Assange’s most lengthy articulation of his own politics comes in a lengthy interview with Forbes. Asked “Would you call yourself a free market proponent?”, Assange replies “Absolutely. I have mixed attitudes towards capitalism, but I love markets”. The stance that is ambigious to capitalism, but in favour of markets represents the more extreme variants of neoliberalism, whereby capitalism (while it actually exists) plays second fiddle to an idealied vision of how markets function avaliable on a minor scale within currently existing capitalism. Assange continues: “To put it simply, in order for there to be a market, there has to be information. A perfect market requires perfect information…For a market to be free, people have to know who they’re dealing with”. How does Wikileaks fit into this scenario?
For Assange, through the act of leaking information, Wikileaks is providing better information in order for the market of international politics to work better. The question of informational asymmetry is a complex one in neoliberal circles, with a long history. Whereas neoliberalism in the variant of the Chicago School of Economics tends towards a model of equillibrium where actors have perfect information about the market, the Austrian school of Economics, favoured by the more radical anarcho-capitalist believe that information is unevenly distributed throughout a market system, and that to increase overall information enables better price setting thus improving the efficency of the market.
Assange’s philosophy here blends Austrian and Chicago School approaches. Accepting the Austrian approach of informational assymetry as the current situation, but believing that increased distribution of knowledge as a result of leaking would tend towards the Chicago assumption of perfect information. In the situation of perfect information3, so runs the theory demonstrated mathematically by Keith Arrow and Gérard Debreu, then market transactions will tend towards a Pareto optimal state, where no actor can be made better off without making another worse off - a state that is a mathematical formalisation of Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand” Hence “WikiLeaks is designed to make capitalism more free and ethical”.
“I have enough expertise in politics and history to understand that a free market ends up as monopoly unless you force them to be free”. Setting up institutions is required. One could perhaps read this in a modern social democractic manner, that the market is a powerful force that requires taming for the good of the majority of society.
Assange’s background prior to Wikileaks included his heavy involvement with emerging cypherpunk groups, whose major interest was the philosophical, political and sociological impact of strong cryptography. Though with some political diversity, the major cypher punk e-mail lists leant heavily towards libertarianism and anarcho-capitalism, particular towards crypto-anarchy, their own coinage, a species of market anarchism that uses heavy cryptography to avoid survilence of the state and conduct market transactions, the most recent articulation of which being Bitcoin. Tim May’s cypher-punk FAQ states that he believes the output of strong cryptography sociographically ‘will be a form of anarcho-capitalist market system I call “cryptoanarchy”’. Cryptography essentially means market capitalism where the state cannot conceivably intervene, since its operation are totally obscure to it.
Tim May writes that “the ‘anarchy’ here is not the anarchy of popular conception: lawlessness, disorder, chaos, and “anarchy.” Nor is it the bomb-throwing anarchy of the 19th century “black” anarchists, usually associated with Russia and labor movements. Nor is it the “black flag” anarchy of anarcho-syndicalism and writers such as Proudhon. Rather, the anarchy being spoken of here is the anarchy of “absence of government” (literally, “an arch,” without a chief or head)…This is the same sense of anarchy used in “anarchocapitalism,” the libertarian free market ideology which promotes voluntary, uncoerced economic transactions”. Though he no longer wishes to call himself a hacker, Assange’s politics are soaked in this paradigm.