I wear the black hat pdf

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN Cultural critic and best-selling author Chuck Klosterman has written eleven books: two novels, five nonfiction narratives, and four essay collections, including Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs; Killing Yourself to Live; and Fargo Rock City. Known for his oddball style and sharp, witty observations, Klosterman writes primarily about music, pop culture, and sports. He is “The Ethicist” for the New York Times Magazine, and his prolific writings have appeared in such publications as GQ, Spin, and Esquire. Klosterman graduated from the University of North Dakota with a degree in journalism in 1994. He served as the Picador Guest Professor for Literature at the University of Leipzig’s Institute for American Studies in 2008.

“Electric Funeral” is taken from Klosterman’s New York Times best- seller, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined). This 2013 essay collection examines the concept of villainy and the way so-called bad guys are perceived in modern culture, with essays on subjects such as the rock group Eagles, the sitcom Seinfeld, Batman, folk hero and hijacker D. B. Cooper, and former president Bill Clinton. Reflecting Klosterman’s work as “The Ethicist” for the New York Times, I Wear the Black Hat grapples with the larger question of good and evil, asking why we call some figures villains and others heroes.

In “Electric Funeral,” Klosterman zooms in on technological innovation and the “villains” that champion it, profiling such figures as Perez Hilton, Julian Assange, and even the office IT guy. They have the power and they are the future, Klosterman posits, asserting that this position of power causes resentment, largely because it scares people. He argues that ultimately “the easiest way for any cutthroat person to succeed is to instinctively (and relentlessly) side with the technology of tomorrow even if that technology is distasteful” (p. 244). From bloggers who matter because of how many followers they have to the founder of the controversial WikiLeaks website, Klosterman looks at the relationship between technological progress and our cultural concepts of villainy.

What do you think makes a villain? What is the nature of good and evil?

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Electric Funeral

If you’re reading this book i

in order, you’ve just finished a section about Bill Clinton, the forty-second president of

the United States. Unless this book ii

has survived far longer than I anticipate, most readers will picture Clinton as a living, breathing mammal. You remember where you were when he was elected in 1992 and the condition of your life during his two-term tenure. His time as POTUS might feel more recent than it actually is (and perhaps that makes you feel strange). But there’s another chunk of readers who had a different experience when they read the

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(and the size of that chunk will get progressively larger for the rest of eternity). Those in the second camp recall Clinton only vaguely, or not at all. You know he was once the president in the same way you know Woodrow Wilson was once the president. It feels like something that happened long ago. That makes you different from those in the first camp (and for a lot of different reasons). And there’s one specific divergence that matters more than most people think: If you’re in that first group, your parents

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worried about how you were affected by the media — and what they worried about was the content you were consuming. If you were born in 1960, your parents worried about Black Sabbath; if you were born in 1970, they

worried about Porky’s; if you were born in 1980, they worried about Beavis and Butt-head. Their fear was that you’d be changed by the images you saw and the messages you heard, and perhaps they believed that content needed to be regulated. Their concern was tethered to the message. But if you were born after 1990, this is not the case. Instead, your parents were (or are) primarily worried about the medium through which all of those things are accessed. The medium is far more problematic than the message. When a father looks at his typically unfocused four-year-old hypnotically immersed with an iPad for three straight hours, he thinks, “Somehow, I know this is bad.” It does not matter that the four-year-old might be learning essential skills on that device; what matters is the way such an intense, insular, digital experience will irreparably alter the way he’ll experience the non-simulated world. It’s normalizing something that was once abnormal, and it’s distancing the child from reality. It will transmogrify his brainstem into the opening credit sequence of Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void. And the worst part is that there is no other option. If a father stops his son from embracing the online universe, he’s stopping him from becoming a competitive adult; it’s like refusing to teach him how to drive a car or boil water. You may worry about all the ancillary consequences, but you can’t take away the experience. Avoiding the Internet is akin to avoiding everything that matters. This is even true for adults. An author I know once explained why writing became so much more difficult in the twenty-first century: “The biggest problem in my life,” he said, “is that my work machine is also my pornography delivery machine.” The future makes the rules.

They know they will end up on the right side of history, because the future always wins.

The future makes the rules, so there’s no point in being mad when the future wins. In fact, the easiest way for any cutthroat person to succeed is to instinctively (and relentlessly) side with the technology of tomorrow, even if that technology is distasteful. Time will eventually validate that position. The only downside is that — until that validation occurs — less competitive people will find you annoying and unlikable.

The future will retire undefeated, but it always makes a terrible argument for its own success. The argument is inevitably some version of this: “You might not like where we’re going, and tomorrow might be worse than yesterday. But it’s still going to happen, whether you like it or not. It’s inevitable.” And this is what people hate. They hate being dragged into the future, and they hate the technocrats who remind them that this is always, always, always happening. We tend to dislike cultural architects who seem excited that the world is changing, particularly when those architects don’t seem particularly concerned whether those changes make things worse. They know they will end up on the right side of history, because the future always wins. These are people who have the clearest understanding of what technology can do,

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but no emotional stake in how its application will change the lives of people who aren’t exactly like them. (They know the most and care the least ... and they kind of think that’s funny.) Certainly, this brand of technophobia has always existed. As early as 1899, people like H. G. Wells were expressing apprehension about a future “ruled by an aristocracy of organizers, men who manage railroads and similar vast enterprises.” But this is different. This is about the kind of person who will decide what that future is.

Early in the third season of The Sopranos, there’s a two-episode subplot in which my favorite character (Christopher Moltisanti) sticks up a charity concert at Rutgers University (the musical headliner is Jewel). What’s most

interesting about this robbery is the person who hands over the money: The role of the terrified box office clerk is portrayed by an unknown actor named Mario Lavandeira. He has only two lines, but the scene — when viewed retroactively — is more culturally significant than everything else that happens in that particular episode. This is because Mario Lavandeira would soon rename himself Perez Hilton and become the first authentically famous blogger, which (of course) made him the most hated blogger of his generation.

[There are no famous bloggers who aren’t hated.]

Perez Hilton once claimed that 8.82 million people read his website within a 24-hour period in 2007. The magnitude of this number was disputed by competing gossip sources, but those critics came off like the type of person who wants to argue over the specific number of people killed during the Holocaust: They missed the point entirely. Even if Hilton was tripling his true traffic figures, the audience for what he was doing was massive. And what he was doing was terrible. It was objectively immoral. The crux of his publishing empire was based around defacing copyrighted photos of celebrities (often to imply they were addicted to cocaine). Other central pursuits included the outing of gay celebrities (Perez himself is homosexual) and publishing unauthorized photos of teen celebrities who may or may not be wearing underwear. The apex of his career was when he broke the news of Fidel Castro’s death, a report mildly contradicted by Castro’s unwillingness to stop living. Hilton was also a judge for the Miss USA Pageant, a referee for a WWE wrestling match, and the star of a VH1 reality show I never actually saw. [I realize Mr. Hilton would likely disagree with my overview of his career and insist that I failed to mention how he’s also been involved with numerous sex-positive, pro- youth, anti-bullying initiatives. But I suspect he will totally agree with much of what I’m going to write next, mostly because it makes him look far less culpable than he probably is.]

Whenever you have an audience as large as Hilton’s, there’s obviously going to be a substantial swath of consumers who adore the person who built it. It would be wrong to say, “Everyone hates Perez Hilton,” because that’s just not true. But it’s pretty hard to find an intelligent person who loves him. (Such individuals exist, but not in great numbers.) It’s hard to find a thoughtful person who appreciates the way Hilton’s appeal is so hyper-directed at the lowest common denominator. Even his decision to name himself after noted celebutard Paris Hilton perpetuates a desire to produce self-consciously vapid

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work. So this, it would seem, is why smart people hate him: because of his blog’s content. They find his ideas despicable (or so they would argue). Now, Perez would counter that accusation by charging his critics with jealousy. He (and his defenders) would claim that what people truly hate about Perez Hilton is not what he writes; it’s the size of his audience and the scale of his reach. That argument is not invalid. For those who live on the Internet, the attention economy matters way more than making money or earning peer respect; there is a slice of the web that would do anything to harvest Hilton’s readership, even if it meant publishing photos of aborted celebrity fetuses while going bankrupt in the process. In other words, some people hate Perez for his ideas and some people hate Perez because they so desperately want to be like him. And as it turns out, both sides have a point. The reason Perez Hilton became a villain was the intersection of those two qualities: It wasn’t just the content, and it wasn’t just the success. It was the creeping fear that this type of content would become the only way any future person could be successful.

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary. The postmodern mother of invention is desire; we don’t really “need” anything new, so we only create what we want. This changes the nature of technological competition. Because the Internet is obsessed with its own version of nonmonetary capitalism, it rewards the volume of response much more than the merits of whatever people are originally responding to. Moreover, there’s no downside to creating something that repulses all those who exist outside your audience (in fact, a reasonable degree of outsider hatred usually helps). Intuitively understanding these rules, Hilton only

went after the kind of pre-adult who simultaneously loved and loathed celebrity culture to an unhealthy degree; he knew that specific demographic was both expanding and underserved. It was a brilliant business model. It was like he opened a buffet restaurant that served wet garbage in a community where the population of garbage gluttons was much higher (and far more loyal) than anyone had ever realized. And this made all the normal food eaters hate him. Do they hate his product? Sure (although there are many things on the Internet far worse). Do they hate his success? Sure (although he’s never been perceived as credible or particularly insightful, so the definition of his success is limited to pure populism). Do they simply think Hilton is a jerk? Yes (and perhaps he is — I have no idea). But none of those individual issues addresses the greater fear. The real reason Perez Hilton is vilified is the combination of a) what he does editorially, b) its level of public import, and c) the undeniable sense that all of this was somehow inevitable. Perez Hilton is a villain because he personifies the way desire-based technology drives mass culture toward primitive impulses. Any singular opinion of his work does not matter; the only thing that matters is the collective opinion, which can be dominated by a vocal, splintered minority who knows only that they want what they want. Everyone seems to understand this. And once everyone understands that this is how New Media works, it becomes normative. It becomes the main way we get information about everything (gossip or otherwise). There is no alternative option. By manipulating an audience that is complicit in the manipulation, Perez Hilton can force the rest of us to accept his version of the future.

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At this point, we can’t walk away from harmful technology. We’ve ceded control to the machines.

Hilton is a technocrat, and technocrats inevitably share two unifying beliefs. The first is that they’re already winning; the second is that they’re going to push things forward, regardless of what that progress entails. Resistance to either principle is futile. Every day we grow closer to a full-on technocratic police state. “I don’t care if you like me,” Hilton has written. “I just care if you read my website.” This is not exactly an original perspective; many writers feel like that, especially when they’re young (Hilton was roughly twenty-four when he first experienced success). But the sentiment is disturbing when expressed by Perez. It seems like his entire objective. It’s like he vividly sees the relationship between those two adversarial ideas, and everything else is built upon that foundation. And this would be totally fine, assuming we felt as if it was our decision to agree or disagree. But we don’t. At this point, we can’t walk away from harmful technology. We’ve ceded control to the machines. The upside is that the machines still have masters. The downside is that we don’t usually like who those masters are.

When Kim Dotcom was arrested during a 2012 police raid of his home, I had the same series of reactions as everyone else: There’s a person literally named “Kim Dotcom”? And this person is a 350-pound, egocentric German multimillionaire who never went to college? And he got famous for being a computer hacker who refers to himself as Dr. Evil? And he lives in a mansion in New Zealand? And he participates in European road races and is the world’s best Modern Warfare 3 player? And he has a beautiful wife of unknown racial origin? And his 24-acre, $30 million estate is populated with life-size statues of giraffes? And he likes to be photographed in his bathtub? Everything about his biography seemed like someone trying to make fun of a Roger Moore–era James Bond movie that was too dumb to exist. I could not believe that this was the person the FBI decided to go after in their ongoing

dream of controlling the digital future. It seemed as if they were arbitrarily penalizing a cherubic foreigner for being wealthy and ostentatious, and New Zealand eventually deemed the raid illegal.

However, the arrest turned out to be far less arbitrary than I’d thought. Dotcom owned and operated the online service Megaupload. In an interview with Kiwi investigative reporter John Campbell, Dotcom (born Kim Schmitz in 1974) described Megaupload like this: “I basically created a server where I could upload a file and get a unique link, and then I would just email that link to my friend so he would then get the file. And that’s how Megaupload was started. It was just a solution to a problem that still exists today.” In essence, Dotcom’s argument was that he simply made it easier for people to exchange and store digital files that were too large for Gmail or AOL — and when described in this simplified manner, it seems like his motives were utilitarian. But this claim is such a profound distortion of reality that it almost qualifies as a lie, even though (I suppose) it’s technically true. Megaupload was a place to steal music. There was no mystery about this; if you knew what Megaupload was, you knew it

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was a pirating service. There appeared to be dozens of other sites exactly like it. But what I did not realize was the scope of Dotcom’s empire: The week after he was arrested, downloading illegal music became almost impossible (not totally impossible, but at least ten times more difficult than it had been in 2011). His arrest instantly changed the entire culture of recreational music theft. For most normal adults, ripping music from the Internet went from “a little too easy” to “a little too hard.” Megaupload was more central to the process of stealing copyrighted material than every other file sharing source combined. He really was the man. Kim Dotcom was not some goofy eccentric being persecuted for the sins of other people. He pretty much ran the Internet (or at least the part of the Internet that people with money actually care about). He denies this, as any wise man would. But even his denials suggest a secret dominance. Here’s one exchange from his conversation with Campbell, the first TV interview he gave following his arrest ...

CAMPBELL: The FBI indictment against you alleges, and I quote, “Copyright infringement on a massive scale, with estimated harm to copyright holders well in excess of five hundred million U.S. dollars.”

DOTCOM: Well, that’s complete nonsense. If you read the indictment and if you hear what the Prosecution has said in court, those $500 million of damage were just music files from a two- week time period. So they are actually talking about $13 billion U.S. damages within a year, just for music downloads. The entire U.S. music industry is less than $20 billion. So how can one website be responsible for this amount of damage? It’s completely mind- boggling and unrealistic.

It is mind-boggling. But it isn’t unrealistic. While I don’t doubt the FBI is using an unusually high estimate, it doesn’t seem implausible that $13 billion worth of music was flowing through Megaupload’s channels (assuming we pretend a CD is still worth its $14 retail price). Ripping music is not like buying music. It’s not a meditative process. When you purchase music, you make a specific choice that (in your mind) justifies the exchange of currency. When you download music illegally, there’s nothing to exchange; if you can simply think of a record’s title and you can type it semi-correctly into a search engine, there’s no reason not to drop it into your iTunes. That’s pretty much the entire investment — the ability to type a band name into a search field. Megaupload made stealing simple (it was far better than the previous theft iteration, the Napster-like Limewire). The downloading process took (maybe) 45 seconds per album, and — if you elected to never listen to those songs, even once — you lost nothing. People would download albums just because they were bored. Since the advent (and fall) of Napster in 1999, consumers’ relationship to music as a commodity completely collapsed. Supply became unlimited, so demand became irrelevant. A better argument from Dotcom would have been that the $13 billion he was accused of “reappropriating” was not actually $13 billion, but merely the projected value of what such exchanges would have been worth in 1998 (and only if the world had become some kind of strange musical utopia where consumers immediately purchased every single album they were remotely intrigued by).

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Weirder still is that the charge of music theft isn’t even the main reason media conglomerates wanted Dotcom’s arrest. Their real concern was the increasing potential for the pirating of feature-length films, which is only feasible through this kind of server (relative to the size of MP3 music clips, film files are massive). The movie industry makes the music industry look like a food co-op (in 2011, global film revenue was $87 billion). Kim Dotcom clearly understood this, which prompted him to make the kind of move usually reserved for the Joker: Despite being under arrest, he wrote an open letter to the Hollywood Reporter, mocking the film industry’s inability to understand the future of its own vehicle. His twelve-paragraph letter opens like a Tweet: “Dear Hollywood: The Internet frightens you.” And he just keeps going ...

(paragraph 2): “You get so comfortable with your ways of doing business that any change is perceived as a threat. The problem is, we as a society don’t have a choice: The law of human nature is to communicate more efficiently.”

(paragraph 4): “My whole life is like a movie. I wouldn’t be who I am if it wasn’t for the mind-altering glimpse at the future in Star Wars. I am at the forefront of creating the cool stuff that will allow creative works to thrive in an Internet age. I have the solutions to your problems. I am not your enemy.”

(paragraph 7): “The people of the Internet will unite. They will help me. And they are stronger than you. We will prevail in the war for Internet freedom and innovation that you have launched. We have logic, human nature and the invisible hand on our side.”

The document concludes with Dotcom’s signature snark: “This open letter is free of copyright. Use it freely.” Technically, he’s trying to forward his opinion on how copyright law should be applied, based on the principle that the laws governing ownership over intellectual property are outdated and not designed for the machinations of the Internet age. But that’s not what interests me. What interests me is his personality and his leverage — and in the case of Dotcom, those qualities are connected.

If you’ve ever worked in an office filled with computers (which, at this point, is the only kind of office that exists), you’ve undoubtedly had some kind of complicated, one-sided relationship with whoever worked in the IT department. “IT” stands for “information technology.” [An easy illustration of the one-sidedness of this relationship can be quickly illustrated by asking random people what the “I” and “T” literally represent in that acronym. You may be surprised by the results.] Now, there are exceptions to every rule, and I don’t want to unfairly stereotype anyone. But people fucking hate IT guys. They want to knife them in the throat and pour acid in their ears. They want to see them arrested for the possession of kiddie porn.

There are two reasons why this is.

The first is that workers typically encounter IT people only when something is already wrong with their desktop (there just aren’t any situations where you want someone to be doing things to your computer that you can’t do yourself). But the second reason is the one that matters more. Regardless of their station within the office

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hierarchy, there’s never any debate over how much power the IT department has: It’s borderline infinite. They control all, and they have access to everything. They can’t fire you, but they could get you fired in 24 hours. You may have a despotic boss who insists he won’t take no for an answer, but he’ll take it from an IT guy. He’ll eat shit from an IT guy, day after day after day.

Specialists in information technology are the new lawyers. Long ago, lawyers realized that they could make themselves culturally essential if they made the vernacular of contracts too complex for anyone to understand except themselves. They made the language of contracts unreadable on purpose. [Easy example: I can write a book, and my editor can edit a book ... but neither one of us can read and understand the contract that allows those things to happen.] IT workers became similarly unstoppable the moment they realized virtually every machine powering the modern world is too complicated for the average person to fix or calibrate. And they know this. This is what makes an IT guy different from you. He might make less money, he might have less social prestige, and people might look at him in the cafeteria like he’s a morlock — but he can act however he wants. He can be nice, but only if he feels like it. He can ignore the company dress code. He can lie for no reason whatsoever (because how would anyone understand what he’s lying about?). He can smoke weed at lunch, because he’ll still understand your iMac better than you. It doesn’t matter how he behaves: The IT department dominates technology, and technology dominates the rest of us. And this state of being creates a new kind of personality. It creates someone like Kim Dotcom, a man who’s essentially an IT guy for the entire planet.

“I’m an easy target,” Mr. Dotcom claims in his defense. “My flamboyance, my history as a hacker. I’m not American, I’m living somewhere in New Zealand, around the world. I have funny number plates on my cars. I’m an easy target.” (Kim Dotcom drives around in luxury vehicles with license plates that read GUILTY.) There is, certainly, something endearing about Kim Dotcom’s attitude. He acts like a man who finds his own obesity hilarious. His relationship to pop culture gives him a childlike appeal. (He once made himself the main character in a seminal flash-animation film that centered on the cartoonish murder of Bill Gates. He named his animated alter ego Richard Kimball, the wrongly accused hero from The Fugitive.) Sometimes it seems like he can’t possibly be serious. (After his arrest, he recorded an anti-copyright ABBA-like pop song titled “Mr. President” in which he directly compares himself to Martin Luther King.) In general, Americans enjoy the idea of computer hackers and prefer to imagine them as precocious elves. (Somehow, the touchstone for how hackers behave is still based on Matthew Broderick’s performance in the 1983 film WarGames.) Dotcom is arrogant, but not unlikable; at the highest possible level, being an IT guy is vaguely cool. Yet his underlying message is troubling. He starts by arguing, “Change is good,” which is only a semi-defensible position to begin with. But that evolves into “Change will happen whether you like it or not.” He uses phrases like “The law of human nature is to communicate more efficiently,” which makes it seem like he’s proposing something natural and obvious. But all he’s really proposing is the business model for his own company (which might not be diabolical, but certainly isn’t altruistic). He’s trying to initiate an era when content is free and content providers make all the money, but he still wants to frame it like

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a more grassroots system (“The people of the Internet will unite”). Would his espoused structure actually be better? I don’t think it’s possible to know. But I do know that any argument attacking Dotcom will come from a position of sad technological inferiority. It will seem unsophisticated and antediluvian. It’s easier to just embrace Dotcom’s viewpoint, even if it’s self-serving and unfair; about a year after the initial raid, he launched another sharing service (this time simply called MEGA) that utilizes cloud technology. I suspect it will succeed. He is, in many ways, the most depressing kind of villain: the kind we must agree with in order to stay competitive. The only other option is being trampled.

There is a view that one should never be permitted to be criticized for being — possibly, even in the future — engaged in a contributory act that might be immoral. And that type of arse covering is more important than saving people’s lives. That it is better to let 1000 people die than risk going to save them and possibly running over someone on the way. And that is something I find philosophically repugnant.

These are the words of Julian Assange, the founder of the website WikiLeaks and the most archetypically villainlike villain of the Internet age. His appearance is so Aryan that it seems like he was engineered by the kind of scientist who ends up hiding in Argentina. I assume Assange can laugh, but I have no proof. He’s truly a worldwide irritant:

Assange has been accused of sexually assaulting two women in Sweden, applied for political asylum in Ecuador, and had a Canadian academic call for his assassination. His brilliance is impolite and self-

defined. There is no one else like him; he is truly a New Thing.

If you know what WikiLeaks is, feel free to skip this paragraph. (I’m not going to outline anything you don’t already know, nor am I going to take a strong position on its merits or flaws, nor have I seen the film The Fifth Estate starring sexy British weirdo Benedict Cumberbatch in the lead role.) If you don’t know anything about it, here’s a 230-word description: WikiLeaks is a website that publishes classified, present-tense documents from anonymous sources. The site’s abiding premise is that the upside of absolute transparency is greater than the potential downside of publicly dumping sensitive information that might theoretically cause damage. The first noteworthy WikiLeaks release was some 2007 footage of a U.S. Apache helicopter killing an Iraqi journalist in Afghanistan (people generally viewed this release positively). The most discussed incident was an avalanche of “diplomatic cables” that went up in 2011; essentially, these were private correspondences American diplomats had exchanged among themselves. Most of these exchanges were more gossipy than meaningful, but it made some high-profile Americans seem crazy and facile. [It also created the impression that WikiLeaks cannot be controlled or regulated, which seemed scarier than the documents themselves.] That same year, WikiLeaks released seventy- five thousand U.S. military documents that came to be known as the Afghan War Diary. The Pentagon wasn’t exactly stoked about this. Obviously, the details of all these fiascoes can be found more comprehensively elsewhere. But the takeaway is this: A very confident Australian (Assange) who’s fixated on the problematic politics of one country (the United States) has created a way to publish information

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about that country that would have previously remained hidden (sometimes for valid reasons and sometimes due to corruption). It is journalism that attacks journalism, which is an extremely interesting topic to journalists.

Supporters of WikiLeaks believe it receives the same kind of unjust, reactionary criticism that was once lobbed at the Pentagon Papers (the Pentagon Papers were a classified overview of U.S. military involvement in the Vietnam War, published by the New York Times in 1971). Those who are against WikiLeaks counter this argument by noting that the Pentagon Papers were vetted by a news organization and only involved defunct military actions that were at least four years old (the study examined activities only through the year 1967). It’s worth noting that the principal whistleblower in the Pentagon Papers (former U.S. military analyst Daniel Ellsberg) has requested a presidential pardon for the principal whistleblower in the WikiLeaks controversy, former U.S. soldier Bradley Manning. I have my own views on this topic, but they’re contradictory and unimportant. What intrigues me more is Assange’s quote at the top of this section: His statement either confronts (and obliterates) the problem I’m trying to describe, or it simply is the problem (described succinctly and expressed with monotone glee).

Assange comes at the media from a bottom-line, non-theoretical, the-ends-justify-the-means perspective that was (perhaps not so coincidentally) first described in Machiavelli’s The Prince. He’s arguing that people are too obsessed with the arcane ethics of print journalism, and he’s willing to accept that an action that hurts one person is justified if it helps a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand others. It’s an old problem. Perhaps the clearest metaphor for how much this disturbs people is the classic hypothetical of the runaway trolley car: Imagine you are operating a trolley car whose brakes have malfunctioned. You are flying down the tracks at an obscene speed. Up ahead, you see five workers on the track, unaware that this trolley is bearing down on them; if you continue on your current path, the trolley will kill them all. But then you notice an alternate track that will allow you to avoid colliding with the five workers. The only downside is that if you turn onto this alternate route, you will kill a different innocent person (but only one). Do you switch to the alternate track and kill one person in order to save five? [The folks usually credited with the creation and popularization of this dilemma are Philippa Foot and Judith Jarvis Thomson, but I’m roughly paraphrasing how it’s described in Michael Sandel’s wonderful book Justice.]

When you pose this question to any normal reader, they almost always say yes. It seems insane to kill five people instead of one. But that’s not the true question; that’s just the introduction. The real question is this: Let’s say you’re not operating the runaway trolley. Let’s say you’re not the conductor. Let’s propose that you’re just watching this event from a bridge above the track. You realize this runaway trolley is going to kill five people. You notice another person is watching this event alongside you — an extremely obese man. It dawns on you that if you push this man onto the track below, it will derail the trolley. Here again, you are killing one man in order to save five. Do you push the fat man off the bridge?

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This second scenario always troubles people more: The most common answer tends to be, “I know these things are basically the same, but I could never push a man to his death.” The reason people feel different is due to how the two scenarios position the decision maker. In the first problem, the decision maker is accepting the existing conditions and trying to choose whatever solution hurts the fewest individuals. In the second problem, the decision maker is injecting himself into the situation and taking on the responsibility of the outcome. The first scenario is a reaction. The second is a self- directed choice. What bothers people about WikiLeaks is that it creates a world in which the second scenario is happening constantly, and what bothers people about Assange is the way he makes that choice seem so stupidly self-evident.

Assange’s belief is that everyone would be better off if all information was equally (and immediately) available. His critics say, “That’s irresponsible. If you just release information — and particularly military information — without considering its sensitivity, someone will get killed.” And that’s probably true. If WikiLeaks continues in its current iteration, I’m sure it will (eventually) contribute to someone’s death. But Assange makes us consider the larger value of that troubling possibility. What if the relentless release of classified information makes every nation less willing to conduct questionable military actions? Will this force all society to become more honest (and wouldn’t that future reality be worth the loss of a hundred innocent people in the present)? Or would it actually make things worse? Will the fear of exposure simply prompt political figures to resist creating any paper trail at all? Will everything become hidden? I really have no idea. No one does, and that’s the discomfort: We don’t know if the old way is better (or worse) than the new way. But Assange does not let us choose. He possesses a sweeping technological advantage, and he knows that released information cannot be retracted. He can make us accept his philosophy against our will. Once a document is released, how we feel about the nature of its existence becomes meaningless; it’s instantaneously absorbed into the media bloodstream as pure content. This is why Assange can make an argument that openly advocates actions that (in his words) “might be immoral.” Those actions are going to happen anyway, so he doesn’t have to pretend that they contradict the way we’ve always viewed morality. He doesn’t have to convince us he’s right, because our thoughts don’t matter. His view of everything is like Perez Hilton’s view of gossip or Kim Dotcom’s view of entertainment: He believes everything longs to be free. And he will make that happen, because he knows how to do it and we don’t know how to stop him. He’s already beaten everybody. It was never close.