WikiJulian

From hacktivism to hardback,the going rate is apparently 1.1 million. Julian Assange,the worldwide whistleblower,has finally decided to talk some truth about himself,but he will be doing so in the old-fashioned format of a book. He has signed deals worth about 518,000 with Alfred A. Knopf in the US,and 325,000 with Canongate in the UK for his autobiography that should come out sometime next year. Throw in other markets,maybe even serialisations,and the total should easily cross a million pounds,Assange calculates. Yet,how ironic that Assange should copyright his memoir; how incredibly apt it would have been if the champion of transparency had stayed true to his territory and released information about himself from his spectral white hair to the shocking disclosure of confidential documents in the great digital commons. Assange says he didnt want to write the book,but needed the money to fight the sexual assault cases against him,and fund WikiLeaks since the organisation is in a financial fix with Visa,MasterCard and PayPal blocking cash transactions to it. Yet WikiLeaks is a philosophy as much as it is an investigative movement. So it is intriguing that he chose not to place his memoirs in the public domain on something like Project Gutenberg or MediaCommons,or even a Wikipedia page and thereby,once again,stand by his grand idea of technological determinism.Year 2011 could see WikiLeaks leaking. Apart from Assanges memoir,his discontented former right-hand man,the German Daniel Schmitt will be coming out with Inside WikiLeaks: My Time with Julian Assange at the Worlds Most Dangerous Website within weeks of Assanges extradition hearing in London in the first week of February. That is entirely appropriate in this millennium of declassification.