Via Browser, a superb piece by Jaron Lanier on the deeper meaning of Wikileaks:

Julian Assange, in defending his actions sees a vindicating contradiction in this difference: How can information be both dangerous and inconsequential, he asks? He sees information as an abstract free-standing thing, so to him, differences in perspective and circumstance mean nothing. This is how nerd supremacists think.

The Wikileaks design, by invoking Wikipedia, creates the impression that some universally negotiated, balanced unveiling of human affairs is being approximated; that what was formerly hidden is being fairly unhidden. But that is not true…

The world we know today couldn’t exist if code had stayed as messy as it used to be.  Structure is what makes information usable. Making everything totally connected and open to everything destroys structure. This principle works for code, but it is also cosmic. 

Even we people need structure in our affairs. Imagine openness extrapolated to an extreme.  What if we come to be able to read each other’s thoughts? Then there would be no thoughts. Your head has to be different from mine if you are to be a person with something to say to me. You need an interior space that is different from mine in order to have a different, exotic model of the world, so that our two models can meet, and have a conversation.

Privacy is not about anachronistic prohibitions on information flow, but about personhood.  I was one of those young hackers who didn’t get this point for a long time. I used to think that an open world would favor the honest and the true, and disfavor the schemers and the scammers. 

In moderation this idea has some value, but if privacy were to be vanquished, people would initially become dull, then incompetent, and then cease to exist. Hidden in the idea of radical openness is an allegiance to machines instead of people…

One magnificent paragraph follows another. Read the whole thing.