SECRECY IN A WIRED WORLD

The interplay between secrecy and disclosure has recently crystallised as a defining feature of the contemporary Zeitgeist of the ‘wired’ culture and society. It is intrinsic to the multifarious phenomena of communicative capitalism's diverse trade in data and information, from the details of private lives, consumer habits, tastes and preferences to the production, packaging and distribution of informational products of all kinds within the knowledge economy; and the value of ‘secrets’ and the price (in several senses) of their disclosure is a matter of great public interest and fascination. The exploits of ‘hackers’ and ‘crackers’ are today not only typical items of daily news, but effectively key to the processes of news gathering and production themselves (as the 2011–12 News International phone-hacking scandal illustrates perfectly). These are all characterised by data-network interventions of one kind or another. Tabloid celebrity phone-hacking and serious political data-journalism both exploit this new technical capacity of networks and the data they carry. More than two decades ago Deleuze and Guattari anticipated that ‘the more the secret is made into a structuring organizing form, the thinner and more ubiquitous it becomes’.