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I agree with many of Assange's positions, but I disagree on one fundamental position: anonymity.

Anonymity is where wikileaks breaks down. All of the lies and deception Julian speaks of are possible because there is no systemic transparency or accountability in the information ecosystem. All of those lies are abstraction events in the cognitive plane of existence and require action in the physical plane to manifest any outcome.

At the end of the day, I think people must step up to the plate and say, "no, this happening, it needs to stop and I am cosigning this information with my community identity on the line." At that point, a wise community should support that person through any life interruption or transition, if the individual cannot.

The thing about living a lie is that it is extraordinarily expensive to sustain or scale because the lie must defy nature and reality. The internet news information systems make it easy to proliferate small/trivial lies in/for a short period of time, but it makes any non-trivial lies much more expensive to sustain. People need more information, more transparency and more accountability.

If you have the accountability, you won't have the "boy crying wolf" problem at scale because of the individual cost of lying.

Ironically, one such platform exists and is six months into beta, but this community hell-banned it in week one. Think about how that will look, PG, in a couple of years. I have screenshots and the record won't be going away. nwzPaper is lean and will be here, it will continue getting better as an application and stronger as a community.



The fundamental flaw with an anonymity-structuree news information system as acknowledged by Assange:

"There is many ways for people to transmit anonymously. One of the greatest difficulties for sources is their proximity to the material. So if they have high proximity to it and it's a limited number of people know it. It actually doesn't matter what technical mechanism you then apply at the top. It would be quite difficult for them to evade scrutiny. And it doesn't matter what country or regime you are in."




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