BRUCE STERLING, one of the sci-fi novelists responsible for the "cyberpunk" sub-genre, is something of an elder statesman of hacker culture, so it comes as no surprise that his attempt to reveal the real significance of WikiLeaks by telling the story behind the story has earned a large internet audience. Having just read the maundering essay, it does come as a surprise to see all the praise heaped upon it in my Twitter feed. I think Aaron Bady aptly captures the character of Mr Sterling's contribution when he calls it "a wonderful precis for a novel about Wikileaks; it's fun to read, and it even bears a distinct resemblance to reality (if reality were a Bruce Sterling novel)". I would differ from Mr Bady only in calling it a "rambling, tendentious, free-associative sketch of a precis of a novel about WikiLeaks."

What is this novel about? I can't hope to write an adequate precis of the precis, but the gist of the thing is that the intertwined history of the National Security Administration and the "cypherpunk movement" makes the emergence of something like WikiLeaks dialectically inevitable. But that leaves out most of Mr Sterling's abundant discursive noodling, which is where most of the action is, and what emerges from Mr Sterling's noodling is mainly how very sorry the kind-hearted Mr Sterling feels for everyone.

Mr Sterling exudes sympathy for Bradley Manning, a "tender-hearted geek", a "mild little nobody", who has politicians calling for his execution as he sits in solitary confinement. "The reason this upsets me", Mr Sterling says, "is that I know so many people just like Bradley Manning."

Mr Sterling feels sorry for the government lawyers tasked with transorming Bradley Manning's alleged leak into an act of "espionage".

Mr Sterling feels sorry for the "people in power" Julian Assange has made to "look stupid", and he feels even sorrier "for the rest of us". As for the effect of "Cablegate" on America's diplomatic corps, Mr Sterling says, "I feel sorry for them and what it does to their values, to their self-esteem." Yes, their self-esteem. "I feel sorry for their plight," he adds, noting the rigours of learning always to put "national interest" first.

Mr Assange is treated less tenderly. Mr Sterling describes him as "personally hampered and sociopathic," as "the kind of guy who gets depressed by the happiness of the stupid". But we are not meant to mistake these harsh words as a failure of sympathy. "I don't say these cruel things about Julian Assange because I feel distant from him," Mr Sterling avers, "but, on the contrary, because I feel close to him".

Mr Sterling sets himself up as a wizened old hand with a perspective too world-wearily Olympian to take sides. Yet what we see strikes me more as a failure of nerve.

I don't want to condone or condemn the acts of Bradley Manning. Because legions of people are gonna do that for me, until we're all good and sick of it, and then some. I don't have the heart to make this transgressor into some hockey-puck for an ideological struggle. I sit here and I gloomily contemplate his all-too-modern situation with a sense of Sartrean nausea.

He even feels sorry for himself! Anyway, Mr Sterling seems to suggest that rendering moral judgment in this case would amount to little more than an exercise in ideological bad faith—something better left to the moralising goons who make pucks of people. But look how Mr Sterling describes Mr Manning's alleged transgression. He characterises it as a merely notional crime, one "that consists of making the activities of a democratic government visible to its voting population". That's better than bad; that's good! And why does Mr Sterling imagine Mr Manning has done this apparently high-minded thing?

His war made no sense on its face, because it was carried out in a headlong pursuit of imaginary engines of mass destruction. The military occupation of Iraq was endless. Manning, a tender-hearted geek, was overlooked and put-upon by his superiors. Although he worked around the clock, he had nothing of any particular military consequence to do. It did not occur to his superiors that a bored soldier in a poorly secured computer system would download hundreds of thousands of diplomatic cables. Because, well, why?

If, as Mr Sterling seems to believe, Bradley Manning was part of senseless, endless military occupation based on a fabrication, then, well, why not? Remember, Mr Manning is also alleged to be the source of the "Collateral Murder" footage, which shows an American military helicopter gunning down a handful of civilians and a couple journalists. If you happen to believe this pointless killing was part of an ongoing unjust war, why wouldn't you try to hasten its end by making these "activities of a democratic government visible to its voting population"? What does it say about you if you happen to believe all that and nevertheless decide to sit this one out?

Perhaps Mr Sterling is afraid that if he condones the acts of poor Bradley Manning, he will legitimate the activities of Julian Assange, a man he clearly finds contemptible. According to Mr Sterling, the sociopathic Mr Assange

... aspires to his transparent crypto-utopia in the way George Bush aspired to imaginary weapons of mass destruction. And the American diplomatic corps are so many Iraqis in that crusade. They're the civilian casualties.

Yes, this is an offensively stupid comparison, but ignore that. The important thing is that Mr Sterling is so sure that Mr Assange is a liar. Repeatedly, Mr Assange has said that WikiLeaks' aim is justice and that its strategy is facilitating transparency when it counts. Repeatedly, he has denied utopian aspirations and has affirmed the modest meliorist of goal of making market and state institutions marginally less likely to do wrong. It is not at all clear to me why Mr Sterling refuses to believe him and continues to insist that Mr Assange wishes to "topple the international order and replace it with subversive wikipedians". It certainly makes a good story, and Mr Sterling does like a good story. As Gabriella Coleman notes, much of Mr Sterling's extended foray into the mind and motives of Bradley Manning is so much "deeply irresponsible" speculation. His theatrical portrait of Mr Assange seems to me almost that.

I share many common misgivings about the way WikiLeaks' has conducted itself. But as far as I can tell, that Mr Assange and his colleagues aspire to some sort of crazy post-national crypto-utopia is a pernicious canard. Rather, the silver couch-surfer's political philosophy appears some sort of mundane, mainstream democratic liberalism. He thinks that the legitimate exercise of state power requires what liberal political theorists call "public justification". What is so startling about the reception to WikiLeaks' latest release of documents is that it has revealed that boring old liberal theories of political legitimacy strike a lot of people as too dangerous to even contemplate.

I think old Immanuel Kant was perhaps a bit too sunny when he said this:

A maxim which I cannot divulge without defeating my own purpose must be kept secret if it is to succeed; and, if I cannot publicly avow it without inevitably exciting universal opposition to my project, the necessary and universal opposition which can be forseen a priori is due only to the injustice with which the maxim threatens everyone.

I doubt even self-evidently unjust policies (or strategems or maxims or wars) ever excite anything near "universal oppostion". But Mr Kant is right, as is Mr Assange, that ongoing injustice tends to require secrecy. He is right, as is Mr Assange, that injustice made public is thereby at least somewhat threatened. And he is therefore right, as is Mr Assange, that policies (or strategems or maxims or wars) that survive the test of thoroughgoing publicity are least likely unjust. Liberalism was once a radical, revolutionary philosophy, but it has become hard to believe it. What is most intriguing about the WikiLeaks saga is not the pathology of hacker culture as envisioned by Mr Sterling's fecund imagination, but the possibility that Julian Assange and his confederates have made dull liberal principles seem once again sexily subversive by exposing power's reactionary panic when a few people with a practical bent actually bother to take them seriously.