Publisher's note: On 20 December 2010 Julian Assange signed a contract to write a book for Canongate. Despite sitting for 50 hours of taped interviews – scarcely credible, I know, given the drivel that follows – Julian decided there was no point in making himself look like an unstable, megalomaniac dickhead as his entire advance had been pocketed by his lawyers. We disagree with Julian's assessment as we will be in big financial trouble if we don't publish. So here it is.

People were screaming at me as I was driven away in a van. I was frightened, but I took comfort in the letters of support I received from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Che Guevara and Jesus Christ, who had all suffered for telling the truth. Although I was in danger, I was beginning to realise that danger was where I lived now. How far and how deeply I had travelled.

Childhood is a climate. Forgive me for going all Proustian, but I believe my mother bred a sensualist in me as I grew up in Townsville with the curtains closed, writing elementary computer code in the nursery. She also brought me up to have a healthy disrespect for authority, so some days I went to school with no shoes on.

Ghostwriter's note: Is it OK to pad out the book with this kind of crap? Publisher's note: Be my guest.

I didn't get on with my stepfather, as he didn't understand that a higher power was chanelling my consciousness, urging me to use my computer to make positive space in a negative field by freeing the world from bullshit. The work was the world and I was the work. Hacking into bank networks was spatial, intellectual and it was I alone who made the internet an instrument of freedom rather than oppression. Not that I expect love or honour for this; I've long since understood that all messiahs are doomed to be condemned. That is the price I must pay for striving to shed light on those areas Big Brother would prefer remained dark.

Incidentally, I don't propose to use this book to talk about the women I've shagged or the kids I've fathered. Fools like the Digested Read will probably claim this to be the ultimate hypocrisy for a man whose creed is openness, but I have learned to shrug off the speciousness of those who would try to undermine me. The difference between other people's secrets and my own should be obvious to everyone: theirs are theirs and mine are mine, and mine belong to a higher justice.

As I made my lonely existential way through university, struggling with the banality of a maths course of little help to a genius who was to rewrite the history of the 21st century, my Damascene moment came when I fell off my bike and broke my arm. As I watched it heal, I resolved that I would heal the world of the secrecy imposed by fascist governments. For nine years I never slept as there was no time to sleep, so important was my work. Albert Camus flew in from Lourmarin cemetery to cut my hair and women sat on my Rod of God, but my fingers never left the keyboard as I unpicked the secrets of the Da Vinci code. It wasn't gallant, maybe it was chauvinist, but I make no apologies for it. The Work was all that mattered and everyone concerned was just flattered to get even a few seconds of my attention.

Sometimes the exertion of the Work and my need to move in secrecy from continent to continent made me ill. Not once, though, did my concentration waver, despite the incompetence of the doctors who misdiagnosed me and insisted on treating me in their usual fascist way. Before long I had become the Ghost in the Machine, the world's first Cyber Messiah offering salvation from years of technocratic oppression. It was now time to unleash WikiLeaks on an unsuspecting world and for that I needed to enlist the help of the so-called defenders of liberal values, the Guardian and the New York Times.

In hindsight, I should have been aware that these media organisations were run by intellectual pygmies who failed to understand the nature of the Work and were themselves in thrall to corporate and government interests. But reader, as Our Lord trusted sinners, so I, too, trusted them. At first the arrangement worked well, with important stories from Kenya and Iceland that only I could tell receiving global attention. Then came Iraq, Afghanistan and Cablegate, and the forces of fascism came gunning for me. And like Jesus, my final betrayal came with a kiss from those two Swedish birds who were well up for it.

Unfortunately, Julian's tape ends there and as £20 seems an awful lot to charge for this tosh we're including 100 pages of WikiLeaks documents you've already read before.

Digested read, digested: In the beginning was the Julian.