The Nantucket Project: Social Media Buzz

The Nantucket Project: Day One

The Nantucket Project: Day Two

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, provided asylum but unable to leave the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, closed out the 2014 Nantucket Project via hologram Sunday afternoon, speaking with filmmaker Eugene Jarecki about the importance of access to information and the dangers of censorship � particularly in the digital frontier � his firm belief that he and Wikileaks will be legally vindicated and his insistence that he is neither a martyr nor a vigilante.

"In the digital world we can delete history very easily. The notion of being able to disappear history entered into Orwell�s writing. He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future," Assange said.

"As a researcher, I'm all too well aware of what people are now calling Google blindness, that the information you can�t find on the Internet doesn�t exist. But the last five years have been the greatest period of education that ever existed. The greatest number of people to the greatest geographic extent are learning about their environment, and the complexities of the international environment."

The on-stage dialogue ended three days of presentations by a diverse group of some of the country�s foremost innovators, entrepreneurs and academics on the theme �Art+Commerce."

Assange called the reaction of the U.S. government to WikiLeaks' release of sensitive information and his role in it a "NeoMcCarthyist attempt to turn me into a Bin Laden-type character."

He also took on Google and its CEO and Nantucket summer resident Eric Schmidt, calling the company a "revolving-door" partner of the National Security Agency, and saying it acts no different than any other large company attempting to lobby and curry favor with the government to further its own ends.

Assange closed by explaining his decision to follow the path he has by saying, "my conclusion is that the best way to go about changing things is simply to act. At its essence, when civilization is working well, it commits us to not do dumb things again. To do that, we have to have the ability to learn from each other, and learn from the past, how our institutions actually behave, their internal dialogue. Ideas can only be as good as their inputs."

The third day of the 2014 Nantucket Project Sunday also included a presentation by Vanessa Kerry, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's daughter, on the work her Seed Global Health is doing to educate doctors and nurses in developing nations; a humorous and self-deprecating endorsement of meditation by ABC "Nightline" host Dan Harris; a presentation on a revolutionary website allowing physicians around the world access to cutting-edge pediatric medicine; a free-flowing panel discussion about finance, investing and the U.S. economy with Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, stock analyst and hedge-fund manager Meredith Whitney and California financier Steve Romick; and a discussion of the Arctic's untapped potential by Alaska Dispatch publisher Alice Rogoff.

For all the social media buzz throughout the weekend, click here.

For complete coverage of Assange's talk, and complete coverage and photos from the 2014 Nantucket Project, pick up the Oct. 2 issue of The Inquirer and Mirror.

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