Alan Saunders: This week on The Philosopher's Zone, we're still online, still thinking about Wikileaks,

As you must have heard by now, it's founder, Julian Assange has, pending an appeal, lost his legal battle in the British courts to escape extradition to Sweden to face sex crime allegations.

We though are turning our attention to the political philosophy of Julian Assange.

Hi, I'm Alan Saunders.

The reason Assange has been leaking all this information is that he believes that this is a way to dismantle the conspiracies of the powerful, so Assange's view of conspiracies is what we're going to be talking about this week, with the help of somebody who's written on the subject, Peter Ludlow, Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University in the U.S. Peter, welcome to The Philosopher's Zone.

Peter Ludlow: Thanks a lot.

Alan Saunders: One of the goals of Assange's project is to dismantle, as I said, what he calls 'conspiracies', but he doesn't use the word 'conspiracy' in the way that most of us use it. So what does he mean by a conspiracy?

Peter Ludlow: You're absolutely right about that. Most of us when we talk about conspiracies we're thinking of some old guys sitting around a mahogany table somewhere in a board room, making plans, you know, and specifically laying out what they're going to do. But on his view of a conspiracy, it could be something where the participants wouldn't even know they were part of a conspiracy. And he thinks that a conspiracy is a kind of emergent property of closed networks, that is, networks of individuals that are sharing information secretly sometimes with each other, but certainly not sharing the information with people outside of the network. And then this conspiratorial nature of this is just a kind of fallout from the existence of a network like that.

Alan Saunders: So I can be part of a conspiracy without knowing that I am part of that conspiracy, simply because I am sharing information with somebody and I believe that information is valuable.

Peter Ludlow: Yes, that's right. So let's take a concrete example. Suppose you are a reporter and you want to get some hit tips for a story, and you find somebody in the government, or in some other conspiracy, and you indicate that you want some hot tips. You get these hot tips, but they're sort of controlled, you're not allowed to tell everything; this person might want a certain spin in exchange, and in essence, whether you realise it or not, you've sort of been absorbed into the conspiracy in a certain sense.

Alan Saunders: Simply because I'm part of the, as it were, the horse-trading that's going on here ?

Peter Ludlow: Yes, but it's horse-trading that is secretive in a certain sense. So this is a little bit different because people on the outside might not necessarily know you have this arrangement with the people in power, for example, and it's basically to some degree, colouring how you report the story and it's also you and the rest of the conspiracy are benefiting from this exchange, in a way that those of us who are outside the conspiracy are not benefiting.

Alan Saunders: And this doesn't just apply to journalists who are dealing in information, obviously other people use information as well, to their profit, so it would work in the business world as well.

Peter Ludlow: It works in the business world just as easily. Say I work for a company and I have some inside information, and you work for a different company and have some inside information, if I just give that information to the press, it becomes worthless because then everyone has the information. But if I work out a deal in which I can exchange the information with you, then you and I as long as we keep that information close to each other, and we don't let it outside of our little two-person conspiracy, that has value, that information has value.

And so eventually you find someone else that you can trade information with, and I find someone I can trade information with and we've now formed a network of individuals where we're trading information secretly, as it were, for our personal benefit. And the interesting thing is that I might not even know everyone who's involved in a conspiracy. My only contact might be you, and so I'm gaining information from your end of the network, right? Even though I don't know the other participants, and in fact I might be blind to the fact that I'm a member of this conspiracy.

Alan Saunders: I want to move away from Assange a bit, to a couple of what you see as his potential influences. One which we've alluded to already, is network theory. What exactly is network theory? It's a phenomenon of the social sciences isn't it?

Peter Ludlow: Yes, it's sort of at the network of information sciences and social sciences, and it's a fairly recent development in the sciences, I guess. And basically it's the idea that there are many systems in the world that have network-like properties, and by studying network properties in the abstract, we can come to learn things about these specific networks. So the network theory itself has been used to study things like efficient ways of organising airplane routes, for example, and it's been used to study things like how the brain is organised. So there's a broad range of phenomena that network theory has been used and deployed to model and to explain what's going on in these different areas of investigation.

Alan Saunders: Another possible influence is emergence theory. Now emergence, which I have always found a very congenial view of the world, is currently quite fashionable, but what is emergence?

Peter Ludlow: Well I would say that it's a property that (when I use the word in the explanation I hope that's OK) it's a property that emerges from low-level aspects of the system that you're studying. So some people might say that consciousness is an emergent property of the actions of the neurons in your brain, for example. And you might say that other kinds of high-level macro-phenomenon like certain economic phenomena might be an emerging property of lots and lots of little transactions that we engage in in the marketplace. In this case it would be that conspiracies are an emergent property of us attempting to form little bargains where we're sort of keeping information to ourselves, and meanwhile connecting with other people with the same sort of arrangement.

Alan Saunders: Is it clear form your reading of Assange's writings that he and the Wikileaks collective are thinking about network theory and these other philosophical developments and they're up-to-date in terms of the latest ideas in the area?

Peter Ludlow: Certainly Assange is. So he has a piece called Conspiracy as Governance where he talks about network theory very specifically, and yes, he seems to be up to speed on this, not surprisingly. He's a fairly bright guy.

Alan Saunders: I know that in writing about Wikileaks, you were aiming simply to understand and lay out Assange's ideas, you weren't arguing for or against his ideas about conspiracy, power and networks, but having read some of his political ideas and theory, what do you now think of him as a theorist and as an activist?

Peter Ludlow: Well as a theorist his work is scattered and sort of not tied together, so you have to piece things together. I think once you piece it together the theory is completely solid. Now then you get to the hard cases like Well, is this a conspiracy that needs to be dismantled? Or, What should I do about protecting confidential sources and things like that? And then I guess we're in your question of Well, what do we think of him as an activist? And there I guess I just don't know. I don't know enough about him, I don't know enough about the details of where he's leaking, and what he's doing to protect people, and I just wouldn't feel comfortable guessing as to what kind of an activist he is. Is he another Daniel Ellsburg, or is he far short of that? And at this point I simply don't have enough information to know.

Alan Saunders: Tell us a bit more about this essay by Assange. I mean how do you, as a philosopher, how do you see it? Is it an exercise in political philosophy?

Peter Ludlow: It's not an exercise in political philosophy in the way that we normally think about it. I think it's more the discussion on a kind of abstract level, where he actually in the essay that I'm talking about here, he actually goes in to illustrating the way we can think of networks and conspiracies in particular. So he talks about the network in terms of pounding nails into a board, and those are the conspirators. And then he says, 'Well then you take a piece of t win and wrap it around the nails and sort of connect all these different things.'

And so what he's trying to do there is to illustrate the way the conspiracy is organised and then he's explaining the way you attack a conspiracy like this is not to pull out nails, because you still have the network in place. So sort of traditional anti-government actions or whatever you would think of, Well we have to sort of remove the heads or the key figures and he argues that that doesn't work in this case because of the way this is systematically organised. So what you have to do is sort of catch the twine and snip - you know, snip the twine and unravel it so that as it were, you get the twine and the information is spinning off of it that network of nails, and out into the open.

Alan Saunders: You said that what Assange is describing is something that network theorists might call a 'scale-free network.' What does that mean?

Peter Ludlow: Well the best thing to do would be to give you an illustration, which would be the way that airline flight networks are organised. So you don't have every city connected to every other city, they're organised around certain hubs. And many smaller cities are connected to these larger hubs, and then there are routes connecting the major hubs together. The human brain is another scale-free network of this character. And what Assange is arguing I think is that many conspiracies have this character as well.

Alan Saunders: On ABC Radio National, you're with The Philosopher's Zone, and I'm talking to Peter Ludlow from Northwestern University in the US, about Julian Assange and what he has to say about conspiracies and networks.

Peter, it is a significant fact, isn't it, that members of a network might not just exchange information, they might also invite each other around to dinner?

Peter Ludlow: Yes, that's something I mentioned in the essay, which is, people in a network actually become attitudinally entrained with each other. So you're in the network and you benefit from being in that network and the more you're in contact with the person, the more that person's attitudes you start to come on. So the members of the network are not just trading information with each other, but they're kind of synchronising with each other psychologically, as it were, simply by being connected in this way.

Alan Saunders: So people within the network may come to have shared values? Even if they didn't have them to begin -

Peter Ludlow: That's exactly right. So suppose you are a government official and you've formed a network with someone who's let's say a reporter, or someone who is a business person, and you hang out with that person, play golf with then, go to dinner with them. Eventually you start to synchronise with that person, in terms of the values that you have, and the attitudes that you have.

Alan Saunders: One of the things about the sort of conspiracies we're talking about is - and this is a property of emergence I think - is that they're able to out-think the individuals who comprise them. They're able to out-think the way these individuals would think if they were just acting alone.

Peter Ludlow: I think that's right, yes.

Alan Saunders: So the conspiracy is, as it were, a sort of self-moving organism. It doesn't - people don't actually have to want it to do what it sometimes does?

Peter Ludlow: Right. And in many cases they might be horrified if they sat and thought about what was actually going on and what it was actually doing. You could imagine a situation in which we're all part of a kind of conspiracy, where we think we're just trading little bits of information to give ourselves the edge, not realising that what we're doing is creating something that is harming other people economically, or doing something which is, say, causing violence in certain parts of the world.

So in that sense, we're often blind to the actions of the conspiracy as a whole, that is, we don't see the forest for the trees. But it's also the case that a conspiracy can solve problems that certain individuals don't. So as I think Assange puts it, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts in many of these cases. In this Conspiracy as Governance papers says something to the effect that conspiracies are cognitive devices and they're able to out-think the same group of individuals acting alone.

So the idea is that one way it can do that is that it, the conspiracy itself has information scattered all over. No one individual would have sufficient information to take action by herself, but if you have a number of individuals acting on the information that they have, say for the conspiracy for example, and acting independently, the sum of those actions can bring about changes and effects for the conspiracy that no individual alone would be able to do.

Alan Saunders: It's difficult to imagine a world without closed networks. So ultimately what's wrong with conspiracies?

Peter Ludlow: I think that we need to question conspiracies when we find them, so I would not want to say that all conspiracies are evil. I think we can imagine situations in which maybe it's a good idea that the information be kept close at hand. Maybe in terms of peace negotiations for something, there's an advantage to not making everything public. On the other hand, I think the correct attitude here would be to be suspicious of conspiracies, and when you find a conspiracy ask that it justify itself somehow, and then if it can't justify itself, then the conspiracy should be dismantled.

Alan Saunders: It's going to be difficult if you're a member of a conspiracy to justify yourself if you don't know that you're a member of a conspiracy.

Peter Ludlow: Right. You can always ask yourself though, Well is it appropriate that I'm in this particular relationship with this individual, exchanging these favours with this individual, information with this individual and not sharing it? I think we can all understand when we're in a conspiracy, we may not know the scope of the conspiracy or how vast it is, or how problematic it is, but the ingredients of it, right, a sort of giant conspiracy is built out of lots and lots of little 2-person conspiracies, as it were. So I think we are in a position to often know that we might be part of something conspiratorial.

Alan Saunders: Assange says that networks and conspiracies act against people's will to truth, love and self-realisation? A rather poetic way of putting it. What do you think he means by that?

Peter Ludlow: I'm not entirely sure what he means by that, but my best guess is that it's something like this: that let's say you and I enter into some conspiracy and now we're basically acting basically to keep the conspiracy going, and lots of our own individual needs and desires and interests are now becoming sublimated to that. That is, I might be acting to learn things that are of interest to other members of my conspiracy, you know, 'What do they want? What do they want to see?' And in that case, I'm not pursuing the plans and interest that I might have as an individual. And I think I don't know for sure if this is what he has in mind, but I think that's certainly a danger being in a conspiracy that you sublimate your own interests and desires and artistic endeavours to this sort of amorphous, conspiratorial organisation.

Alan Saunders: And how is Wikileaks going to put an end to this?

Peter Ludlow: Well, as I say, it's pretty optimistic to say that Wikileaks will put an end to it, but I think the plan is, the idea is that are if you can get into the conspiracy and disrupt the network so that the information is no longer held close, in effect you have made the conspiracy irrelevant. That is, if what holds the conspiracy together, is like that little strand of twine wrapped around the nails, right? And if you can get that twine and pull it out, there's basically nothing left at that point.

So the idea is that once you get in there and get the information and start leaking it to the public, the information's no longer held close, the conspiracy no longer exists. But even if you can't successfully do that, you might bring about other effects, so maybe because of a leak in the network, the network responds by splitting in two. Let's say it doesn't trust the United States government or State Department any more because it's not reliable at keeping information close. So then what you might get is a network that undergoes a kind of fission, and in that sense the network would become less powerful.

And then the final thing that Assange argues is that if nothing else, you can get the network preoccupied with trying to protect its security and trying to hold things close. It would be less trusting of other people, so it would bring fewer people into the conspiracy. It'll have to vet information more closely, and so the costs of exchanging information are going to increase for them, and basically even if you don't destroy the network, or dismantle it, you at least increase its cost of doing business.

Alan Saunders: Well you might increase its cost of doing business, but you might also make it stronger, mightn't you? It will become more secretive, more draconian in its actions, even though this costs more money?

Peter Ludlow: I think that's right. And that's one of the questions I raised. I mean you might get a response where the conspiracy just gets better at doing its business. That's a possibility. I think however, that the most likely outcome is just that the conspiracy becomes more draconian in the sense that it has to control the edges of the conspiracy and make it harder for people to get access to it. That is, give fewer people the sort of high security clearance. But that just means there are going to be fewer people in the network, and if there are fewer people in the network, then you have fewer sources of information and less things of value to to the network. And the other way it might respond, in a draconian way, is by compartmentalising things. But if it's compartmentalising, then also it's weakening itself as a network. It's as though you were to split the two hemispheres of the brain or something.

Alan Saunders: Is it necessarily the case that conspiracies can't act to the benefit of others?

Peter Ludlow: Perhaps not. I think that there are certain conspiracies that are justified. I don't object to the idea that some kinds of diplomacy take place outside of public view. I think obviously Wikileaks itself is a kind of conspiracy by Assange's own definition, because we're not privy to the communications between Assange and his principals for the most part, so he keeps things rather close. So the justification in that case, you know, I'm sure Assange is aware that what he's running is a kind of conspiracy, the justification is that you need to do this to protect the principles in an organisation like this, because they're at risk. And obviously there are many places in the world where that's absolutely true.

So there are networks of friends in various countries in the Middle East right now that are communicating in encrypted form etc., so that sources of power can't dismantle those networks. And I'm sure that this is something Assange would agree with, because he's also worked for and advocated encryption technologies for ordinary folk. And so the idea is rather than have conspiracies of the powerful, maybe we should work to dismantle the conspiracies of the powerful and then seek to find ways that people out of power can communicate with each other closely, as it were, in effect so that they don't get stamped out by sources of power.

Alan Saunders: Well, Peter Ludlow, thank you very much for being part of the global network we call The Philosopher's Zone.

Peter Ludlow: There you go, right, we're part of a conspiracy. Great to be here.

Alan Saunders: Peter Ludlow is Professor of Philosophy at Northwestern University.

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The Philosopher's Zone is a conspiracy produced by Kyla Slaven, with Charlie