Chapter 4: ‘After’ WikiLeaks

As WikiLeaks leapt from obscurity to the nightly news, digital leaking underwent a short-lived Cambrian explosion. WikiLeaks was not the first digital leaks and disclosure website, but its infamy introduced the efficacy of the idea to many of those people formerly known as audience. The capacity to register a web address and solicit some muck to rake was a low enough bar that many tried. The forms and functions of radical leaking that evolved from WikiLeaks were diverse and distributed across geography, capacity, issue, and model for capturing, interacting with, and disclosing secrets.

This chapter maps the burgeoning ecology of public ‘leaks’ websites and their practices in the period of popularisation/infamy of WikiLeaks. Each instance considered here purports a similar basic form and ethos to the WikiLeaks model: ‘we publish anonymously uploaded secrets’. Many of these apparatuses employed unique designs to afford a spectrum of political potentials and (anti)democratic merit. This chapter takes a macro view of these experiments to show how the explosion and collapse of material practices of radical transparency inspired by WikiLeaks evolved. The chapter systematically documents public leaks sites through analysis of their thematic focus or innovation, their basic material characteristics, and the degree to which they are visibly interrelated. While the macro analysis can map the birth, life and death of a distributed leak site ecology, it cannot account for the narrative of leak site culture. The next few chapters consider cultures and continuation of leaks sites in more detail. This chapter remains focussed on mapping how the initial spore of WikiLeaks grew a burgeoning set of new practices of radical transparency that appeared online. The ‘after’ signalled in this chapter's title denotes a phenomenological perspective more than a temporal one – during and after WikiLeaks popularisation/infamy there seemed to be a rhizomic blossoming of online resources for would-be leakers and publics to explore radical disclosure. Rhizome here is not meant to reference Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical interpretation of the term. I use it as a metaphor to help give form to the various leaks site that seemed to spring up from unseen roots that were laterally linking independent practices of disclosure without visible connection.