A Persona of Global Controversy: Assange, Snowden, and the Makings of the Digital Information Activist

Abstract

This chapter examines two controversial celebrities: ex-hacker and editor of the whistleblowing platform WikiLeaks, Julian Assange, and the former U.S. National Security Agency contractor who leaked a trove of classified documents concerning state mass surveillance programs, Edward Snowden. I read Assange and Snowden as two related but contrastive performances of a contemporary persons: the celebrity digital information activist. By persona, I mean a speaking position emergent from and responsive to a series of institutional constraints and social practices, a kind of person or character established through repeated discursive use. By performance, I mean both the collaborations and conflicts of Assange and Snowden with the mainstream press, and the range of biographical interventions by journalists that take Assange and Snowden as their objects of inquiry. I argue that the performances of Assange and Snowden - their actions and the mediatic reception of these last as achievements and missteps - comprise two key contributions to the ongoing, ethopoetical construction of the persona ofthe digital information activist.