It is clear that the reports sent to Mrs. Clinton are not about secret dealings—they were not spy messages. And although they dealt with apparently highly confidential information, such as the fact that Berlusconi has private interests in Russian gas deals, even here (whether true or false) the messages would have done no more than repeat what had already been talked about by those who in Fascist times were branded café strategists, in other words, those who talked politics at the bar.
And this goes to confirm another well-known fact, that every dossier compiled for the secret service (in whatever country) consists entirely of material already in the public domain. The “extraordinary” American revelations about Berlusconi’s wild nights reported what could have been read months earlier in any Italian newspaper (except the two controlled by the premier), and Gaddafi’s satrapic follies had for some time been providing—rather stale—material for cartoonists.
The rule that secret files must contain only information already known is essential for the operation of a secret service, and not just in this century. Likewise, if you go to a bookshop specializing in esoteric publications, you will see that every new book (on the Holy Grail, the mystery of Rennes-le-Château, the Knights Templar, or the Rosicrucians) repeats exactly what was written in earlier books. This is not simply because occult writers are averse to carrying out new research (nor because they don’t know where to go looking for information about the nonexistent), but because followers of the occult believe in only what they already know, and in those things that confirm what they have already learned. It is the formula behind the success of Dan Brown.
The same happens with secret files. The informant is lazy, and the head of the secret service is either lazy or blinkered—he only regards as true what he already recognizes.
Given that the secret services, in any country, aren’t able to foresee events like the attack on the Twin Towers (in some cases, being regularly led astray, they actually bring them about) and that they file only what is already known, it would be just as well to be rid of them. But in present times, cutting more jobs would indeed be foolish.
I have suggested, however, that while in terms of its contents it was a false scandal, in terms of its formal implications, WikiLeaks has opened a new chapter in history.
No government in the world will be able to maintain areas of secrecy if it continues to entrust its secret communications and its archives to the Internet or other forms of electronic memory, and by this I mean not only the United States but even San Marino or the Principality of Monaco (and perhaps only Andorra will be spared).
Let us try to understand the implications of this phenomenon. Once upon a time, in Orwell’s day, Power could be seen as a Big Brother who monitored every action of every one of its subjects, particularly when no one was aware of it. The television Big Brother is a poor caricature because everyone can follow what is happening to a small group of exhibitionists, assembled for the very purpose of being seen—and therefore the whole thing is of purely dramatic and psychiatric relevance. But what was just a prophecy in Orwell’s time has now actually come true, since the Power can follow people’s every movement through their mobile telephones, through every transaction, hotel visit, and motorway journey carried out using their credit card, through every supermarket visit followed on closed-circuit television, and so on, so that the citizen has fallen victim to the eye of a vast Big Brother.
That, at least, is what we thought until yesterday. But now it has been shown that not even the Power’s innermost secrets can escape a hacker’s monitoring, and therefore the relationship of monitoring ceases to be one-directional and becomes circular. The Power spies on every citizen, but every citizen, or at least the hacker appointed as avenger of the citizen, can find out all the secrets of the Power.
And even though the vast majority of citizens are unable to examine and evaluate the quantity of material that the hacker seizes and makes public, a new rule of journalism is taking shape and is being put into practice at this very moment. Rather than recording the important news—and once upon a time it was governments who decided what items were really important, whether it was declaring war, devaluing a currency, signing a treaty—the press now decides independently what news ought to be important and what news can be kept quiet, even negotiating with the political power (as has happened) over which disclosed “secrets” to reveal and which to keep quiet.
(Incidentally, given that all secret reports fomenting government hatred or friendship originate from published articles, or from confidential information given by journalists to embassy officials, the press is coming to assume another purpose—at one time it spied on foreign embassies to find out about secret plots, but now it is the embassies that are spying on the press to find out about events in the public domain. But let us get back to the point.)
How can a Power hold out in the future, when it can no longer keep its own secrets? It is true, as Georg Simmel once said, that every real secret is an empty secret (because an empty secret can never be revealed) and holding an empty secret represents the height of power; it is also true that to know everything about the character of Berlusconi or Merkel is in fact an empty secret, so far as secrets are concerned, because it is material in the public domain. But to reveal that Hillary Clinton’s secrets were empty secrets, as WikiLeaks has done, means removing all power from the Power.
It is clear that countries in the future will no longer be able to hold secret information online—it would be just the same as posting it on a street corner. But it is equally clear that with current surveillance technology there is no point in hoping to carry out confidential transactions by telephone. And nothing is easier, moreover, than to find out where and when a head of state has flown off to meet a colleague . . . not to mention those popular jamborees for demonstrators that are the G8 meetings.
How then can private and confidential relationships be carried on in future? What reaction might there be to the irresistible triumph of Complete Openness?
I am well aware that for the time being my prediction is science fiction and therefore fanciful, but I cannot help imagining government agents riding discreetly in stagecoaches or calèches along untrackable routes, along the country roads of more desolate areas—and those not blighted by tourism (because tourists use their mobile phones to photograph anything that moves in front of them)—carrying only messages committed to memory or, at most, hiding a few essential pieces of written information in the heel of a shoe.
It is most appealing to imagine envoys from the Glubbdubdrib Embassy meeting the messenger from Lilliput on a lonely street corner, at midnight, murmuring passwords in their brief furtive encounter. Or a pallid Pierrot, during a masked ball at the Ruritanian court, who draws back from time to time to where the candles have left an area of shadow, and takes off his mask, revealing the face of Obama to the Shulamite who, swiftly drawing aside her veil, we discover to be Angela Merkel. And there, between a waltz and polka, the meeting will at last take place, unbeknownst even to Assange, to decide the fate of the euro, or the dollar, or both.
All right, let us be serious. It won’t happen like that. But in some way or other, something very similar will have to happen. In any event, information, the recording of a secret interview, will then be kept as a single copy or manuscript, in a locked drawer. Just think: ultimately, the attempted espionage at the Watergate Complex (which involved forcing open a cupboard and a filing cabinet) was less successful than WikiLeaks. And I recommend this advertisement to Mrs. Clinton. I found it online:
Matex Security has been in existence since 1982 to protect your property. With made-to-measure furniture for the home, with secret compartments to hide your valuables and documents, where no intruder will ever find them even if they search your whole house or offices or boats of whatever make or model. These works are carried out in the greatest confidentiality and made to the specifications and instructions of the client, built exclusively by our cabinetmaker and our highly dependabl
e staff.
Some time ago, I wrote that technology moves like a crayfish, in other words, backwards.1 A century after wireless telegraphy revolutionized communications, the Internet has reestablished a telegraphy that runs on (telephone) wires. Videocassettes (which are analog) enabled film buffs to explore a film step by step, moving backward and forward and discovering all the secrets of how it was put together, whereas DVDs (which are digital) allow us only to jump from chapter to chapter, in other words, only by macro-leaps. High-speed trains now take us from Milan to Rome in three hours, while flying there, all in all, takes at least three and half. It is not so extraordinary, then, that even politics and government communication techniques should return to the times of the horse-drawn carriage, meetings in the steam room of a Turkish bath, or messages left in an alcove by some Mata Hari.
[Reworking of two articles that appeared in Libération (December 2, 2010) and L’Espresso (December 31, 2010).]
1. Edited by Leonard C. Lewin (New York: The Dial Press, 1967).
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1. Giacomo Leopardi, L’infinito, c. 1819—translation by Jonathan Galassi.
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2. Eugenio Lecaldano, Un’etica senza Dio (Rome-Bari: Laterza, 2006).
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1. “In generatione animalis et hominis in quibus est forma perfectissima, sunt plurimae formae et generationes intermediae, et per consequens corruptiones, quia generatio unius est corruptio alterius. Anima igitur vegetabilis, quae primo inest, cum embryo vivit vita plantae, corrumpitur, et succedit anima perfectior, quae est nutritiva et sensitiva simul, et tunc embryo vivit vita animalis; hac autem corrupta, succedit anima rationalis ab extrinseco immissa, licet praecedentes fuerint virtute seminis.”
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1. For the story of this reply and the justifications that followed it, see Hugo, Hélas! by André Gide, edited by Claude Martin (Paris: Éditions Fata Morgana, 2002).
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2. Jean Cocteau, Le mystère laïc, in Oeuvres complètes, vol. 10 (Lausanne: Maguerat, 1946), p. 21.
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3. Umberto Eco, “Casablanca, o la rinascita degli dei,” in Dalla periferia dell’impero (Milan: Bompiani, 1977), pp. 138–46.
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4. “Elogio del Montecristo,” in Sugli specchi e altri saggi (Milan: Bompiani, 1985), pp. 147–58.
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5. Victor Brombert, Victor Hugo and the Visionary Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
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6. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, translated by Eden and Cedar Paul (1926).
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7. Georg Lukács, The Historical Novel, translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (1962).
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1. Translator’s note: The word casino in Italian is in effect two words, with two pronunciations—a casinò, with the accent on the final syllable, is the same as the English casino, or gambling house; but here we are concerned with the other word casino, pronounced, confusingly, with the stress on the penultimate syllable in exactly the same way as the English word.
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2. Now that we have established what veline originally were, I can explain how the word came to take on its present meaning. When Antonio Ricci started the television entertainment show Striscia la notizia in the 1990s, he wanted some girls, usually appearing on roller-skates, to bring messages for the two presenters, and he called them veline. But the choice is very significant; it means that when Ricci created Striscia la notizia, the fact that he could make a joke out of the word veline indicated there was still an audience that remembered and knew what the veline sent out by the MinCulPop were. If no one knows this today, it is another reflection that can be made on “noise,” on the superimposition of information: in the space of two decades one notion is canceled out because it has been taken over by the obsessive use of another.
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3. Translator’s note: Silvio Berlusconi appeared as guest at a girl’s eighteenth-birthday party in April 2009, prompting his wife to file for divorce.
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1. Translator’s note: An imaginary island in Emilio Salgari’s novels.
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2. Renato Giovannoli, Scienza della fantascienza (Milan: Bompiani, 1991).
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3. According to a recent hypothesis, yet to be proved, tachyons could exist—as neutrinos.
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4. Hans Hörbiger, Glazial-Kosmogonie (Leipzig: Kaiserslautern Hermann Kaysers, 1913).
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5. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, Le matin des magiciens (Paris: Gallimard, 1960). The book was translated into English in 1963.
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6. In fact, it was Rudolf Elmayer-Vestenbrugg, in Die Welteislehre nach Hanns Hörbiger (Leipzig: Koehler Amelang, 1938).
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7. For example, René Alleau, Hitler et les sociétés secrètes (Paris: Grasset, 1969), or Giorgio Galli, Hitler e il nazismo magico (Milan: Rizzoli, 1989).
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8. For example, Gerard Kuiper, of the Mount Palomar Observatory, in an article that appeared in Popular Astronomy in 1946, and Willy Ley, who had worked on the V-1 in Germany, in his article “Pseudoscience in Naziland,” in Astounding Science Fiction vol. 39 (1947).
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1. This collage contains passages, in the following order, from Alexandre Dumas, Ponson du Terrail, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Xavier de Montépin, Victor Hugo, Dumas again, and Carolina Invernizio.
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1. Translator’s note: Fascist organizations of workers and employers.
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2. Apart from passages that link paragraphs, the various judgments are taken from articles that appeared in the 1920s and ’30s, in the following order: (1.) Carlo Linati, “Joyce,” in Corriere della Sera, August 20, 1925; (2.) Report on reading the manuscript of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916; (3.) Santino Caramella, “Anti-Joyce,” in Il Baretti, vol. 12, 1926; (4.) Valentino Piccoli, “Ma Joyce chi è?” in L’Illustrazione Italiana, vol. 10, 1927, and “Il romanzo italiano del dopoguerra,” in La Parola e il Libro, vol. 4, 1927; (5.) Guido Piovene, “Narratori,” in La Parola e il Libro, vols. 9–10, 1927; (6.) Curzio Malaparte, “Strapaese e stracittà,” in Il Selvaggio, vol. 4, no. 20, 1927; (7.) G. B. Angioletti, “Aura poetica,” in La Fiera Letteraria, July 7, 1929; (8.) Elio Vittorini, “Joyce e Rabelais,” in La Stampa, August 23, 1929; (9.) Elio Vittorini, “Letteratura di psicoanalisi,” in La Stampa, September 27, 1929; (10.) Luciano Anceschi, “Romanzo collettivo o romanzo collettivista,” in L’Ambrosiano, May 17, 1934 (in consideration of the man who was to become the leading light behind some of the most radical movements in postwar Italian culture, we should not forget that he was twenty-three at the time, and only ten when Fascism had begun to educate him); (11.) Vitaliano Brancati, “I romanzieri europei leggano romanzi italiani,” in Scrittori nostri (Milan: Mondadori, 1935); (12.) Mario Praz, “Commento a Ulysses,” in La Stampa, August 5, 1930; (13.) Filippo Tommaso Marinetti et al., Il romanzo sintetico, 1939 (now in Teoria e invenzione futurista [Milan: Mondadori, 1968]); (14.) Ennio Giorgianni, “Inchiesta su James Joyce,” in Epiloghi di Perseo, vol. 1, 1934; (15.) Renato Famea, “Joyce, Proust, e il romanzo moderno,” in Meridiano di Roma, April 14, 1940; (16.) Mario Pannunzio, “Necessità del romanzo,” in Il Saggiatore, June 1932; (17.) Giuseppe Biondolillo, “Giudaismo letterario,” in L’Unione Sarda, April 14, 1939.
For all of these sources I am indebted to Giovanni Cianci
, La fortuna di Joyce in Italia (Bari: Adriatica, 1974).
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1. Tarcisio Lancioni, Almanacco del bibliofilo—Viaggio tra gli isolari (Milan: Rovello, 1992).
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2. On this whole question, see Arturo Graf, Miti, leggende, e superstizioni del Medio Evo, chapter 4 (Turin: Loescher, 1892–93).
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3. Although a great deal was written at the time about Powder of Sympathy, in particular in the writings of Sir Kenelm Digby (for example, Theatrum sympatheticum, in quo Sympathiae Actiones variae, singulares & admirandae tàm Macro—quam Microcosmicae exhibentur, & Mechanicé, Physicé, Mathematicé, Chimicé & Medicé, occasione Pulveris Sympathetici, ita quidem elucidantur, ut illarum agendi vis & modus, sine qualitatum occultarum, animaeve Mundi, aut spiritus astralis Magnive Magnalis, vel aliorum Commentariorum subsidium ad oculum pateat [Nuremberg, 1660], the story about the dog is perhaps legendary. More recent references to it include Dava Sobel, Longitude (New York: Penguin, 1995).
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1. Turning Back the Clock (New York: Harcourt, 2007).
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Umberto Eco, Inventing the Enemy: Essays
(Series: # )
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