"We Are At the Very Beginning of a New Epoch:" Chelsea Manning On the Luxury of Privacy

PAPER is proud to present this conversation between an affiliation of artists and activists and Chelsea Manning -- the former military intelligence analyst who is currently two years into a 35-year sentence (less a credit of roughly three years) at the military prison in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for furnishing WikiLeaks with hundreds of thousands of classified or sensitive documents. In the following exchange, conducted via US mail and encrypted web platforms, Manning takes questions from electronic-music artists Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst; design duo Metahaven, aka Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk; and Web-activist Jacob Appelbaum. Together, they weigh the strictures and possibilities not just of government, but of technology, culture and gender.

My relationship with my digital self has changed a lot over the last few years of incarceration. I feel that my digital representation -- my avatar, as you put it -- has been restricted by the various filters that I've had imposed on it, first throughout my initial confinement at Quantico, Virginia, then through my court-martial, and now my time here at Fort Leavenworth. It  -- or rather she -- has been through several changes, including gender, voice, and frequency and intensity of interaction. Beyond the obvious physical disconnection with me, personally -- she has been filtered through the administrative restrictions -- mostly military-specific -- imposed on what I can and can't say through her. It can be frustrating, but the challenge is absolutely worth it.

I don't consider myself a "radical." In fact, none of Cornell West's statements come across as radical to me. Radical in American society has, I think, become this buzzword that makes a lot of ideas and discussions seem foreign or new to people -- whether for or against them. Is it radical to seek justice? Is it radical to be rescued by love? Is it subversive to be sweet? I think if you go around the country and ask people they will almost universally agree -- at least in principle. Instead of trying to be "radical"; I just try to be true to myself! Is it radical to be true to yourself? Maybe it is? I don't know, but it just makes sense to me, haha!

I believe that we are just at the very beginning of a new epoch. I've believed this for a very longtime, probably starting around my early teens when I was really spending a lot of time online to "escape" my life -- school, bullying, my awkward relationship with family, my gender identity -- at night. I think that with ubiquitous and total access to highly connected information technology, and with ubiquitous digital and robotic automation, and with increasingly elegant and intuitive human/machine interfacing we are slowly beginning to blur the lines between the concepts that have seemed so separate for generations, such as the relationships between gender, sexuality, art and work. As we begin to ascend into a new era -- which sometimes includes ideas of "transhumanism" and the information, economic and technological "singularity" -- perhaps we are going to begin to slowly embrace, or fear, a post-human world? If it happens quickly enough, we might even find out ourselves!

Facebook's policies are a reflection of their unique history -- first as a Boston/Cambridge area student social media site -- and current business model. I think that their targeted advertising and "big data" search filters require taking discrete and "accurate" -- from the perspective of their advertising clients -- data for tracking and analysis. This is why they do what they do, and why such big institutions resist allowing us to define ourselves, because it takes away from their power -- either directly, especially in the case of governments, or indirectly, as in social media's advertising models.

I think it's an odd paradox that technology is providing for us. We are more diverse and open as a society -- yet we also seem to be more homogenous and insecure than ever before. I think that today's technology certainly provide tools that can be used to declare a kind of digital independence from institutional control through monitoring, censorship, and political -- and physical -- eradication. But, I don't think these tools are any more necessary than they are without them. We can still be independent without technology. Some people might even find their independence in embracing the Luddite philosophy and shunning technology. Ultimately though, in this constant technological arms race, we are always only one breakthrough away from making our methods to get past such institutions irrelevant or unusable. We might wake up tomorrow and find out that the Riemann hypothesis has been solved by some brilliant person or group of people, suddenly making most of our encryption algorithms weak -- or we might wake up tomorrow and find out that a six-to-ten-qubit quantum computer has been built, accomplishing the same thing! My point is, technology only takes us so far. For me, the most important element is the human one -- let's try not to forget that!

You can certainly work toward improving my situation by donating to my legal defense fund. We're working on a lot of big issues in my case -- which has the potential to become landmark precedent in the American jurisprudence system -- that affect a lot of people in America. It's so very important that they get help too. Paying the legal bills is the biggest logistical hurdle to that at this point. Ultimately though, keeping me motivated -- because sometimes it can get pretty tough emotionally -- and ensuring that people haven't forgotten just how important this case is for our ensuring that our rights are protected in our society, will certainly work toward that end as well.

Read everything. Absorb everything that is out there and act as your own filter. Hunt down your own answers to questions. This is the only advice that is actually worth anything. If you don't read these things yourself, then you can't say that you truly understand what humanity has done, and where we are going. We can't spend our lives getting spoon-fed all of our information every day and then expect to understand our world. Only then will you understand that people are still hurting and dying in the world around us.

It's difficult to say what my kind of political paradise or utopia would look like. I mean, given the fact that humanity has thus far managed to avoid it, yet still improve upon it, a practical and realistic vision of utopia is, I think, currently beyond our biologically imposed ability to construct or comprehend. I do believe that three things would likely contribute to a situation in which we might figure it out: an abundance-based economy where energy and matter are never scarce, virtually instant and infinite access to every other person and all the available information in such a society, and a wisdom or insight that allows such a society to act in harmony. Is it possible? I don't know. I guess we'll find out, won't we?