The leaky weirdo was never a hero

This month’s zero was an easy choice: Julian Assange. That’s right, the creepy weirdo with the leaky wiki; the self-styled champion of transparency now angrily opaque about his own private life; and, ultimately, the soiled posterboy for some of the most retrograde trends in modern political life, from rampant conspiracy theory to gross responsibility-shirking.

Yet it hasn’t always been this way. For a while, many liberal, broadsheet-reading types thought he was the data-dumping dog’s bollocks, a man to rival ‘Nelson Mandela and Mother Teresa’ in the saintliness stakes, or even, as the New Yorker put it, ‘a rail-thin being who has rocketed to earth to deliver humanity some hidden truth’. In short, he was Jesus – but with gadgets. A cyber-Jesus, if you will, an open-source Messiah, a Second Coming and to hell with firewalls.

This is a taster from the July edition of spiked plus, our exclusive ‘magazine within a magazine’ for readers who make invaluable contributions to spiked’s fundraising drive. To read the rest of the article, sign in, or sign up, to spiked plus here.