Julian Assange may still be holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, but that hasn’t stopped him from appearing simultaneously in the United States at a festival.
The 43-year-old appeared in 3D form to a rapt audience at the 2014 Nantucket Project in Massachusetts over the weekend.
Assange discussed free access to information, research and the impact of censorship to filmmaker Eugene Jarecki.
“As a researcher, I’m all too well aware of what people are now calling Google blindness, that the information you can’t find on the Internet doesn’t exist,” the Australian’s hologram told the audience.
People can “delete history very easily” on the internet, he added, quoting George Orwell’s work: “He who controls the present controls the past. He who controls the past controls the future.
“But the last five years have been the greatest period of education that ever existed.
“The greatest number of people to the greatest geographic extent are learning about their environment, and the complexities of the international environment.
“My conclusion is that the best way to go about changing things is simply to act. At its essence, when civilization is working well, it commits us to not do dumb things again. To do that, we have to have the ability to learn from each other, and learn from the past, how our institutions actually behave, their internal dialogue. Ideas can only be as good as their inputs.”
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