Julian Assange is writing a "major" new book, in which the Wikileaks founder details his vision for the "future of the internet" as well as his encounter in 2011 with Google chairman Eric Schmidt – a meeting which his publisher described as "an historic dialogue" between "the North and South poles of the internet".
The book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, will be published in September this year, announced publisher OR Books this morning. It will recount how, in June 2011 when Assange was living under house arrest at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, Schmidt and "an entourage of US State Department alumni including a top former adviser to Hillary Clinton" visited for several hours and "locked horns" with the Wikileaks founder.
"The two men debated the political problems faced by human society, and the technological solutions engendered by the global network – from the Arab Spring to Bitcoin. They outlined radically opposing perspectives: for Assange, the liberating power of the internet is based on its freedom and statelessness. For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with US foreign policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-western countries to American companies and markets. These differences embodied a tug-of-war over the internet's future that has only gathered force subsequently," said OR Books in its announcement.
The title will include an edited transcript of the conversation between Schmidt and Assange, as well as new material written by Assange, who has been confined to the Ecuadorian embassy, in London, for the last 18 months. The book will provide "the best available summary of his vision for the future of the internet", said the publisher, including his proposal for "a radical overhaul of the naming structure of the internet, one which would revolutionise the way information is accessed".
"By coupling the intellectual content of a document to its online name – doing away with the haphazard URL system – Assange outlines a potential future for the internet that would make it faster and much more difficult to censor," said OR Books.
The author will also denounce Schmidt's "world view" – which he says "equates progress with the geographic expansion of Google, supported by the US State Department" – as "technocratic imperialism".
OR Books, a small New York press which calls itself a "new type of publishing company", has previously published Assange's Cypherpunks. Founder Colin Robinson defended his author last month following a revelatory account by Assange's former ghostwriter Andrew O'Hagan in the London Review of Books about the problems of working with him.
O'Hagan wrote that "the man who put himself in charge of disclosing the world's secrets simply couldn't bear his own. The story of his life mortified him and sent him scurrying for excuses. He didn't want to do the book. He hadn't from the beginning."
Robinson, however, said that O'Hagan focused on Assange's "character defects", while passing over his "achievements in uncovering the misdemeanours of the secret state". Cypherpunks, he said, was the publisher's bestselling title, and while he describes himself as "Julian Assange's publisher, not his friend", Robinson said he was "acutely aware of [Assange's] achievements, which seem to me to be both substantial and generally on the side of justice".
