A 50th birthday message to an old friend named Julian Assange

I wish the situation right now would be different Julian. As the world is changing faster than ever, the future looks grim without you being around. Without your advice, your feedback and endless support to our causes. Without your guidance, and you, in simple but clear statements, always giving good people direction. Knowing you are locked up, without really doing anything wrong, while the real criminals you helped to expose still walk free and are creating a story that we would only be able to picture in our worst nightmares, on your 50th birthday I can not celebrate.

We first started talking around the economic crash in 2008. It was only about a year or so after your platform Wikileaks was released to the public. Before that I had only known you as an activist. You weren’t the famous figure you are today. I always knew you weren’t the “one day fly” kind of person, the person who would do something once, like expose a horrible crime, and then disappear back into the shadows. The goals you had in life were different. And, looking back at everything that happened over the 13 years I’ve known you, the path you took, and what it resulted in, I realize I would not have advised you to do anything else than what you chose to do.

Your actions changed the world. You showed everyone, especially our collective of activists, that we were all able to bring truth to the public, not by repeating information flowing down from the top of the pyramid, but by allowing it to be disseminated by the “normal people”. By listening to those who were willing to speak out, by allowing leakers and whistleblowers to submit information privately, and by spreading it using our own platforms. Not relying on the old media to do anything, but working collectively, decentralized, with loyalty to only one thing: the truth. And we were successful at it. We were no longer behaving as followers, listening to authority figures, idols or influencers, no longer having money or political motivations decide for us. All of the things we took as granted, we believed we couldn’t fix anymore, became irrelevant as we finally had a way of fighting back. We had a way to level the playing field, and we did.

When the establishment tried to get rid of you in 2010 by targeting the Wikileaks platform with cyber attacks, you asked us to really become decentralized. Our activist collective jumped on this and we spent the next few days setting up thousands of copies of your website. And it worked. The attackers backed off after realizing they just couldn’t take all of us out. The entire world was watching as the establishment was unable to deal with a group of internet activists. And I can’t deny that those days gave me a great feeling, and made me smile, even though I knew that we were dealing with a horrible situation we shouldn’t even be in, had they just respected our right to a free press.

Yes, we knew they would come for the money after that. And they would try to cut off your funding. Because it was the last thing they still had power over, that disgusting monetary system.