Viral

Julian Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, founded and controls Wikileaks. Assange has white hair, grew up on a place called Magnetic Island, never attended school regularly, spent ages 11 to 16 in hiding from his mother's abusive cult-member ex-boyfriend, and adopted the online moniker "Mendax" as a teen when he began hacking into servers at the Department of Defense, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and other sensitive targets. He was arrested by the Australian National Police in 1991 and charged with 31 counts related to his hacking; he pleaded guilty to 24 of them and avoided jail time. Prior to founding Wikileaks, he spent time as a programmer, blogger, security consultant, and physics student at the University of Queensland. He is essentially homeless, spending the vast majority of his time couch-surfing around the U.S., Iceland, and Europe. In his OKCupid profile, he described himself circa 2006 as engaged in changing the world through "passion, inspiration, and trickery," and his CouchSurfing.com profile promises that he will regale hosts with tales of "attempted assassinations in Africa, telephone taps in Australia...election rigging, the Russian mafia...and politicians' wives." He has a 20-year-old son, Daniel Assange, in Melbourne.

-Gawker's crib notes on Julian Assange

Julian Assange sounds like the sort of badass nerd-cum-hero every pasty high school computer geek wants to be when they grow up. [Also allegedly an egomaniac and less than savoury character in some aspects, but what's to be believed?]

Apart from all that, this new role model for the nerds, despite a notsoslight immersion in it I've always been wary of the viral world (this is the point where the hypocrisy of this blag comes to the forefront, I know) as at once a watered down, pixelated substitution for the real world and the best marketing tool in human history. Information especially from the social aspect of the Internet is collected in mass quantities and used for the clever targeted sales pitches that then insidiously bombard us from all sides. It's inspiring to me, then, to see this network of nerds fighting back, using information and computer code as their weapon, telling the world things it needs to know. It seems almost too blackandwhite, good guys versus bad guys, and of course it's more complicated than that even if we like to think it's not. But lately I've seen the Internet as overwhelmingly a banal distraction/ purveyor of quick gratification/ marketing machine, so it's a nice reminder that people out there who understand this particular system far more than I ever will are using that information as power and having a very real impact.

One of my close friends had a poster on the wall of their dorm in freshman year. Soundbytes in pretty font are oft derided for being almost too easy, but this one rings true and perhaps sometimes a salve against the onslaught is not so inexcusable: