Chelsea Manning: "Heroine? Traitor? Complex! I'm neither perfect nor do I want to be put on a pedestal."

BarcelonaIn 2010, she shook the world when, as a U.S. Army soldier, she leaked 750,000 classified documents to WikiLeaks, exposing her government's international abuses of democracy. She spent seven years in prison under harsh conditions, including being confined for 23 hours a day, until Barack Obama pardoned her at the end of his presidency. She currently works as a digital activist, and wearing this hat, she visited Barcelona for the Mozilla Festival this past weekend.

We're conducting this interview the week Elon Musk is poised to become the world's first billionaire and...

— Not yet! It will only happen if it achieves the goals of the next ten years.

But the path he himself paves indicates as much.

— We'll see, we'll see! We don't know where the economy will be in ten years.

In any case, do you think this is a symptom of how society is losing the battle against the technological oligarchy?

— Of course. The internet is no longer that space of freedom, because seven companies and some states control it. We are now fully immersed in an era where everything is behind a paywall, everything is a product, everything is a transaction. And everything is viewed through the lens of identity, politics, and algorithms. Large corporations governed by shareholders own the planet's infrastructure, and then some states have directly built their own platforms, as China has done with WeChat.

The understanding between them is evident. In the United States, we've seen how Big Tech has embraced Trump without hesitation. What consequences might this have for everyone?

— The United States is experimenting with what scholars like Steven Levitsky and Wei Zhong define as hybrid authoritarianism. Since the Voting Rights Act was passed in the mid-1960s, a product of the civil rights movement, we have had a liberal democratic system, albeit an imperfect one. But all its precepts have begun to erode, shifting toward this competitive authoritarianism. And these models are becoming commonplace worldwide. They are systems in which there is still political opposition, courts, a Congress or legislative authority... but they are greatly weakened.

And how did we get here?

— The neo-authoritarians have learned to manipulate the scales to their advantage. If someone becomes popular but also troublesome, then the necessary mechanisms are set in motion to persecute and neutralize them.

What would you like the reaction to be against this?

— We still have to find it. We've discovered that democracies have this weakness. During the 1990s and 2000s, academics assumed that if they were robust, they were guaranteed to remain so, but that hasn't been the case. This hybrid, or competitive, authoritarianism is newer than liberal democracy: it's advanced technology and an equally advanced way of doing politics that we haven't yet figured out how to manage.

But what is your impression?

— The thing is, I'm afraid I don't have the answer. Perhaps we need something even more robust than the traditional liberal democracy of the 20th century. But I don't know what this supposed new system looks like. Perhaps we have to invent something new. Perhaps we should experiment. That is to say, of course we must react and respond, but we'll have to do so with some creativity, since the defense mechanisms we attributed to democracies don't work against these hybrid authoritarian regimes. And sometimes this is difficult to make clear because, nevertheless, you have an opposition party, and therefore the theory is that the opposition party will eventually win and overturn that regime. But this is like trying to climb a mountain on a skateboard, because all the odds are stacked against you.

Do you think we'll see tensions in the streets? During the era of the civil rights struggle I mentioned, there was the Martin Luther King line, but also the one embodied by Malcolm X.

— I don't know. Many social movements have become social media movements. That is, their action is now a hashtagor to achieve a moment of virality on Instagram. This channels discontent down a path that poses no threat to hybrid authoritarian regimes, with their police and intelligence apparatuses. And, in the end, social movements can be easily quelled by allowing them to vent their frustrations on social media.

Would the leak he facilitated fifteen years ago be possible today?

— If someone tried it today, it would immediately be said that it is fake...which has been generated by AI... And the other problem is that states no longer hide some of the things they do. On the contrary, they do them quite openly: they talk about it on social media and are proud of it. The landscape has changed because we are overwhelmed with so much information. We are in the era of radical transparency, but neo-authoritarians know how to neutralize it: if they do it openly and say they are proud of it, it ceases to be a scandal.

I have avoided calling her "alerting" because I know she doesn't like the word.

— I try to see myself as more than that. When people call me a whistleblower, it reduces me to a cliché, when in reality I'm a much more complex entity. I see myself as an activist, especially after my time in prison, which is where I became seriously radicalized. It's funny, because people assume I was already radicalized, but it was prison, and the years that followed, that made me this way. In fact, as I get older, I'm a little less brandish now, but the label still bothers me. Ultimately, the word gets slapped on me and other people who did similar things, but who have nothing to do with each other. We have different personalities, different backgrounds, different interests.

What makes his case different is precisely the brutal repression he suffered, with years of solitary confinement in inhumane conditions. Does he ever think about what his life would have been like if he hadn't made the decision to leak all those documents?

— I've been asked this four times today, and I find it frustrating... The simplest and most honest answer I can give is that if I had done something differently, then I wouldn't have been me. I would have been someone else. Given the facts and circumstances I had, and considering who I am, I made the decisions I made.

Put that way, it seems as if we don't have free will. That we're programmed.

— Hmm... I don't know. I guess my personality tends to adapt to what I end up doing.

Her figure must be polarizing. A heroine to some, a traitor to others. At least in the United States.

— Oh no, no. I never encounter anyone who calls me a traitor, except once, on Fox News. I suppose some media outlets have tried to play on that dichotomy, but I don't see it that way. Heroine? Traitor? I'm me: a complex person! I'm neither perfect nor do I want to be put on a pedestal. I've made some missteps in public and learned my lesson, but I think most people in the United States have already forgotten about me. And this is the most realistic way to portray me, because I get on the subway and nobody seems to notice me.

She ran in the Maryland Senate primaries. Did she want to change politics from within?

— Wow, that was a long time ago...

In 2018.

— I've been living in New York for six years now. Looking back, I realize I wasn't really prepared to get caught up in all of it. I had just gotten out of jail and was eager to take the plunge and do everything I could... Over time, I've come to understand that I first needed to figure out who I was and get my feet back on the ground.

Finally, if you could pass a single law concerning large technology companies, what would you require them to do?

— It would make them pay more taxes.

And that's it? Would that be enough?

— That only leaves me one law, right? Well, I'd tax them until they're roasted.