Via Gizmodo: “This essay by Julian Assange is taken from the introduction to The Wikileaks Files: The World According to the US Empire, a collection analyzing how Wikileaks’ release of US diplomatic cables impacted foreign policy.”

“…Cultures and economies communicate using all manner of techniques across the regions and years of their existence, from the evolution of jokes shared virally between friends to the diffusion of prices across trade routes. This does not by itself make an empire. The structured attempt at managing an extended cultural and economic system using communications is the hall- mark of empire. And it is the records of these communications, never intended to be dissected, and so especially vulnerable to dissection, that form the basis for understanding the nature of the world’s sole remaining “empire.”