The ongoing adventures of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange are an ink-blot test for a mass public.

Just who is this guy, you might well ask. And which public exactly is he serving?

For right-wing U.S. politicians like Newt Gingrich, Assange is simply "an enemy combatant," a virtual cyber-terrorist who is putting America and its interests in harm's way.

But for many of the callers to a recent edition of CBC Radio's Cross Country Checkup, Assange is a hero, a kind of cyber Robin Hood.

They reveled in the diplomatic undressing he and his cohorts have been administering to the Great Empire to the South.

The Robin Hood of cyberspace? Supporters of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange stand outside the magistrates court in central London on Dec. 14, 2010 as a British judge granted him bail. (Andrew Winning/Reuters)

The man at the centre of this storm, Assange, has been profiled in The New Yorker, Maclean's and here on CBC.ca, among other places, as a celebrated computer hacker and brilliant misfit with a bohemian upbringing.

But on another level, he confirms the existence of what New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman once called (in his 1999 bestseller The Lexus and the Olive Tree) the super-empowered individual.

As Friedman saw it, globalization had so reshaped and distorted national authority that certain unique individuals have been able to emerge to punch far beyond their weight, essentially on the scale of nation states themselves.

Friedman's examples, for better and ill, included such super-empowered characters as Osama bin Laden, the Houdini of world terrorism, and Microsoft's Bill Gates, the epitome of start-up capitalism and global charity.

Julian Assange may or may not become Time magazine's Person of the Year. But as the current embodiment of Friedman's super-empowered, nation-shaking individual, he would appear to have few current equals.

The modern public

Still, you have to ask, who is the "public" that WikiLeaks and Julian Assange are intending to serve with these document dumps?

Surely it has to be more than just a bunch of conspiracy theorists, cyber-anarchists and news junkies.

We in the media, of course, are feasting on Assange's handiwork, to the point of commenting on the elegant quality of the diplomatic prose and parsing the revelations as either real or simply warmed-over titillations.

But we (and who is this "we"?) can't pretend anymore that one blanket mass audience exists.

In fact, a public is not just one thing, one big cover for a multitude. Today's public is more like a changing facade, an information market filled with high-end boutiques alongside discount shops, various, rowdy and noisily democratic.

This democratization of our public sphere is the lesson from my Ideas colleague David Cayley's multi-part series on "The Origins of the Modern Public," which first aired last spring.

The act of publicizing oneself, Cayley tells us, "was once the exclusive property of men of rank. They alone, by virtue of their stations, could make things public."

But no longer are men of rank, the king and the nobility (or Barack and his court), the ones who hold the keys to the public door.

Although this downward transfer of authority has been going on long before the days of WikiLeaks.

History has probably always had two (or more) narrative streams running side by side. Sometimes these streams resolve into one river (that's the dialectical view); and sometimes, as postmodernists believe, they simply travel in rough proximity.

This means we can have not only different options on history and the public interest — a "people's history" versus the well-buffed chronicles of the high and mighty.

But we can also have narratives where an outlier like Assange can apparently appeal to diverse publics at the same time, be they adolescent hackers or the greying patrons of CBC's The National.

Our forbidden planet

Ultimately, Cayley tells us, a public is a "summons to attention."

"People come into an awareness of themselves through media," as their public sense of themselves joins with their private identity.

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a press conference in Geneva in November 2010. (Valentin Flauraud/Reuters)

Someone like Assange forces that awareness on us and mixes it up in the process: Is he a romantic hero or a villain? A man who wants to ruin discrete diplomacy or make it more transparent, so that it is more open to his preferred word, "justice"?

In this way, he is the (Bonnie and) Clyde Barrow of the digital age, hoodlum and hero, rolled into one, depending a bit on where you stand.

On the broader scale, the result of all this surplus information flowing about is a world of Facebook babble, endless scrolling, privacy commissioners and companies you can hire to remove your social media indiscretions before the next job interview.

In the 1950s science fiction classic Forbidden Planet, starring the late Leslie Nielson and Robbie the Robot, a United Planets spaceship is sent to a remote world, only to discover that its advanced civilization has been destroyed by a device called "a plastic educator."

The device so roiled the dreams of its inhabitants that they murdered each other after they went to sleep at night.

Transparency run amok, you might say, 1950s style.

Are there some things that are better left secret, black dreams in the night, or maybe the white lies we sometimes tell children, friends and colleagues?

Has the web and Julian Assange turned our world into a Forbidden Planet where every day we can pick our truths and demand others act in ways we would never demand of ourselves?

One thing I will predict. Coming next year, more children will be named Julian while, in government agencies, dartboards will be hoisted with his shining, winsome face.