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Robert P. Baird, Poetry contributor and blogger over at 3 Quarks Daily, has posted a terrific article regarding the the similarities between the strategies of transparency that WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has articulated, and the strategies of defamiliarization theorized by the Language Writers. Baird begins by discussing an essay by Assange which summarizes his project and his ethics in terms of the conspiratorial nature of power:

For Assange in 2006, then, the public benefit of leaked information is not the first-order good of the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world (free information is its own reward), nor is it the second-order good of the muckrakers* (free information will lead the people to demand change). What Assange asks of leaked information is that it supply a third-order public good: he wants it to demonstrate that secrets cannot be securely held, and he wants it to do this so that the currency of all secrets will be debased. He wants governments-cum-conspiracies to be rendered paranoid by the leaks and therefore be left with little energy to pursue its externally focused aims. In his words, “We can marginalise a conspiracy’s ability to act by decreasing total conspiratorial power until it is no longer able to understand, and hence respond effectively to, its environment.”

Baird then goes on to show how Language writing's formal interventions attempt a similar disruption. This disruption does not take the form of a populist call-to-arms, but instead opens up the internal contradictions of orderliness itself, to break apart the seeming coherence of authority:

Here “the ‘clear’ and ‘orderly’ functioning of language” plays the same part in the Language poets’ political mythology that the clear and orderly functioning of secrecy plays in Assange’s: both are invisible agents of Caesar, up to no good for as long as no one is looking.

However, Baird concludes not by simply praising Assange or the Language poets, but by pointing out that each political attempt is tied to an idea of the world as a series of signs. Basically, he's calling them out for a supposed linguistic determinancy, one which ignores the power's determining factors of financialization and wars, in favor of a theory of information and conspiracy:

His belief that secrecy is the fundamental source of power is a version of the classic category mistake of the internet age: to imagine that the "world" of information simply is the world, that there is no remainder, nothing left to of the latter to overflow or exceed or resist the former. (The Language poets made a similar mistake in suggesting that a stylistic innovation in poetry was predictably convertible into real-world effects.)