(Photo of Richard Stallman and Julian Assange holding a propaganda photo of Edward Snowden)

Bruce Sterling wrote up a long-winded editorial “The Ecuadorian Library” that covers a lot of ground and ends up posing Richard Stallman, Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden as moral heroes against the State Department and NSA as antithetical to democracy.

Here’s a particularly lovely excerpt from the article.

People, you couldn’t trust any of these three guys to go down to the corner grocery for a pack of cigarettes. Stallman would bring you tiny peat-pots of baby tobacco plants, then tell you to grow your own. Assange would buy the cigarettes, but smoke them all himself while coding up something unworkable. And Ed would set fire to himself, to prove to an innocent mankind that tobacco is a monstrous and cancerous evil that must be exposed at all costs.

And yet the three of them together, they look just amazing.

While I’m yet unsure of my position on and generally suspicious of all these parties, I’m sure The Ecuadorian Library by Sterling is worth reading.