The WikiLeaks Truck Is For Sale
Aside from the field of blue-tarp-covered tents and the People's Library, one of the most iconic images of Occupy Wall Street's Zuccotti Park encampment was the WikiLeaks truck that kept a near-constant vigil across the street. Now the truck's up for auction. Daily Dot points us to an eBay listing for the truck with a starting price of $7,500, though nobody's actually placed a bid yet. The Kelly Blue Book value for a 1996 Ford F-350 longbed pickup truck with close to 200,000 miles is about $2,500. This one's a 1996 F-350 with 194,672 miles that's been converted to a box truck (it used to be a U-Haul). But more importantly, it's got massive decals on the sides that say WikiLeaks Mobile Information Collection Unit, and it gained fame for its constant presence at Occupy Wall Street as well as its suspicious disappearance into the annals of New York City's vehicle impound system when it got seized the day of Occupy's massive march following its eviction.
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Clark Stoeckley, the truck's owner, wrote in his listing: "Clark's New Year's resolution is to expand the WikiLeaks Truck project and make a fleet around the world. To afford to do so, he must sell the original truck. This is not the end of this conceptual art piece, rather it is merely just the beginning." Stoeckly's including some pretty tantalizing extras, as well: "Satellite Dish, 4 Dummy Security Cameras, Patriotic Bunting, Couch, Toy Piano, and possibly tracking bugs installed by the government." What a deal!
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Update (4:57 p.m. EST): Stoeckley says he's gotten a bid from a WikiLeaks truck fan who has the Twitter handle @AnonDaily. The sale, he says, will finance the creation of a second WikiLeaks truck, which will in turn finance a third, and so on. He bought the truck for $2,900, he says, and put $1,000 into it. The rest of the mark-up comes from its value as a work of art. "I’m an artist and artists sell their work to make more art," Stoeckley told The Atlantic Wire. "So I figured I should sell this one to make more trucks. I figured the first one got enough notoriety ... that it might have some cultural value already built into it."
