The Truth About Anonymous’s Activism
November 17, 2014 7:32 AM Subscribe
A look behind the mask reveals a naïve techno-utopianism.
Actually, the article ends with a pretty interesting categorizing, seeing Anon as the latest wave of Silicon Valley techno-utopianism. Which also accounts for the piece's tendentiousness: it's eagerly taking a side in a competition between two groups competing to be the vanguard of radical progressivism. On one side, the academic Left establishment, of which The Nation is very much a part: Marxist, upper-class but expressing solidarity with the urban working class, more female, making a living in universities and therefore prizing ideological bona fides and historical research. On the other side, the online Left: anarchist, middle class but expressing solidarity with the rural working class, more male, making a living in offices and therefore prizing efficiency and quantifiable results.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 8:13 AM on November 17, 2014 [16 favorites]
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 8:13 AM on November 17, 2014 [16 favorites]
Oh, this is quite good. I've been really nonplussed to see the Coleman book so warmly embraced by the leftish press despite all the issues Chen highlights — and it's a good point he makes, the substitution of a technophilic enthrallment with their means for much analysis at all of the group's ends, laudable or not. It's a pity that he (or someone) hasn't done that much of a better job at an actual analysis of the ideological drivers of the lulz — I had hoped the book would really break down the weird incoherent stew of teenaged right-libertarianism and tech-supremacy and anarchist individualism and misogyny and proto-fascist mob mentality that drives the Anon worldview, but that kind of critical analysis is a harder task than the relatively facile "subversion" take on the techie means of organizing, and much less rewarded by the world at large.
posted by RogerB at 8:29 AM on November 17, 2014 [7 favorites]
posted by RogerB at 8:29 AM on November 17, 2014 [7 favorites]
MASS MOVEMENT IS "NAIVE"
posted by grobstein at 8:36 AM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
posted by grobstein at 8:36 AM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
So happy to see The Nation Left pushing the well-worn and familiar 'outside agitators' theme. I was starting to think I'd never have the pleasure of hearing that one again!
posted by still bill at 8:42 AM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by still bill at 8:42 AM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
As somebody who reads a lot of history of the 1960s, the left embrace of Anonymous reminds me a little too much of the fascination with channeling the archetypal "bad boy" in the name of revolution that drove the 1960s New Left/counterculture fascination with the Hell's Angels and the Manson Family.
posted by jonp72 at 8:48 AM on November 17, 2014 [13 favorites]
posted by jonp72 at 8:48 AM on November 17, 2014 [13 favorites]
MASS MOVEMENT IS "NAIVE"
I think, given Chen's conclusion, that the poorly phrased subhead is really meant to refer to Coleman's take, not the "movement" itself.
So happy to see The Nation Left pushing the well-worn and familiar 'outside agitators' theme.
Yeah, the Ferguson stuff in this piece is pretty incoherent and you're right that this is basically the shitty upshot of all Chen's talk of cooptation. But there is a real problem of protest politics and organizing there, it's just one that neither Chen and his anti-"outsider" Twitter-liberal circles nor Coleman and her pro-flash-mob "subversive" take quite know how to talk about. That's really one of the central things that it would have been really nice to think about in a take on what Anonymous's politics either are or could be: how can their kind of organizing best be used to support the more familiar kinds of protest tactic, and when/why will they come in conflict?
posted by RogerB at 8:53 AM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
I think, given Chen's conclusion, that the poorly phrased subhead is really meant to refer to Coleman's take, not the "movement" itself.
So happy to see The Nation Left pushing the well-worn and familiar 'outside agitators' theme.
Yeah, the Ferguson stuff in this piece is pretty incoherent and you're right that this is basically the shitty upshot of all Chen's talk of cooptation. But there is a real problem of protest politics and organizing there, it's just one that neither Chen and his anti-"outsider" Twitter-liberal circles nor Coleman and her pro-flash-mob "subversive" take quite know how to talk about. That's really one of the central things that it would have been really nice to think about in a take on what Anonymous's politics either are or could be: how can their kind of organizing best be used to support the more familiar kinds of protest tactic, and when/why will they come in conflict?
posted by RogerB at 8:53 AM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
RogerB: absolutely. This could have been a much more meaningful piece. As it stands, I don't find much here in terms of a coherent critique of Anonymous that goes beyond the obvious issues of misogyny and 'lulz'-seeking trolling (apart from the bits on that weev guy, but that doesn't say much about the broader anonymous movement, I don't think).
posted by still bill at 9:03 AM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by still bill at 9:03 AM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
On the other side, the online Left: anarchist, middle class but expressing solidarity with the rural working class, more male, making a living in offices and therefore prizing efficiency and quantifiable results.
Much of the article makes a point of showing how few and thin are the "quantifiable" results of Anonymous's actions to date. Nor is the boundary between the "online" Left and the "academic" Left all that clear; tumblr activism, for instance, fits comfortably within your characterization of the "academic" left, but it's pretty clearly as much an online as an academic phenomenon.
More broadly, I'd hoped we were a decade and change past lazy valorizations of "the transgressive" as a good in itself. I suppose I should've known better.
So happy to see The Nation Left pushing the well-worn and familiar 'outside agitators' theme.
True or not, this doesn't make Anonymous the better option by default. They do indeed have a clear and troubling history of terrifying harassment and cyberbullying, petty criminality, and doxxing the wrong people. Being aggressive int he wrong direction is only efficacy if you're too enamored of the joys of being Chaotic Stupid to waste time thinking about what you're effective *at* and *why*.
Look, there are real problems with the article, such as the easy conflation of Anonymous with misogynist 'gaters, for example, but at the same time Coleman's book doesn't sound terrifically good either. Her efforts to defend weev's neo-Nazi sentiments as if the only real objection to them is that they're not "progressive transgressivism" reflects something between naïveté and simple incompetence as a critic. (Coleman's rhetoric actually seems like a very good example of the way certain elements of the academic Left can be ineffective and misguided.) Nor do I find the particular genealogy of Anonymous and Silicon Valley culture especially convincing, though I do think there's an analysis worth pursuing about their links and overlaps.
Myself, I'm broadly dubious about the efficacy of most forms of "online activism" and of political mobilizations of memetic counterculture in general. Almost by definition, its efficacious for attracting attention and directing derision, but utterly terrible for proposing coherent responses or solutions. It's not a terribly self-correcting or reflective mechanism, either.
Most of it -- and I include Tumblr wars and hashtag activism and Anonymous -- never gets very far offline and, in one of the more convincing arguments made in the article, turns potentially more effective modes of protest and response into media sideshows. It's not as if Scientology collapsed after Operation Chanology, and nothing seems to have changed in Ferguson, either. More than that, I'm not convinced that the techno-libertarian impulse is particularly resistant to the deeper problems that give rise to the obvious ones. It's the activism of the already comfortable, aimed mostly at soft targets that happen across its field of view. It's almost never capable of examining itself for undeserved entitlement.
posted by kewb at 9:05 AM on November 17, 2014 [9 favorites]
Much of the article makes a point of showing how few and thin are the "quantifiable" results of Anonymous's actions to date. Nor is the boundary between the "online" Left and the "academic" Left all that clear; tumblr activism, for instance, fits comfortably within your characterization of the "academic" left, but it's pretty clearly as much an online as an academic phenomenon.
More broadly, I'd hoped we were a decade and change past lazy valorizations of "the transgressive" as a good in itself. I suppose I should've known better.
So happy to see The Nation Left pushing the well-worn and familiar 'outside agitators' theme.
True or not, this doesn't make Anonymous the better option by default. They do indeed have a clear and troubling history of terrifying harassment and cyberbullying, petty criminality, and doxxing the wrong people. Being aggressive int he wrong direction is only efficacy if you're too enamored of the joys of being Chaotic Stupid to waste time thinking about what you're effective *at* and *why*.
Look, there are real problems with the article, such as the easy conflation of Anonymous with misogynist 'gaters, for example, but at the same time Coleman's book doesn't sound terrifically good either. Her efforts to defend weev's neo-Nazi sentiments as if the only real objection to them is that they're not "progressive transgressivism" reflects something between naïveté and simple incompetence as a critic. (Coleman's rhetoric actually seems like a very good example of the way certain elements of the academic Left can be ineffective and misguided.) Nor do I find the particular genealogy of Anonymous and Silicon Valley culture especially convincing, though I do think there's an analysis worth pursuing about their links and overlaps.
Myself, I'm broadly dubious about the efficacy of most forms of "online activism" and of political mobilizations of memetic counterculture in general. Almost by definition, its efficacious for attracting attention and directing derision, but utterly terrible for proposing coherent responses or solutions. It's not a terribly self-correcting or reflective mechanism, either.
Most of it -- and I include Tumblr wars and hashtag activism and Anonymous -- never gets very far offline and, in one of the more convincing arguments made in the article, turns potentially more effective modes of protest and response into media sideshows. It's not as if Scientology collapsed after Operation Chanology, and nothing seems to have changed in Ferguson, either. More than that, I'm not convinced that the techno-libertarian impulse is particularly resistant to the deeper problems that give rise to the obvious ones. It's the activism of the already comfortable, aimed mostly at soft targets that happen across its field of view. It's almost never capable of examining itself for undeserved entitlement.
posted by kewb at 9:05 AM on November 17, 2014 [9 favorites]
how can their kind of organizing best be used to support the more familiar kinds of protest tactic,
I dunno, it seems like a question that's been haunting the Left since the 60s is whether "the more familiar kinds of protest tactic" is itself ineffective or even counter-productive. There are times when a lot of Left activism seems like a cargo cult reprise of the civil rights movement, repeating the visually obvious gestures without understanding why they worked once.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 9:09 AM on November 17, 2014 [16 favorites]
I dunno, it seems like a question that's been haunting the Left since the 60s is whether "the more familiar kinds of protest tactic" is itself ineffective or even counter-productive. There are times when a lot of Left activism seems like a cargo cult reprise of the civil rights movement, repeating the visually obvious gestures without understanding why they worked once.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 9:09 AM on November 17, 2014 [16 favorites]
That'll teach me to post before updating...
Much of the article makes a point of showing how few and thin are the "quantifiable" results of Anonymous's actions to date.
Steubenville was a pretty big one, though. Beats most of the more traditional activist protests of the last few years.
Nor is the boundary between the "online" Left and the "academic" Left all that clear; tumblr activism, for instance, fits comfortably within your characterization of the "academic" left, but it's pretty clearly as much an online as an academic phenomenon.
Yeah, tumblr/twitter activism definitely blurs those categories.
More broadly, I'd hoped we were a decade and change past lazy valorizations of "the transgressive" as a good in itself. I suppose I should've known better.
That's begging the question, I think, or perhaps grabbing yardage you didn't actually win. There are a lot theorists, thinkers, and just, like, people who think that there's value in transgressing repressive social rules, to some degree, even when the thing being repressed is destructive or dangerous. I don't know that Dostoyevsky's Underground Man is necessarily my guru, but I see his point.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 9:13 AM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
Much of the article makes a point of showing how few and thin are the "quantifiable" results of Anonymous's actions to date.
Steubenville was a pretty big one, though. Beats most of the more traditional activist protests of the last few years.
Nor is the boundary between the "online" Left and the "academic" Left all that clear; tumblr activism, for instance, fits comfortably within your characterization of the "academic" left, but it's pretty clearly as much an online as an academic phenomenon.
Yeah, tumblr/twitter activism definitely blurs those categories.
More broadly, I'd hoped we were a decade and change past lazy valorizations of "the transgressive" as a good in itself. I suppose I should've known better.
That's begging the question, I think, or perhaps grabbing yardage you didn't actually win. There are a lot theorists, thinkers, and just, like, people who think that there's value in transgressing repressive social rules, to some degree, even when the thing being repressed is destructive or dangerous. I don't know that Dostoyevsky's Underground Man is necessarily my guru, but I see his point.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 9:13 AM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
there are real problems with the article, such as the easy conflation of Anonymous with misogynist 'gaters
Given that both groups have roots in 4chan, I don't know if I would call it "conflation."
posted by jonp72 at 9:25 AM on November 17, 2014
Given that both groups have roots in 4chan, I don't know if I would call it "conflation."
posted by jonp72 at 9:25 AM on November 17, 2014
I had to stop reading at " the hacktivist collective Anonymous" as Anonymous is a metagroup. It's a shared identity like "Luther Blissett" and anybody can be Anonymous if they call themselves Anonymous.
posted by I-baLL at 9:26 AM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by I-baLL at 9:26 AM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
and anybody can be Anonymous if they call themselves Anonymous.
Isn't that part of the problem? Any group that operates that like that would be sitting ducks for infiltrators, provocateurs, and "false flag" operations, which actually seems to be the case with Anonymous.
posted by jonp72 at 9:28 AM on November 17, 2014
Isn't that part of the problem? Any group that operates that like that would be sitting ducks for infiltrators, provocateurs, and "false flag" operations, which actually seems to be the case with Anonymous.
posted by jonp72 at 9:28 AM on November 17, 2014
"Any group that operates that like that"
It's not a group.
posted by I-baLL at 9:30 AM on November 17, 2014
It's not a group.
posted by I-baLL at 9:30 AM on November 17, 2014
I think anon is good at combatting specific types of injustices, primarily by pointing out the absurdities of lunatics. Its not going to bring about legislative change or get in the way of an oil pipeline.
I read this last week, and while I believe in a multiplicity of tactics, I also feel that communities need to be heard when activists are coming in to help with their struggles. From what I heard there were very real instances of out of town activists acting 'on behalf' of Ferguson residents in ways they were vocally opposed to. That's not okay because it reeks of "I'm the expert protester and know what your community knows better than you." Magnify that sentiment with class and race differences and I have a hard time saying supporting them.
posted by lownote at 9:36 AM on November 17, 2014
I read this last week, and while I believe in a multiplicity of tactics, I also feel that communities need to be heard when activists are coming in to help with their struggles. From what I heard there were very real instances of out of town activists acting 'on behalf' of Ferguson residents in ways they were vocally opposed to. That's not okay because it reeks of "I'm the expert protester and know what your community knows better than you." Magnify that sentiment with class and race differences and I have a hard time saying supporting them.
posted by lownote at 9:36 AM on November 17, 2014
such as the easy conflation of Anonymous with misogynist 'gaters
They used the same tools. Manifestos, doxxing, chans to organize. From the article:
The ultimate political significance of Anonymous lies instead in the tools and strategies it uses: hacking, video editing, identity-masking software, decentralized organization and, of course, lulz. These “weapons of the geek,” as Coleman calls them, are “a modality of politics exercised by a class of privileged and visible actors who often lie at the center of economic life.”
How is gamergate not using this playbook? I reminded of popehat's article on gamergate:
The consequence of gleefully piling onto some douchebag is that you normalize and model gleefully piling on someone you find offensive. The consequence of abandoning proportionality is that someday some segment of the internet may wig out and lose all proportionality about you or someone you care about. Recognize cultural cause and effect.
Going back to that question Is transgression and subversion only ok if progressive?. Are we only cool with online doxxing and hacking if we don't like the people who it happens to? Do we have acceptable standards of behavior, or acceptable targets?
posted by zabuni at 9:38 AM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
They used the same tools. Manifestos, doxxing, chans to organize. From the article:
The ultimate political significance of Anonymous lies instead in the tools and strategies it uses: hacking, video editing, identity-masking software, decentralized organization and, of course, lulz. These “weapons of the geek,” as Coleman calls them, are “a modality of politics exercised by a class of privileged and visible actors who often lie at the center of economic life.”
How is gamergate not using this playbook? I reminded of popehat's article on gamergate:
The consequence of gleefully piling onto some douchebag is that you normalize and model gleefully piling on someone you find offensive. The consequence of abandoning proportionality is that someday some segment of the internet may wig out and lose all proportionality about you or someone you care about. Recognize cultural cause and effect.
Going back to that question Is transgression and subversion only ok if progressive?. Are we only cool with online doxxing and hacking if we don't like the people who it happens to? Do we have acceptable standards of behavior, or acceptable targets?
posted by zabuni at 9:38 AM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]
I had to stop reading at " the hacktivist collective Anonymous"
Then you won't make it past page 1 of the book — "collective" is Coleman's word, not Chen's. And I just took a quick look back through the book to see if I'd misremembered or missed something, but still couldn't find any real argument for the choice of term apart from its apparently pleasing anarchist-ish connotations.
posted by RogerB at 9:38 AM on November 17, 2014
Then you won't make it past page 1 of the book — "collective" is Coleman's word, not Chen's. And I just took a quick look back through the book to see if I'd misremembered or missed something, but still couldn't find any real argument for the choice of term apart from its apparently pleasing anarchist-ish connotations.
posted by RogerB at 9:38 AM on November 17, 2014
That's begging the question, I think, or perhaps grabbing yardage you didn't actually win. There are a lot theorists, thinkers, and just, like, people who think that there's value in transgressing repressive social rules, to some degree, even when the thing being repressed is destructive or dangerous.
I could say the same about your use the term "repressive." You can characterize a statement such as "don't be a white supremacist/anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist" as a "repressive" social rule, but white supremacism and anti-Semitic conspiracism are themselves bodies of extraordinarily oppressive rules, some of which are even reflected other repressive rules laid down by dominant ideology.
For that matter, both of them involve plenty of standard repression as well, when examined. Is neo-Nazism really a transgressive thought or discourse subject to a repressive rule, or is it simply a particular, rightfully excoriated exemplar of a supremely repressive ideological formation with much deeper roots? And if the answer is "both," then what is this account of "the transgressive" but an amoral, apolitical concept of little value in political and ethical argument?
Most thinkers work through that stuff carefully, asI imagine you do as well, but I'd say that such work produces something other than "the lazy valorization of transgression as a good in itself." The quoted material from Coleman doesn't come across that way; it comes across as the use of an aging buzzword as a substitute for the critical thought meant to be represented in shorthand by a carefully deployed critical term.
"Any group that operates that like that"
It's not a group.
But this means that Coleman's claim that Anonymous's less salutary actions are the result of "false flag" operations is equally incoherent. Really, it means that it's a bit pointless to worry about whether or not Anonymous is helpful or harmful, on one side or another, because the answer will always be ambivalent at best.
But then we can step back, and note that while anyone *could* call themselves "Luther Blissett" or "Anonymous," not everyone does. (In fact, relatively few people do.) And then we might ask what is common to those who do choose to adopt the name.
posted by kewb at 9:40 AM on November 17, 2014 [7 favorites]
I could say the same about your use the term "repressive." You can characterize a statement such as "don't be a white supremacist/anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist" as a "repressive" social rule, but white supremacism and anti-Semitic conspiracism are themselves bodies of extraordinarily oppressive rules, some of which are even reflected other repressive rules laid down by dominant ideology.
For that matter, both of them involve plenty of standard repression as well, when examined. Is neo-Nazism really a transgressive thought or discourse subject to a repressive rule, or is it simply a particular, rightfully excoriated exemplar of a supremely repressive ideological formation with much deeper roots? And if the answer is "both," then what is this account of "the transgressive" but an amoral, apolitical concept of little value in political and ethical argument?
Most thinkers work through that stuff carefully, asI imagine you do as well, but I'd say that such work produces something other than "the lazy valorization of transgression as a good in itself." The quoted material from Coleman doesn't come across that way; it comes across as the use of an aging buzzword as a substitute for the critical thought meant to be represented in shorthand by a carefully deployed critical term.
"Any group that operates that like that"
It's not a group.
But this means that Coleman's claim that Anonymous's less salutary actions are the result of "false flag" operations is equally incoherent. Really, it means that it's a bit pointless to worry about whether or not Anonymous is helpful or harmful, on one side or another, because the answer will always be ambivalent at best.
But then we can step back, and note that while anyone *could* call themselves "Luther Blissett" or "Anonymous," not everyone does. (In fact, relatively few people do.) And then we might ask what is common to those who do choose to adopt the name.
posted by kewb at 9:40 AM on November 17, 2014 [7 favorites]
anonymous was killed by the 'sabu' case... which incidentally illustrates just how easily the police can control "underground" radical groups. but this... this is a book review.
media vulture vs. media vulture fighting over a corpse.
posted by ennui.bz at 9:50 AM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
media vulture vs. media vulture fighting over a corpse.
posted by ennui.bz at 9:50 AM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
" Really, it means that it's a bit pointless to worry about whether or not Anonymous is helpful or harmful, on one side or another, because the answer will always be ambivalent at best."
Yup, I wholeheartedly agree.
"But then we can step back, and note that while anyone *could* call themselves "Luther Blissett" or "Anonymous," not everyone does. (In fact, relatively few people do.) And then we might ask what is common to those who do choose to adopt the name."
Pretty much boils down to awareness of the identity and computer access. And a sense of humour or some other understanding of why the idea of a shared identity exists. Oh, and a need or a desire to use it.
posted by I-baLL at 9:51 AM on November 17, 2014
Yup, I wholeheartedly agree.
"But then we can step back, and note that while anyone *could* call themselves "Luther Blissett" or "Anonymous," not everyone does. (In fact, relatively few people do.) And then we might ask what is common to those who do choose to adopt the name."
Pretty much boils down to awareness of the identity and computer access. And a sense of humour or some other understanding of why the idea of a shared identity exists. Oh, and a need or a desire to use it.
posted by I-baLL at 9:51 AM on November 17, 2014
Adrian Chen is awesome.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:14 AM on November 17, 2014
posted by Potomac Avenue at 10:14 AM on November 17, 2014
...the idea of a shared identity exists.
Wait, you mean Anonymous is a shared unidentity?
posted by Mental Wimp at 10:31 AM on November 17, 2014
Wait, you mean Anonymous is a shared unidentity?
posted by Mental Wimp at 10:31 AM on November 17, 2014
> Pretty much boils down to awareness of the identity and computer access. And a sense of humour or some other understanding of why the idea of a shared identity exists. Oh, and a need or a desire to use it.
You can't say "It's not a group" and then start talking about shared identities and whatnot. I mean—you can, but I'll post a response like this. But really, I agree with your points here.
Anonymous plays a ridiculous shell game between how the members self-identify and how the media portrays them. It's really just anyone who visits a highly-trafficked message board, where someone says "hey, let's go do This Thing" and a subset of people join in at various points of action. Instead of trying to profile any individual operation, it would be easier to just profile 4chan (and one of the first comments in this thread is a pretty good shot, already).
To only remember their involvement in Chanology and the Arab Spring is looking at Anonymous through the rosiest of rose-tinted goggles, though; so, I'm glad when a wild takedown article like this appears. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but instead of media vulturing, I see it as an attempt to educate and inoculate against misinterpretations of this whole Anonymous thing.
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 10:46 AM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
You can't say "It's not a group" and then start talking about shared identities and whatnot. I mean—you can, but I'll post a response like this. But really, I agree with your points here.
Anonymous plays a ridiculous shell game between how the members self-identify and how the media portrays them. It's really just anyone who visits a highly-trafficked message board, where someone says "hey, let's go do This Thing" and a subset of people join in at various points of action. Instead of trying to profile any individual operation, it would be easier to just profile 4chan (and one of the first comments in this thread is a pretty good shot, already).
To only remember their involvement in Chanology and the Arab Spring is looking at Anonymous through the rosiest of rose-tinted goggles, though; so, I'm glad when a wild takedown article like this appears. Maybe I'm too optimistic, but instead of media vulturing, I see it as an attempt to educate and inoculate against misinterpretations of this whole Anonymous thing.
posted by Johann Georg Faust at 10:46 AM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
"You can't say "It's not a group" and then start talking about shared identities and whatnot."
Wait, why not?
"Anonymous plays a ridiculous shell game between how the members self-identify and how the media portrays them."
Anonymous has no "members". I can be Anonymous, you can be Anonymous. The only requirement to being Anonymous is calling yourself Anonymous. Why it's a metagroup is because if I like what you say under the name "Anonymous" I can join in and help you out also under the name "Anonymous" or I can do completely opposite actions also under the name "Anonymous". It's like "John Doe". "John Doe" doesn't have members. You just call yourself "John Doe" and there you are.
posted by I-baLL at 10:54 AM on November 17, 2014
Wait, why not?
"Anonymous plays a ridiculous shell game between how the members self-identify and how the media portrays them."
Anonymous has no "members". I can be Anonymous, you can be Anonymous. The only requirement to being Anonymous is calling yourself Anonymous. Why it's a metagroup is because if I like what you say under the name "Anonymous" I can join in and help you out also under the name "Anonymous" or I can do completely opposite actions also under the name "Anonymous". It's like "John Doe". "John Doe" doesn't have members. You just call yourself "John Doe" and there you are.
posted by I-baLL at 10:54 AM on November 17, 2014
As a group name is associated with public acts, though, the group gets an identity narrated *for* it, and that narrated or imposed identity will affect people's choices to adopt of not adopt it. So the reasons for taking up the banner of "Anonymous" instead of some other shared pseudonym narrow from the very broad criteria noted by I-baLL above.
There are reasons "Luther Blissett" was used almost entirely for vaguely lefty media hoaxes aimed at the art, media, and literary worlds, and never became, say, the pseudonym of choice for a rightist anti-immigrant movement or engaged in hacking attacks a la "Anonymous." (Even the choice of name is speculated to be an anti-right-wing joke, which helps explain it.)
And there are reasons "Anonymous" tends to be techno-libertarian in outlook, why it's most famous icon is that of an English-language comic-book antihero from a popular film adaptation, and why by most accounts the majority of the most people who take on the pseudonym are white men in a certain age range. As "Anonymous" is attached to activities, it becomes less and less an amorphous, contingent label and more and more a consistent pseudonym, a character with traits more than a freely floating name.
posted by kewb at 11:02 AM on November 17, 2014
There are reasons "Luther Blissett" was used almost entirely for vaguely lefty media hoaxes aimed at the art, media, and literary worlds, and never became, say, the pseudonym of choice for a rightist anti-immigrant movement or engaged in hacking attacks a la "Anonymous." (Even the choice of name is speculated to be an anti-right-wing joke, which helps explain it.)
And there are reasons "Anonymous" tends to be techno-libertarian in outlook, why it's most famous icon is that of an English-language comic-book antihero from a popular film adaptation, and why by most accounts the majority of the most people who take on the pseudonym are white men in a certain age range. As "Anonymous" is attached to activities, it becomes less and less an amorphous, contingent label and more and more a consistent pseudonym, a character with traits more than a freely floating name.
posted by kewb at 11:02 AM on November 17, 2014
It's not a group.
Seriously, if you're having angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin epistemological discussions about whether your group is really a group, you're probably wasting time that could be spent on something productive.
posted by jonp72 at 11:03 AM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
Seriously, if you're having angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin epistemological discussions about whether your group is really a group, you're probably wasting time that could be spent on something productive.
posted by jonp72 at 11:03 AM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
it's most famous icon is that of an English-language comic-book antihero from a popular film adaptation
An icon of a terroristic religiously authoritarian monarchist no less.
posted by jonp72 at 11:05 AM on November 17, 2014 [4 favorites]
An icon of a terroristic religiously authoritarian monarchist no less.
posted by jonp72 at 11:05 AM on November 17, 2014 [4 favorites]
The ultimate political significance of Anonymous lies instead in the tools and strategies it uses: hacking, video editing, identity-masking software, decentralized organization and, of course, lulz.This is a good point; part of why Anonymous so deeply penetrated the popular imagination is that we can read into them a story about the internet fulfilling a promise that what wins in the brave new online is pluck, skill, and righteous irreverence for the old order. But in the (totally fair) attempt to draw a line between Anon and the story of "a great geek political awakening, along with Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks, the Pirate Party and Debian programmers," I think Chen's downplaying an equally significant aspect of Anon.
...
By fetishizing the “weapons of the geek,” Coleman belies her radically techno-utopian belief—which colors the entire book but is never stated outright—that geeks offer the way to a better world through technological mastery. Anonymous is a political vanguard because it is the purest, most potent expression of geek power, able to slice through the Gordian knot of state repression and grueling organizing conditions that so often tie down activists.
I mean, 4chan is not a hacker collective (although they know a guy who knows a guy). Even more than harassment, doxxing, riffing, and, yeah, breaking into social media accounts, there's one thing that 4chan is really good at: mythologizing 4chan.
Maybe it's unfair at this point to yolk Anonymous and 4chan (I doubt it), but Anon's existence and success was built almost entirely as an extension of what 4chan had been doing for years. The often surreal ingroup references, the attempt to confuse or overwhelm targets, the insistence that they were a boundless entity, the melodrama and frisson, were all pretty bog standard 4chan. Part of the site culture is iterative drafts and spamming and making things happen without a visible actor or actors.
Chanology was the first big IRL raid, and it was for great justice, I guess, but it came in the context of 4chan loudly telling everyone that it was the final boss of the internet, the Mos Eisley, a churning pit of trolls and vengeful hikkomori who all knew how to work the internet better than everyone else, and doing some horrible things to real people. And, on the other hand, producing or getting credit for a huge swath of anglophone internet culture at the time. Combine that with an inscrutability to newcomers, and 4chan told a story about 4chan that was super effective. The participants in the chanology raids weren't drawing on hacker expertise, they were raiding Scientology just like 4chan used to raid Habbo.
Really, without a Habbo would there have been a KYAnonymous?
Basically, Chen has a lot of great points in the OP, but aside from the technical aspect of Anon in popular imagination and what it means ideologically, there's also the fact that Anonymous grew out of a subculture that wasn't just technical; a ton of what came from 4chan is soft skills like organizing and messaging and leveraging sometimes tiny gaps in understanding to tell a story that others will hear, expand and repeat.
posted by postcommunism at 11:10 AM on November 17, 2014 [5 favorites]
By which I mean I think Anonymous as it/they are conceived in popular imagination is perhaps more of a reflection of the strain of techno-utopianism he's talking about than they are active participants or even the flipside of the coin.
posted by postcommunism at 11:40 AM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
Anonymous is Silicon Valley’s unwitting shock troops, a live demo of the Internet’s power to transform our world. When Anons call for revolution, they’re calling for a better world. But the shallowness of their politics and their uncritical embrace of technology means this energy is easily channeled into Silicon Valley’s parody of revolution: a techno-liberation from the doldrums of day jobs with health insurance and steady benefits, in favor of the radical freedom and flexibility to pilot an Uber under contract.I'm with him on the first sentence; shaky at the end.
posted by postcommunism at 11:40 AM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
Agreed, postcommunism. I'll go so far as to give him the first 2 sentences of the quoted passage. I'm not as sure as Chen seems to be, though, that the tech-driven methods of Anonymous' activism justify the conflation of its 'ideology' (which is awfully tough to pin down, really) with that of Silicon Valley style techno-utopianism/libertarianism.
posted by still bill at 11:51 AM on November 17, 2014
posted by still bill at 11:51 AM on November 17, 2014
And, just because it seems relevant: I browsed the Reddit thread on Anonymous' doxxing of Klan members making threats in Ferguson just now, and it was a real mindfuck. The Reddit user base, which I would generally consider reflective of equal parts Anonymous' ideological vagary and genuine Silicon Valley techno-utopian meritocracy BS (with the knee-jerk misogyny and racism that cling to both), seemed to strongly support the doxxed Klansmen on some sort of misinformed constitutionalist grounds. So yeah, as if Anonymous' itself wasn't inscrutable enough, that just threw a few more questions into the mix for me about who, exactly, is who.
posted by still bill at 11:56 AM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
posted by still bill at 11:56 AM on November 17, 2014 [2 favorites]
If I'm going to do anything anonymously, it will NOT be as "a part of Anonymous", which, by becoming a Label, has become a self-oxymoron.
I consider myself a Groucho Marxist, with one of his greatest quotes being "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." So any public rallies I attend in disguise, yeah, I'll be wearing Groucho Glasses.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:02 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
I consider myself a Groucho Marxist, with one of his greatest quotes being "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." So any public rallies I attend in disguise, yeah, I'll be wearing Groucho Glasses.
posted by oneswellfoop at 2:02 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
Seriously, if you're having angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin epistemological discussions about whether your group is really a group, you're probably wasting time that could be spent on something productive.
If they were doing something productive, they wouldn't be Anonymous now, would they.
Frankly, the only lasting result of Anonymous is giving groups like GamerGate the tools they need to make women in tech, feminists and other progressive's lives living hell. There's your techno-utpianism for ya.
posted by happyroach at 2:26 PM on November 17, 2014
If they were doing something productive, they wouldn't be Anonymous now, would they.
Frankly, the only lasting result of Anonymous is giving groups like GamerGate the tools they need to make women in tech, feminists and other progressive's lives living hell. There's your techno-utpianism for ya.
posted by happyroach at 2:26 PM on November 17, 2014
You might be right, happyroach. And I'm no fan of the misogyny and other horrible elements of the culture that Anonymous emerged from (or, perhaps more accurately, is still a part of). I do know, though, that a few of their 'ops' have had a bigger impact than your comment suggests. Stuebenville, for example, seems to have really gained traction only after Anonymous' involvement. There are also a number of young Egyptian and Tunisian organizers who give lots of credit to Anonymous (whatever that even means, arrrgh the incoherency of this group is proving very frustrating in talking about them/it/whatever!) for assisting in setting up and teaching ways to communicate safely during intensely repressive moments in both occupations.
posted by still bill at 2:43 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by still bill at 2:43 PM on November 17, 2014 [1 favorite]
The left has been neutered in this country. The academic left is... Just... Adorable.
Anonymous has done a lot of actual boots on the ground work, their homelessness campaign #opsafewinter being one of them.
Meanwhile, groups like King County's Coalition to end Homelessness are going to end Homelessness in a decade!
I know where I'm placing my bets.
The left in the US has been splintered, and it's kind of sad, but that's what you have.
posted by formless at 5:47 PM on November 18, 2014 [1 favorite]
Anonymous has done a lot of actual boots on the ground work, their homelessness campaign #opsafewinter being one of them.
Meanwhile, groups like King County's Coalition to end Homelessness are going to end Homelessness in a decade!
I know where I'm placing my bets.
The left in the US has been splintered, and it's kind of sad, but that's what you have.
posted by formless at 5:47 PM on November 18, 2014 [1 favorite]
The persecution of Barrett Brown - and how to fight it by Glenn Greenwald
But the work central to his prosecution began in 2009, when Brown created Project PM, "dedicated to investigating private government contractors working in the secretive fields of cybersecurity, intelligence and surveillance."posted by jeffburdges at 12:20 PM on December 8, 2014
The Latest Example Of Chicago Police Allegedly Behaving Badly Comes Courtesy of Anonymous, Privacy Activists
posted by homunculus at 7:12 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]
posted by homunculus at 7:12 PM on December 8, 2014 [1 favorite]
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...is a pretty important question for academic rhetoric.
posted by ThatFuzzyBastard at 8:04 AM on November 17, 2014 [3 favorites]