Anonymous Created the Modern Hacktivist. It’s Still Figuring Out What That Means.

Decoding the tech world.
Nov. 13 2014 8:45 PM

The Hacktivist’s Dilemma

Can Anonymous’ shadowy prankster activism survive itself?

Photo by David McNew/Reuters
A protester wears a Guy Fawkes mask in solidarity with Occupy Oakland protesters in Los Angeles on Nov. 2, 2011. What’s next for the hacker consortium Anonymous, which uses the mask as a symbol?

Photo by David McNew/Reuters

“Live unknown,” says Epicurus, suggesting one abandon politics, power, and social life to achieve peace of mind. Online, however, it’s become much easier to be involved in all of those things while still living unknown—anonymously. The loose group that goes under the umbrella name Anonymous has made that its explicit goal, with shifting, unpredictable results.

David Auerbach David Auerbach

David Auerbach is a writer and software engineer based in New York. His website is http://davidauerba.ch.

The first association most people have with Anonymous is the Guy Fawkes mask that serves as its unofficial logo—that is, Anonymous is fundamentally about being, well, anonymous. What the collective does beyond that can be difficult to sum up, since it has been in constant flux since its creation. Its members are diverse in age, race, and sexual orientation, but predominantly male. They say they support civil liberties, the rights of the oppressed against the powerful, and the right to dissent. They are capable of noble (if illegal) gestures, like hacking the Westboro Baptist Church and taking down wretched revenge porn king Hunter Moore’s wretched revenge porn site, but also more dubious actions like mass doxings of police officers. Their hacktivism has frequently perplexed the media, generating both fascination and outrage. Journalist Adrian Chen furiously rebuked them Thursday in the Nation, declaring them to be posers wearing the clothes of techno-liberation while ineptly sabotaging the progressive causes they claim to support. Anonymous is so vague and ill-defined that it can be all of these things, and you’d need to have future vision and God’s calculator to figure out whether the net is positive or negative. But it is too simple and too easy to condemn Anonymous outright.

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Anonymous’ amorphous nature may be confounding, but it also allows the collective to adapt, evolve, and discard failed strategies with minimum mess. While it may have particular, pseudonymous voices on Twitter like @YourAnonNews and @AnonyOps, none of them ever claims to be central or essential to the movement. In the words of @YourAnonCentral, speaking to journalist Max Freeman, Anonymous is “an ideology in its own way that manifests itself as a group.” But how does that “group” work? Despite its seemingly formless organization, Anonymous does maintain a loose consistency.

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Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman has been more or less embedded with Anonymous since 2008, about the time the group made its first concerted action by mounting an aggressive campaign against the Church of Scientology (“Project Chanology”). Her new book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy (which Chen reviews in his Nation piece) is a fascinating and sometimes jaw-dropping account of the surreal evolution of the movement, climaxing with the fallout of the devastating revelation that one of Anonymous’ more self-promoting members, Hector “Sabu” Monsegur of splinter group Lulzsec, had been secretly turned by the FBI and was working as an informant.

In Coleman’s words, “Anonymous follows a spirit of humorous deviance, works though diverse technical bodies (such as IRC), is built on an anti-celebrity ethic, and intervenes politically in astoundingly rich and varied ways.” Anonymous was founded on in the spirit of that deviance, which it terms “lulz,” echoing Saul Alinsky’s rule that “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” The Encyclopedia Dramatica page for “lulz” quotes Lucretius on the pleasures of watching a pot boil from safety. Here’s my preferred translation of the passage, by Ronald Melville:

A joy it is, when the strong winds of storm
Stir up the waters of a mighty sea,
To watch from shore the troubles of another

The search for lulz takes many different forms, some productive and some malignant. Coleman told me that “Anonymous has a real susceptibility to mutation.” From today’s vantage, the origins of Anonymous on imageboards like the notorious 4chan (whose /b/ board has been called “the asshole of the Internet”) looks unlikely and perverse. The idea of Anonymous had been around since at least 2003, resulting in disorganized “raids” against the sites of people like white nationalist Hal Turner. At its worst, early Anonymous action took the form of puerile antics like logging onto Finnish Second Life clone Habbo Hotel and forming swastikas to block people’s paths. But in 2008, after the Church of Scientology attempted to remove from the Web all instances of an infamous Tom Cruise video through copyright violation claims and other means, enough Anonymous denizens felt sufficiently offended to organize a long-term campaign against Scientology, more or less moving off of the chaotic chans and onto IRC channels. Project Chanology was the first move into a more sophisticated “hacktivism” that more or less left the chans behind. This shift, according to Coleman, was necessary for real organization. Imageboards like 4chan offer total ephemeral anonymity, making it difficult to verify even if multiple posts are by the same person. With the move onto IRC, users could remain anonymous while using consistent pseudonymous handles.

Courtesy of The Encyclopedia Dramatica.
The beginnings of Anonymous on 4chan’s /b/.

Courtesy of the Encyclopedia Dramatica. (https://images.encyclopediadramatica.se/a/a4/Chanologybegins1.jpg)