Gabriella Coleman on Anonymous
Gabriella Coleman, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Story of Anonymous: Free review copy. Coleman spent a lot of time in IRC chatrooms with various aspects of/members of Anonymous, as well as some in-person interviews with key figures. She clearly really likes them (“for the most part, a force for good in the world”) and wants them to represent an important political/cultural movement, though I think it’s too soon to tell. Her informants comprise a fairly racially and nationally diverse group, though she didn’t meet any cis women (she reports that trans women were “more common than one might imagine” in these hacker groups).
The book is an insightful chronicle of community-building and -destruction in an environment that doesn’t reward persistent identities in the same way as the online communities with which I’m familiar. Anonymous hates BNFs, including people who purport to speak for Anonymous, and will try to shut them out; the highly distributed structure also made BNF-dom difficult. In fact, she suggests, the trolly things these anons did made anonymity the only way to build community, given the potential sanctions. At the same time, anonymity created fractures that could be and were exploited by law enforcement to “turn” a key player, leading to several arrests. (Speculation: like appropriation artists reacted to a culture of increasingly strong copyright/massification by copying exactly, Anonymous participants reacted to a culture of celebrity by casting off identity, at least in public.)
Coleman maintains that we shouldn’t write off many of Anonymous’s political statements as teenage foolery, even though many participants are young; it’s interesting that here youthful rulebreaking gets framed by mainstream culture as extremely dangerous deviance, when other kinds of “boys will be boys” behavior is more tolerated, but that danger framing still denies the political arguments that Anonymous is sometimes making. When approached by law enforcement, many participants did exhibit naivete, youthful or otherwise-they spoke without demanding a lawyer. (Never talk to the cops.) The way that former leaders in Anonymous fell apart wasn’t necessarily natural to the form-the government had a hand in disrupting the groups that were getting things done. Once the disruption started, paranoia ran rampant.
Unlike most countercultural groups that make a big splash, Anonymous wasn’t much at risk of being commodified, since the risk of being targeted for total information disclosure or other harm seemed great to established players. Instead, Anonymous is a rare success story for counter-commodification: taking a Hollywood symbol, the Guy Fawkes mask (yes, I know V for Vendetta was a comic first and I’m sure she does too, but that’s not relevant to her point), and reappropriating it. Coleman does note that Davos-style “thought leaders” did want to figure out what they could appropriate from Anonymous, even if the rewards couldn’t be direct, and writes bitingly about the cottage industry of advice-givers who convert every big news hook into a “formula for corporate success.” This lets corporate executives “feel great about what they do, strengthen corporate cultural machinsery, and make a lot of money off of culture that they don’t have to invest in.”
Coleman has some great stories to tell, including talking to Canadian intelligence and hearing from them that jihadists wanted to replicate Anonymous’s media success-which since the book went to press seems to have happened. I found her hopes for the power of Anonymous to be overclaimed, at least for now; she wants to attribute more goodness to most of these for the lulz types than I think exists, and some of her informants even say they don’t know why they’re doing what they do. Nonetheless, others do engage in DDoS attacks and distribute leaked files in order to make political statements. And others engaged in spirited internal debate about the right political response to poor security with respect to citizens’ information (identity theft vulnerabilities) and too much secrecy with respect to government actions (Wikileaks). There were Anonymous participants who strongly rejected the idea that it was ok to release large chunks of personal information as an object lesson in how badly big corporations secure their data. Others looked for injustices large and small to fight, from Syria to Steubenville; Coleman argues that if vigilante justice is problematic, we should target the lax law enforcement that creates the gap into which vigilantes come. (That has some rhetorical force for underenforcement of rape law, though (1) Anonymous didn’t really ask whether victims wanted its help, and (2) sometimes vigilantes want to suppress conduct-or people-that shouldn’t be suppressed.)
Because of the structure or lack thereof, there’s no final end to disagreements-only, at most, people can leave and form new nodes or backchannels to coordinate their own responses, which they often did. (As it turns out, hackers gossip and have personal feuds just like everybody else.) Anonymous ended up supporting persistent identities because that was the only way people could work together; because participants became friends or even more; and because people like to be known in some way.
Coleman admits she’s romanticizing a bit, even if she distances herself from weev and the harrassment and literal Nazism that were just as much part of his identity as his more-palatable-to-liberals hacking credentials. In the end, she defends the value of “enchantment”-breaking free of ordinary constraints, imagining communities, and taking action to make the world different. Pleasure is political, and politics can be pleasurable, and she points out that we don’t talk about that enough. “By sacrificing the public self, by shunning leaders, and especially by refusing to play the game of self-promotion, Anonymous ensures mystery; this alone is a radical political act, given a social order based on ubiquitous monitoring and the celebration of runaway individualism and selfishness.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.
The book is an insightful chronicle of community-building and -destruction in an environment that doesn’t reward persistent identities in the same way as the online communities with which I’m familiar. Anonymous hates BNFs, including people who purport to speak for Anonymous, and will try to shut them out; the highly distributed structure also made BNF-dom difficult. In fact, she suggests, the trolly things these anons did made anonymity the only way to build community, given the potential sanctions. At the same time, anonymity created fractures that could be and were exploited by law enforcement to “turn” a key player, leading to several arrests. (Speculation: like appropriation artists reacted to a culture of increasingly strong copyright/massification by copying exactly, Anonymous participants reacted to a culture of celebrity by casting off identity, at least in public.)
Coleman maintains that we shouldn’t write off many of Anonymous’s political statements as teenage foolery, even though many participants are young; it’s interesting that here youthful rulebreaking gets framed by mainstream culture as extremely dangerous deviance, when other kinds of “boys will be boys” behavior is more tolerated, but that danger framing still denies the political arguments that Anonymous is sometimes making. When approached by law enforcement, many participants did exhibit naivete, youthful or otherwise-they spoke without demanding a lawyer. (Never talk to the cops.) The way that former leaders in Anonymous fell apart wasn’t necessarily natural to the form-the government had a hand in disrupting the groups that were getting things done. Once the disruption started, paranoia ran rampant.
Unlike most countercultural groups that make a big splash, Anonymous wasn’t much at risk of being commodified, since the risk of being targeted for total information disclosure or other harm seemed great to established players. Instead, Anonymous is a rare success story for counter-commodification: taking a Hollywood symbol, the Guy Fawkes mask (yes, I know V for Vendetta was a comic first and I’m sure she does too, but that’s not relevant to her point), and reappropriating it. Coleman does note that Davos-style “thought leaders” did want to figure out what they could appropriate from Anonymous, even if the rewards couldn’t be direct, and writes bitingly about the cottage industry of advice-givers who convert every big news hook into a “formula for corporate success.” This lets corporate executives “feel great about what they do, strengthen corporate cultural machinsery, and make a lot of money off of culture that they don’t have to invest in.”
Coleman has some great stories to tell, including talking to Canadian intelligence and hearing from them that jihadists wanted to replicate Anonymous’s media success-which since the book went to press seems to have happened. I found her hopes for the power of Anonymous to be overclaimed, at least for now; she wants to attribute more goodness to most of these for the lulz types than I think exists, and some of her informants even say they don’t know why they’re doing what they do. Nonetheless, others do engage in DDoS attacks and distribute leaked files in order to make political statements. And others engaged in spirited internal debate about the right political response to poor security with respect to citizens’ information (identity theft vulnerabilities) and too much secrecy with respect to government actions (Wikileaks). There were Anonymous participants who strongly rejected the idea that it was ok to release large chunks of personal information as an object lesson in how badly big corporations secure their data. Others looked for injustices large and small to fight, from Syria to Steubenville; Coleman argues that if vigilante justice is problematic, we should target the lax law enforcement that creates the gap into which vigilantes come. (That has some rhetorical force for underenforcement of rape law, though (1) Anonymous didn’t really ask whether victims wanted its help, and (2) sometimes vigilantes want to suppress conduct-or people-that shouldn’t be suppressed.)
Because of the structure or lack thereof, there’s no final end to disagreements-only, at most, people can leave and form new nodes or backchannels to coordinate their own responses, which they often did. (As it turns out, hackers gossip and have personal feuds just like everybody else.) Anonymous ended up supporting persistent identities because that was the only way people could work together; because participants became friends or even more; and because people like to be known in some way.
Coleman admits she’s romanticizing a bit, even if she distances herself from weev and the harrassment and literal Nazism that were just as much part of his identity as his more-palatable-to-liberals hacking credentials. In the end, she defends the value of “enchantment”-breaking free of ordinary constraints, imagining communities, and taking action to make the world different. Pleasure is political, and politics can be pleasurable, and she points out that we don’t talk about that enough. “By sacrificing the public self, by shunning leaders, and especially by refusing to play the game of self-promotion, Anonymous ensures mystery; this alone is a radical political act, given a social order based on ubiquitous monitoring and the celebration of runaway individualism and selfishness.”
comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.