Anonymous

A 'subterranean man' [is] at work, one who tunnels and mines and undermines. As though he perhaps desires this prolonged obscurity, desires to be incomprehensible, concealed, enigmatic, because he knows what he will thereby also acquire: his own morning, his own redemption, his own daybreak? Friedrich Nietzsche

Forthcoming in the Glossary of Network Ecologies. Carolin Wiedemann & Soenke Zehle, eds. Theory on Demand. Amsterdam, NL: Institute of Network Cultures. April 2012

Anonymousa name taken by different individuals and groups to organize collective actionoften defies expectations and thus easy definition. It is a cluster of ideas and ideals adopted by various, at times unconnected, hackers, technologists, activists, geeks, and human rights activists, and is grounded in the concept of anonymity. It is a banner for online political campaigns and street demonstrations, actions ranging from fearsome pranks to hacking for sensitive information to human rights technological support for revolutionaries in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Just as a twist of a kaleidoscope conjures a new, unexpected colorful pattern, so too does the pattern behind Anonymous morph easily, its axis shifted by world events, a new node hatching, or conflicts within and between networks. Changes to its constitution and its amplitude are difficult to predict, and frustrate the sociological imperative for clarity and comprehensiveness. Anonymous participants prefer not only to live in the shadows of pseudoanonymity but they take up their residence in multiple places. It is thus difficult to comprehensively map the entire terrain they build and traverse. If Anonymous is constantly in motion, with no stable center of gravity, how might we understand its recent presence on the world stage? How do we account for the consistency of

its many actions? One way to do so is via the place of its birth. The uncanny and canny tactics of Anonymous cannot be understood independent of the cultural dynamics on 4chan, the iconic and transgressive image board from which they first arose. Starting roughly around 2005, Anonymous was a name used almost exclusively by some 4chan users to trollharass, humiliate, prank, and sometimes ruin the reputations of chosen targets. In 2008 the name acquired more layers and different meanings when some individuals deployed the alias to protest earnestly the human rights abuses associated with the Church of Scientology. Anonymous soon settled into what media scholar Marco Deseriis defines as a multiple use name, the adoption of the same alias by organized collectives, affinity groups, and individual authors.1 In December 2010, Anonymous rose to public prominence when individuals part of the AnonOps network came to the defense of Wikileakslaunching a distributed denial of service (DDoS) campaign against financial corporate giants that had bowed to pressure and refused to accept donations for the whistle-blowing organization. Many of the individuals and groups who rallied around the name Anonymous for these and other activist causes still carried with them the irreverent, roughish dispositionwhat they call the lulz (a pluralization and bastardzation of lol) formed in the heady days when Anonymous was a name heralded for the sake of trolling alone. Anonymous meteoritic rise and consistency must also be assessed via the skills and capacities of those who install, configure, and deploy various pieces of software, such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC), where they congregate, and the scanning tools that scour the Internet for software vulnerabilitiesprime targets for exploitation. In the media it is common to portray Anonymous as wholly inaccessible, inchoate, spectral, and impossible to locate, its thunderous rise beyond explanation, simply a magical effect of the Internet. Although this portrait contains kernels of truth, some of the mystery vanishes when we consider the software they use and the skills and capacities of the participants. In fact, a great many Anonymous participants are rather easy to find: just log onto one
1

Marco Deseriis Improper Names: The Minor Politics of Collective Pseudonyms and Multiple-Use Names." PhD. Dissertation. Department of Media, Culture, Communication, New York University, 2010.

of their Internet Relay Chat networks. While being on IRC is not requiredsome participants act individually and others use Web forums, Twitter, and/or Skype chat roomsmany make their second home on various IRC networks, chatting on public channels, on back channels, at times with single Anons, sometimes with purpose, often without much aim. By today's standards, IRC, invented in 1989, is a rather primitive chat program. But its staying power has to do with its simplicity: it is ideal for real time communication and has become the location where participants organize ops and acts as the communicative medium through which bonds of fellowship often form. To recognize the importance of IRC is to recognize the importance of those who install, configure, and maintain the server: the system or net administrator . Once they install an IRC server, their work is not over. Often aided by a small team of individuals with similar skills, the administrator is part plumber, part groundskeeper, and part ninja, fixing problems, maintaining the system, and fending off attacks. In the case of some Anonymous networks, they use their extensive and intimate knowledge of servers, networks, botnets, security, and vulnerabilities to thrash servers by burdening them with too many requests as part of a DDoS campaign or embarking on a hacking operation to access information (some networks never use such tactics staying well within the bounds of the law and many of the admins only maintain infrastructure). Even if much within Anonymous is impenetrable, these individuals and the team tasked with doing the work of maintenance and upkeep are some of the more known quantities on these networks. Indeed, some of the networks even erect Web pages offering the public this information, proudly announcing the staff, and these individuals often have a symbol (a flag, @, & or star) next to their nickname to designate the privileges they hold on the network. One simply cannot grasp (at least with any nuance and richness) the vibrant and often turbulent ethical life internal to Anonymous without considering the technologists who install and maintain its infrastructure. Anonymous is famously predicated on an anti-celebrity and anti-leader ethic. Participants insist that anyone and everyone is Anonymous, that no one

person or small groups call the shots, and that no one should seek public credit or recognition for their actions. Readers might be skeptical, interpreting this resistance to the notion of leadership as an ideological cape that drapes and occludes the reality of concentrated technical power. In this view, leadership must be in the hands of system or net administrators, the team tasked with maintenance, and the hackers whose operations have received the lions share of media attention. If it were so simple, however, one would not need to heed the social and technical life behind these networks. Individuals pour tremendous labor into critiquing and modulating the concentration of power that is a byproduct of technical structures (although technical affordances also contribute toward the fragmentation of power as well). Lets then return to IRC, the home of so many within Anonymous. It is erected largely in the guise of a platform where users are usually afforded the freedom to initiate their own operations and channels. While the founders and staff can ban individuals or a channel, or discourage an operation from flourishing, most IRC networks have a long traditionand this is no different with Anonymousof a laissez faire, hands off approach to the creation of channels (although some ops that don't get informal sanction from the operators never thrive). Thus although those who manage and control technical resources do wield more power than othersas an example, admins can and do ban users with some frequency and will do so for violating explicit rules, informal norms, and over petty personal disagreements as well there is no one group commandeering authority over the dozens of operations, some in full swing, some more tempered, making their home on any number of IRC networks in existence. When it comes to single operations, there can be, as one Anon put it, ad hoc leaders, many whom dont maintain the technical system. Each operation has its own distinct history and organizational culture. Technical operations, such as hacking or DDoS, usually lean heavily on a smaller number of individuals (a DDoS campaign can also become more populist when single individuals contribute using a tool like Low Orbit Ion Cannon). But power does concentrate. Or at least some Anonymous participants think it has, at times, to an intolerable

degree and have taken quite targeted action as a result. For example, the birth of new nodes, crews, and networks is often the result of dissatisfaction with power dynamics on or tactics used by one network.

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Anonymous acts in a way that is irreverent, often destructive, occasionally vindictive, and generally disdainful of the law. These actions are unlike the work of traditional activists, who might rather urge citizens to stay within the bounds of the law, to wield the law, to call their local representatives, or to charter an NGO. Anonymous stokes the hot embers of transgression, tricksterism, and irreverencea fire long in existence and yet in perpetual need of renewal. In ancient Greece, the cynic philosopher, Diogenes, masturbated in public to proclaim his disdain for what he saw as the artificiality of decorum. More recently the Yes Men have tightly fused pranksterism and activism, in one instance presenting a three-foot-long golden penis (employee visualization appendage) at a World Trade Organization textileindustry conference as a means of controlling workers. Anonymous is an heir to this tradition: when advertising their campaigns on Twitter participants will joke about a certain bodily appendage; on IRC they remind each other not to take themselves too seriously; they will at times feed the media with false information as part of an elaborate prank. Subversions, whether a media hack or an anatomy joke, unravel the often oppressive force of norms, conventions, and the law. To transgress is to also highlight absurdities of current political life and generate the spectacles that elicit coverage from the mainstream media. Anonymous may enact a less elegant version of this irreverent tradition, but it is more populist and participatory than most anything that has come before it. Along with copious transgressions, Anonymous also offers a compelling alternative and antithesis to the logic of constant self-publication, the desire to attain recognition or fame. Anonymous is configured as e pluribus unum: one from many. Although individuals do fail at

times to live up to the norm, the revelation of self is discouraged. Depending on what op they run, who they know, and especially what back channels they are in, individuals within Anonymous can accumulate status and prestige. But marshaling this prestige to speak on behalf of Anonymous, to reveal yourself to the mainstream media, or to make a name for yourself, is taboo. In instances when this occurs, people are often drubbed, chastised, sometimes even banned. In an era when we post the majority of our personal data online, and states and corporations collect and market the rest, there is something hopefulone might even say necessaryin Anonymouss effacement of the self, in the cloaking of identities, in offering a small symbolic oasis of anonymity in the current expansive desert of top down and bottom up surveillance. From a more experiential perspective, participants often express the joys of anonymity and pseudonymity, regular fixtures in these environments . One Anon participant elaborated it as follows: I used to enjoy the hivemind feeling at 4chan, where everyone was anonymous and everyone was the same, ops coming and going in the time between a thread starting and 404ing sometimes. For me now its about the old fashioned Internet pseudonymity, where you can have a persona that persists but is not connected to your real life self. Now everything is about Facebook and showing your real self on the internet, the Anon IRC/twitter world is full of people enjoying these personas where they get to pretend to be lulz pirates or jesters or whatever theres less and less chance for that now it seems on the net.

The icon most associated with Anonymous, the Guy Fawkes mask, seen at protests around the world, symbolizes the trading of individualism for collectivism. In an age of atomization, in a period where the individual seeks recognition, and at times profit, for every expression and creation, it is unsurprising that Anonymous has so captivated the publics imagination. Nevertheless, Anonymous does not signal the reappearance of the mass political subject united by one program or aspiration; it is not a united front, but a hydra, a rhizome, comprising numerous different networks and working groups that are often at odds with one another. Indeed there is always a degree of disorder present even with the stable networked

nodes of Anonymouschaos following from the permanently contingent environment so common to IRC, the tensions and conflicts between individuals and networks, and the fact that operations are often reactive responses to unpredictable world events. Despite operating behind a mask, shall we declare Anonymous the new face of democratic digital politics, as some have suggested? Does it provide the antidote to cure the world of its many political ills? Or should we write them off as cyber vigilantes who lack aim (but still manage to cause diabolical havoc)? When it comes to assessing the political significance of Anonymous, we should resist grand declarations and pronouncements. The work of politics and social transformation requires multiplicityfrom fine tuned policy interventions to rowdy subversive tacticsand we should be wary of christening any one a magic bullet (the norm today, at least with the many pundits who overstate the role of digital media in political life, declaring some element, such as social networking, as our technological savior). Through its actions, Anonymous erected different platforms for individuals to act politically. Although cloaked and veiled, many of their actions seek transparency from the state and corporations and also often strike at legislationcopyright statutes, surveillance billsseen to threaten Internet freedoms. It depends on a spectacular visibility and invisibility; it is everywhere, yet difficult to pin down. It thrives off a dynamic tension between cool and hot, openness and secrecy, pranks and seriousness, and predictability and unpredictability. In some instances, it is a place for the many to participate. There are also more exclusive groups of hackers in existence for those willing to break the law for political dissent. Laughter and humor, sometimes lighthearted, other times wickedly dark and offensive, are a staple part of the carnivaleque atmosphere erected simply... Whatever your interpretation of their actions, Anonymous has undeniably catalyzed and spurred copious conversations about a range of topics, from the ethics of DDoS tactics to the existence of a privatized security apparatus, demonstrating that spectacular interventions can sustain a public debate. What does Anonymous mean to you? Since it is not a singularity

but a multiplicity, I am sure there are many answers. But perhaps that is precisely the point.

RELATED WORKS

Coleman, Gabriella 2012 Our Weirdness is Free. The logic of Anonymousonline army, agent of chaos, and seeker of justice. Triple Canopy. Issue 15, January 2012 http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/our_weirdness_is_free

Deseriis, Marco 2010 Improper Names: The Minor Politics of Collective Pseudonyms and Multiple-Use Names." PhD. Dissertation. Department of Media, Culture, Communication, New York University, 2010.

Hyde, Lewis. 1999 Trickster This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art. New York: North Point Press

Knuttilla, Lee 2011 User Unknown: 4chan, anonymity, and contingency. First Monday 16(10). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3665/3055

Norton, Quinn 2011 Anonymous 101 Part Deux: Morals Triumph Over Lulz http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12/anonymous-101-part-deux/all/1

Wesch, Michael

2012 Anonymous, Anonymity, and the End(s) of Identity and Groups Online: Lessons from the First Internet-Based Superconsciousness In Neil Whitehead and Michael Wesch eds. Human No More: Digital Subjectivities, Unhuman Subjects, and the End of Anthropology. 134-158. University of Colorado Press.