Anonymous
…the Internet is simply too important for its continued existence to be imperilled by an antisocial and lawless minority.
This essay, which will attempt to explain the post-PC phenomenon borne out an interconnected society of the information age: Anonymous.
Enemy of the Net
Anonymous is “a loosely organised consortium of hackers formerly linked to 4chan” recently credited with cyber-attacks on various organisations e.g. DDoS attacks against anti-Wikileaks’ organisations. In recent years, news networks have portrayed it as a representable organisation with an agenda, instead of “domestic terrorists” as did the KTTV Fox 11 News report in 2007.
It is surprising, why Anonymous has been associated with a website whose users primarily discuss Japanese comics and cartoons; because Paul Fetch had assumed the first Google search result of “Anonymous” in the year 2006 was the right one. At the time, it may have been inferred that a website where every user is indeed unlabelled, therefore “anonymous”, was where Anonymous came from.
Who’s your daddy?
At MITS’ first “world-wide” conference in 1975, Bill Gates launched a personal diatribe against hobbyists who pirated software, effectively branching into the now accepted packaged-software industry. Before that, user groups by corporations e.g. SHARE and later micro users e.g. the Homebrew Computer Club were formed to exchange software for free. This was the very antithesis of computer liberation movement which had gained a foothold among hobbyists/hackers.
In the 1970s, the first generation of hackers emerged in university computer-science departments. They lived and worked in the Bay area as industry engineers and hobbyists, surrounded counter-cultural activities and institutions. The emerging computing culture was influenced with counter-culture concepts of information sharing, individual empowerment, and collective growth; which resulted in the second generation of hackers who invented and manufactured the PC. These nonacademic hackers were hardcore counter-culture types — like Steve Jobs.
At about the same time, a motley collection of students and programmers were busy connecting their host computers to IMPs i.e. slowly developing ARPANET. The participation of this many undergraduates doing it on a part-time basis while they completed their computer science programmes, created a distinctive and somewhat anarchic culture in the network community. This culture was as strong as the computer-amateur culture of the PC industry in the 1970s; but unlike the PC world, this culture was more persistent, and it accounted for the unstructured and anarchic state of the early Internet.
By the 1980s, almost anyone could get onto a machine of their own or through a public terminal like at a library, courtesy of the PC / “machine liberation” revolution of the 1970s, and use the application, education and entertainment programs created by the third generation of hackers. They could also access the Internet, where besides the many consumer networks like MSN and AOL, there were FTP repositories for “anonymous” users, web sites, etc; all controlled by it’s users, not corporations. The Internet, built with its informal, decentralised structure, could not be claimed by any one commercial entity.
“If we can get to the point where anyone who gets out of high school alive has used computers on the Net … When access to information is as ubiquitous as access to the phone system, all Hell will break loose. Bet on it.”
— Steve Welch
Peter Mattis, one of the creators of GIMP, who came to Unix from the Apple Macintosh, and is representative of a new generation of hackers who took rock-solid post-mainframe computing architecture stability and basic operating systems for granted, to demand more. By the 1990s, a fourth generation of hackers have created myriad computer bulletin boards and a non-hierarchical linking system called Usenet.
“Ask not what your country can do for you. Do it yourself.”
Web-designers are the hackers of the Information Age, who like the hobbyists of the 1960s tend to found start-ups and hack their websites to force part of the Web to become more user-centric, advocating the “Don’t Make Me Think” model espoused by the terms “Web 2.0” and “Social Web” that have come into prominence alongside rising social networking websites like Facebook, and Twitter.
The Internet, particularly the Web, has been filled with tools that have the inherent ability to “spread the word”; social media has become a tool for democracy fighters and the mob alike to pursue their agenda. By October 2003, nearly 11% of the world’s population was online, 4chan was founded.
We are legion
The Oxford English Dictionary adds “Google” as a verb; Wikipedia has replaced the revered Encyclopædia Britannica in the minds of the netizen. The Internet, such a global phenomenon, not one government in the world can monitor it in it’s entirety e.g. spam has always been and may remain a problem, because if it’s operations were discovered, it can be moved to another country where there are no anti-spam laws.
Particularly interesting is how 4chan.org, the American offspring of 2chan.net from Japan, has created an environment where the online disinhibition effect has flourished. Every post made on these websites does not have a username, this has prompted it’s users to joke that all “anonymous” posts are in fact from one person/entity called Anonymous. Although not affiliated, the confluence of empowerment from social networking websites and the perceived inability to trace an anonymous action from these imageboards, has given rise to an anarchic collective whose membership is through mere attribution; because of this, what started as a joke has spread beyond 4chan into various other social networking websites.
We [Anonymous] just happen to be a group of people on the Internet who need — just kind of an outlet to do as we wish, that we wouldn’t be able to do in regular society. …That’s more or less the point of it. Do as you wish. … There’s a common phrase: ‘we are doing it for the lulz.’
What should have been seen a movement has devolved into a mob, influenced by the idiosyncratic humour of lolcats.com and the indigenous shock humour of 4chan. News coverage of Anonymous since 2008 has used terms once associated with the counter-culture of the 1960s: DDoS attacks likened to the online equivalent of a sit-in protest. Various forms of P2P software have been used for piracy, a perversion of the ideals of Free Software itself rooted in counter-culture.
“Pranks are entertainment, comedy… ‘Don’t get caught,’ and if you’re shocked that I can trick people with my pranks and not feel dishonest about it, remember that the basic form of entertainment is to make up stories. That’s comedy.”
— Steve Wozniak
Anonymous seemed to exhibit properties of the previous generations of hackers: they played pranks, never wanted to get caught, used the nuances of language and imagery for shock humour and self-aggrandisement. Although Anonymous has been seen as a mob-ruled entity, it is still made of people, who will bring with them their varied political nuances.
The few times Anonymous has been seen in physical form by way of it’s members protesting in public, they have been seen to wear a replica of the mask from the movie “V for Vendetta”. The choice of outfit is probably related to the film’s themes of an anti-establishment figure fighting for the greater good.
This is where I hypothesise that there are at least two strands that make up Anonymous. There are the technocrats who are working towards Free Software and open dissemination of content, and there are those with an affinity for politics who are working towards free speech and freedom of information.
Pirates vs Ninjas
As sales at news-stands begin to fall, some newspaper websites have begun to lock-up their content instead of letting them free on the Internet. e.g. The New York Times recently raised a paywall that required it’s viewers to pay for it’s articles. Then Anonymous walks into the room: it starts a Twitter feed @FreeNYT to circumvent the paywall. The old model of distribution of information from the central Network Broadcasting Company is being questioned and challenged. The top-down model of information being distributed by a few for mass consumption is no longer the only news. Many websites like Digg and Reddit have grown around the idea of spreading social media.
This idea that any information on the Internet is free to use and profit from seems to have seeped into publishers themselves. Ignoring problems as plagiarism, the editor of Cooks Source seemed to have assumed everything on the Internet was in the public domain. Although not attributed to Anonymous, it was described that this was a form of Internet vigilantism that had gone viral on social networking websites causing DDoS attacks and pulling of ads from Cook Source’ website.
It is rare for the GNU project, other Free Software projects, and Open Source projects to be related to Anonymous, but what they are collectively doing is to affect a freedom with regards to computing, algorithms and information. The immediate benefits of these movements will not be seen by the majority of the world, but they will then have the opportunity to pass on these benefits to other users. They advocate the Open Web. They are the unseen force shaping the Internet. I call them Anonymous’ Ninjas.
In recent years, Anonymous has been credited with a protest against Scientology, dubbed Project Chanology; it’s support of Wikileaks and it’s founder Julian Assange; it’s attack on the security firm HBGary Federal, and it’s purported assistance of the ongoing 2010–2011 Jasmine Revolution uprisings in the Middle East and Asia.
Of particular interest is the trinity consisting of Anonymous, Wikileaks, The Pirate Bay; and by association: the Pirate Party.
If every website can be visited for free on the Internet, then by associative logic, everything that can be found on the Internet is free. Piracy could be seen an overzealous view of Free Software, actually perpetuating the problems highlighted by Gates in 1975. The Pirate Bay is one of many in a string of websites supported by the “anonymous public” through use of P2P software.
The team behind Pirate Bay is also behind a string of pro-piracy projects and has relations with the other two major pirate organisations in Sweden: Pirate Party and Piratbyrån. The former has now grown to become the third largest political party in Sweden, and is one of Wikileaks’ webhosts.
Anonymous announced it was supporting Wikileaks, a document archive website used by whistleblowers, when the came under pressure to stop publishing secret U.S. diplomatic cables. This was probably the deepest alliance made by members of Anonymous so far who spread the “Cablegates” via torrent, and voluntarily downloaded a botnet to launch DDoS attacks on the websites of Mastercard, Visa, and Paypal.
The Pirate Bay had supported Anonymous’ website that gives information to Iranian supporters how to organise themselves by temporarily colouring it’s logo green and calling it the “Persian Bay”. This “operation” was repeated when Anonymous turned it’s collective gaze on the Tunisian government which had decided to block access to the Wikileaks website.
These “hacktivists” are the Anonymous everyone will come to know, because the immediate effect of their actions are likely to be felt and seen by the world. They advocate the social web, only because everyone within their social network will be able to hear their message. I call them Anonymous’ Pirates.
Wild West Shootout
“Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.”
— Mark Zuckerberg
At the 2011 South by Southwest (SXSW) conference, Christopher Poole said Zuckerberg was wrong to equate online anonymity with cowardice, and:
“Anonymity is authenticity. It allows you to share in a completely unvarnished, raw way. To fail in an environment where you’re being identified by your real name is costly. We value content over creator.”
The social good of the Web 2.0 “revolution” on the Social Web is in danger of being overshadowed by unscrupulous and criminal behaviour of the Anonymous mob, as with the “French Revolution, the narrative of increasing anarchy undermined the narrative in which the revolutionaries were striving to create a new social order.” The freedom that comes with anonymity may be Anonymous’ biggest weakness.
