Using Anonymous

I saw E. Gabriella Coleman give a terrific talk Friday at the New Media/Social Change Symposium on Anonymous, the loose online collective bent on wreaking havoc and occasionally bringing about positive social change. Like Alan Smithee or Luther Blissett, Anonymous is an "open reputation" or an "improper name", an identity to be used by anyone. Coleman's talk prompted me to ask several questions about Anonymous, aside from the obvious question of who uses the title: why do people use it and under what circumstances do they use it?

There's something exhilarating, liberating, and perhaps frightening about an identity that gives anyone the freedom to do or say anything without fear of reprisal. You could think of the title "Anonymous" as less of an identity and more of a tool that could be used by the powerless to subvert the creeping surveillance state. But that's not quite what this is. In actuality, there are authorities trying to identify and prosecute members of Anonymous or, more intriguingly, trying to infiltrate it and discredit it by engaging in activities in its name that are antithetical to its stated modus operandi. In order to outwit their "competition", members of Anonymous require free time and technical know-how: two things many young, unemployed or under-employed men happen to have in spades. It certainly helps explain the original aesthetic and ideological tendencies that marked Anonymous's original endeavors, and also helps explain its limits: why it can't be picked up by any group to do anything. Instead of a selfless Robin-Hood-type collective, we're left with a small, relatively homogeneous group that is the only group capable of using the tool well. They all have the same axes to grind, the same sense of humor, and very similar experiences: all markers of a relatively uncomplicated identity. Anonymous didn't have to be an identity, but there just aren't that many people who have the time and the skill to use it as a tool.  

While one anonymous collective is good at disrupting and tearing things down, another relatively anonymous collective is good at building things up: wikipedia. As an anonymite, you can create or you can destroy, but (to return to the topic of the symposium) can you really change anything, any existing power structure in the offline world? Offline world changes - changes in policy, changes in the flow of capital - usually require actors to maintain traceable identities. But maybe the disruptions caused by Anonymous are enough to spark offline changes by people who have traceable identities - voters, investors, consumers, and workers.

Finally, to get a sense of the possibilities of anonymous social action, its worth considering two competing popular narratives that revolve around revolutionaries, justice, and open reputations. Anonymous borrowed the iconography of a graphic novel and film from the 1980's/mid-2000's: V for Vendetta, which featured the open reputation of V, a freedom fighter (or anarchist) intent on bringing down a fascist regime. The story leaves it open as to whether V was sane or not, but his actions - toppling a regime that is obviously fascist - are treated by author and audience as having a positive outcome. Conversely, in Fight Club, we see a collective like so many military or para-military revolutionists, bent on washing away any trace of individuality in order to form a stronger coalition, only to re-discover the value of individual identity when one of them is martyred. But the real identity problem in this story is with the main character, who is either a downtrodden worker drone or the lead revolutionary. Instead of sloughing off his old, ineffectual identity for his gleaming new one, he's caught between the two, a stranger to himself. It remains to be seen as to whether the lead hackers behind Anonymous are less like Bruce Wayne/Batman and more like Ed Norton's character/Tyler Durden, and whether their minions are more like the group-thinking benign terrorists of Project Mayhem and less like the triumphant masses of the Arab Spring.

"The Thug Finding the Gutenberg Press"

What is the role of digital media in cases of social disorder, be it a riot or a revolution?

The answer on the tips of every social media guru's tongue is that social media - text messaging, group messaging, social networking sites - make organizing protests and mass looting easier and faster. Without this tool, the argument implies, the young men (and it is mostly young men, for what that's worth) would not overthrow the government or burn down the business. Another argument states that it is the way the rulers are behaving (austerity measures, police brutality, and a gap between rich fat cats and the proletariat) that inevitably leads to this kind of behavior.

Both of these arguments seem unsatisfying to me. Riots and revolutions happened without social media and there have been plenty of nations throughout history that had huge disparities between ruling classes and non-ruling classes that didn't erupt into violence for long periods of time. Perhaps both of these things contribute to the likelihood of these events, but perhaps there are other ways in which the new media landscape contributes to this likelihood.

Media content, be it what we see on television, what we read on our favorite site for news, or what we see in our Facebook feed, influences our ideas of what is normal in society or the sub-segment of society to which we believe we belong, which in turn affects our actions. By framing a certain behavior as more or less normal, a message sender can affect behavior of the message receivers. Its possible that various kinds (both positive and negative) of coverage of social unrest frame it as something that angry young men at a certain place in time do, enforcing a kind of norm to engage in civil disobedience, violence, or destruction of property. Instead of relying on the depictions of protesters, freedom fighters, and rioters that the mainstream news give us, we can get a first-hand look at them on social media sites. Even if only 5% of the population goes to these sources instead of MSM for coverage of the unrest, if its the right 5% (i.e. the 5% inclined toward real-world action), it matters. Perhaps this gives readers the impression that these aren't just objects on the screen to be watched, but people who are similar to the readers, who could interact with the readers. Maybe that makes identifying with them easier.

The panoply of opinions and ideologies on the internet makes finding justification (and a group that makes your thoughts about behaving in a certain way more normal) easier to find as well. I think this gets lost in the discussion of how easy social media facilitates the logistics of social unrest. You may start out with anger, but if that anger can't find justification, its unlikely to manifest itself in action. Sure, a mind sufficiently detached from reality can find a justification pretty much anywhere, but even those with a firm grip on reality can find reasons to act in ways that they couldn't when the messages were manufactured by people with too much to lose to advocate civil disobedience, violence, or property destruction.

Perhaps the default sentiment toward authority in complex societies is anger, an instinct that we feel from perceiving that we do not have much control over our fate. But that anger gets channeled into avenues other than civil disobedience, violence, and property destruction when we can't find justification or a group performing these actions to make them seem more normal.

(quote from Mike Butcher, TechCrunch Europe)