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.

Mood/situation & the Personal Blog

After reading this week's New York Times Magazine's cover story about blogging and online life in general, I began wondering how exactly "snark," as an attitude, as a writing style, came to take over so much of the blogosphere. Blogger Emily Gould defines it as "smart yet conversational, and often funny in a merciless way," though just how smart and funny such blogs are seem to be in the eye of the beholder. Perhaps her subsequent characterization of their style as "righteously indignant but comically defeated" rings more true. Did several blogs that were written in this style become popular, inspiring other bloggers who wanted to become popular to unconsciously imitate that style?

And what of the people reading and responding to personal diary blogs? What does that tell us about the function of personal blogs for readers?

"They were co-workers, sort of, giving me ideas for posts, rewriting my punch lines. They were creeps hitting on me at a bar. They were fans, sycophantically praising even my lamer efforts. They were enemies, articulating my worst fears about my limitations."

Keep in mind that Emily's blog on Gawker was only somewhat personal. Like a lot of blogs, its a hybrid of news, commentary, and diary. This kind of hybridization may be an inevitability caused by the desire of bloggers and their advertisers for a broader audience, or so the NYTimes piece suggests.

So, Co-workers contributing ideas: I think of them as co-authors, who then should get some of the revenue generated by the ads on the blog.

Creeps: people are out to pick other people up, on social networking sites, on adultfriendfinder, on blogs, in real life, pretty much everywhere. Rejection doesn't have much of a price in the anonymous world of blogging, so why not act creepy? Maybe she's into creeps.

Enemies: those working out identity issues or trying to affect society in some way. They find someone who represents values that they dislike and publicly express hatred towards them so as to discourage others from holding those views. We may dismiss this behavior as digital vandalism, but like real life vandalism, there are deeper social issues that motivate it that are worth exploring.

Fans: those looking for entertainment.

But maybe calling it "entertainment" or "voyeurism" is to cheapen and misunderstand it. So as to better understand what blog fans are after, I thought I'd engage in a little self-ethnography.

What do I get from reading personal blogs? When I watch TV or movies or read books or listen to music, I seem to want to identify with someone: a character, an author. Behind that desire to identify, I think there's a desire to escape but also to find someone who is in a similar situation, who is feeling what I'm feeling. I want this maybe to learn more about what to do in my mood/situation and to not feel alone in the way I'm feeling, or maybe to feel as though as foul as my mood/situation is, there are people who have it far worse than I do. This kind of "at least I'm not that awful" schadenfrued should be familiar to some fans of Jerry Springer, Flavor or Love, or other reality tv shows. Some fans watch, in part, to feel superior.

Here's the big difference between personal blogs and Big Media content in terms of how we relate to their characters or creators (either as our inferiors or sympathetic individuals whom we can identify with): considering how many millions of personal blog entries there are, I bet you that given the proper search technology, I could find someone who is in nearly the exact same mood/situation that I'm in instead of having to settle for someone whose mood/situation vaguely resembles mine. In fact, I have done this.

When we watch a TV show and read a book, we know that our mood/situation is not exactly like the character's or the author's. Maybe the character is a New York socialite or a farmer, but the story deals with themes that are universal - true love, loyalty, respect, mortality. We draw analogies to our own lives - the lack of respect afforded to Christopher Moltesanti is similar to my situation at work, or Sherman Klump's negative body image and lack of self-confidence is similar to my own. We read stories about people who lived hundreds of years ago in cultures totally dissimilar to our own, and yet somehow we can identify with the characters.

In the oral storytelling tradition before mass-media, stories could be localized or tailored to fit the listeners' lives. Once stories became commodities, then they were forced to be general and universal. We were forced to identify with people who were not like us, which probably had good consequences (we see a world that is more diverse than our particular corner of it) and bad ones (we disavow our heritage and our selves so as to try in vain to become more like the wealthy, beautiful, upbeat people on TV). With the proliferation of personal blogs, maybe stories are becoming more personal than they ever were. And don't think that its the same thing as gossip. Personal blogs function as gossip only when we know the people who are writing or are featured in them.

Imagine thinking of a phrase that described how you felt and being able to search for other people who felt the same way. Or imagine watching a clip from a movie or listening to a song that fits your mood and being able to read about the lives of the other people who were in that mood (fellow viewers and listeners). You can do all that now. And its not always about actually interacting with these like-mooded people. Sometimes, its enough to know they're out there.

Maybe finding someone in the same mood/situation as you will be a dead end. Maybe they'll have nothing new to add and their companionship, if you want to call it that, will feel hollow. But we keep searching, we keep trying to connect.

Anti-Heroes and the Therapists who Love Them

After reading the analysis of last night's episode of The Sopranos on Slate, I buy what Jeff Goldberg said: that like Dr. Melfi, the viewers tricked themselves into believing that they were doing something good by analyzing this person that they knew was evil. But now, at the end, finally we wake up and realize that we need to stop, that if we’re going to be good, reasonable people, we can’t enable this person any longer.

There’s also something interesting going on in terms of the ambiguity of viewer identification with characters on The Sopranos. For me, Dr. Melfi has always been more sympathetic, if for no other reason than that she’s from a socio-economic class closer to my own than most of the other characters are. That’s probably true for a lot (but maybe not most) of the audience. We think of ourselves as superior to Tony, who isn’t terribly bright, but we think that he wants to be good. We feel his anger and his sorrow. We’re occasionally empathetic. But we also have known all along that he’s a murderer, that he’s a bad person.

In Scorsese on Scorsese, Marty talks about wanting to portray people normally thought of as bad or evil, particularly Jake Lamotta and Travis Bickle, as something more sympathetic, or perhaps more complex. This wouldn’t excuse their actions (or would it?), but would somehow be more realistic, and therefore preferable to the black-and-white unrealistic morality of traditional Hollywood. While describing the sympathy that viewers might feel for the main characters in Goodfellas, Scorsese talks about it in terms of growing up: “It raises a moral question, like a kid getting older and realizing what these people have done, but still having those first feelings for them as people.” At the conclusion of most of their narratives, Scorsese’s anti-heroes are either praised by a backwards society (Taxi Driver, King of Comedy), thus indicting society, or they’re leading undesirable, unglamorous lives (Goodfellas, Raging Bull), which, in a culture where glamour and fame are indistinguishable from respect, can only be considered a fate worse than death. None of the films really let the immoral protagonist (or the viewer who identifies with him) off the hook, but it doesn’t punish them the way the old Hays code would’ve demanded that they do. This moral gray area is defended on the grounds that it is more realistic than Hollywood’s depiction of evil.

Dr. Melfi hasn’t really played too prominently in the last few seasons of The Sopranos, so this second-to-last episode, in which Melfi recognizes that she’s been mollycoddling a murderer, seems like a bit of an unsatisfying cheat, an escape hatch for those of us who always felt uncomfortable with the prospect of a murderous protagonist. I’ve spent so much more time with Tony that I’m more inclined to identify with him, but when I take a step back, I clearly identify with Melfi more, feeling that, as Scorsese put it, its time to grow up and judge this person for his actions. What might’ve been praised by some as the realistic, gray-area depiction of evil is really just an attempt to excuse the voyeuristic pleasure of the therapist/viewer.

Because it has two points of viewer identification, the show can have it both ways. We can wash our hands of Tony and the show, giving up our vicarious addiction to the pleasures of acting selfishly, or we can believe, like Tony believes, that we're the last of a dying breed, and that there's a nobility in that.

Then there's the nascent terrorist AJ, but maybe it'll be better to write about that after the series concludes.