What it's like to participate in Anonymous actions

theatlantic.com

48 pointsselenamarie4 comments

The article was written by Professor Biella Coleman, an anthropologist and professor at NYU who studies hacker culture. She's written a lot about Anonymous, 4chan and /b/ and teaches a class on the anthropology of hackers at NYU.

Very richly detailed and clearly presented. "From at least this vantage point Anonymous starts to look more like a group of seasoned politics activists, debating the merits and demerits of actions and targets, warning for example, not to attack the media. Even if these documents cannot be taken as the totality of Anonymous, they reveal that some of the participants do engage in strategic and political thinking."

It's an appropriate counterweight, I think, to the unmitigated and much too facile condescension that some have been indulging in lately.

It's easy to understand what anonymous is if you spend some time on 4chan/b/: it's people. Some of those people try to rally more behind some cause, be it just or lulzy, and many of those leaders will fail. Occasionally, some of the anonymous people agree and form a rally, which gains steam in the same way any fad does.

Anonymous is pure, direct democracy: equivalent to anarchy.

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