We ARE the 99 Percenters !

http://www.mercurynews.com/documents/ci_20040081

If you look at the comments by Gingrich, Romney, and Santorum…and project what would be the natural outcome of their policy changes, one realizes that a frightening Oliver the waif story would result. Gingrich wants to get rid of child labor laws, and suggested kids work as janitors..also, Ron Paul wants to get rid of the minimum wage, and Santorum, bless his pointy little head, is dead set against state controlled education and wants everyone to “home school” their children, but, even crazier, he is dead set against contraception.

So, what would be the net effect of eliminating contraception, stopping formal education in favor of home schooling, eliminating child labor laws, and eliminating the minimum wage ? Well, the natural outcome is an increase in birth rates, and hence, lots of children being in the population…and with the parents and politicians encouraging them to “get a job”, kids would be working long hours at very small pay because there would be no minimum wage level.

Yes, if this sounds like a third world sweat shop work force in the making …you’re right. FoxConn in China..meet FOX NEWS CHILD FORCE in USA. 

http://www.medpagetoday.com/Neurology/PainManagement/31254?utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=DailyHeadlines&utm_source=WC&eun=g357165d0r&userid=357165&email=bakerchiropractic@gmail.com&mu_id=

Prescriptions for narcotic painkillers soared so much over the last decade that by 2010 enough were being dispensed to medicate every adult in the U.S. around-the-clock for a month.

Fueling that surge was a network of pain organizations, doctors and researchers that pushed for expanded use of the drugs while taking in millions of dollars from the very companies that made them, a Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today investigation found.

Last year, the Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today found that a University of Wisconsin-Madison based organization had been a national force in helping liberalize the way opioids are prescribed and viewed. During a decade-long campaign that promoted expanded use of opioids — an agenda that critics say was not supported by rigorous science — the UW Pain & Policy Studies Group received $2.5 million from makers of opioid analgesics.

After that article was published last April, the UW Pain group said it had decided to stop taking money from the drug industry.

But the UW Pain group is just one link in a network of national organizations and researchers with financial connections to the makers of narcotic painkillers.

Beginning 15 years ago, that network helped create a body of “information” that today is found in prescribing guidelines, patient literature, position statements, books and doctor education courses, all which favored drugs known as opioid analgesics.

Without rigorous scientific evidence to prove that their benefits out weigh potential harm, drugs like OxyContin and Vicodin increasingly have been used to treat a wide array of chronic pain syndromes including low back pain and fibromyalgia.

Current practices reflect a gradual shift from the use of these drugs to treat short-term acute pain such as post-surgical pain, as well as severe pain associated with metastatic cancer or end-of-life pain — uses that were based on solid evidence that such use was safe and effective.

But the benefit seen for those conditions was extended to treatment of chronic pain syndromes, an extrapolation that had no evidence to back it up.

Caught in the middle are millions of Americans with real pain that can last for years and thousands of doctors who want to help them.

It’s a situation that was ripe for the influence of the pharmaceutical industry, said Mark Sullivan, MD, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington.

By 2010, those firms were selling four times as many prescription painkillers to pharmacies, doctors’ offices and hospitals as in 1999.

Led by OxyContin, sales of prescriptions of opioid drugs totaled $8.4 billion in 2011, up from $5.8 billion in 2006, according to data supplied by IMS Health, a drug market research firm.

“We’ve never really exposed so many people to so much drug for so long,” Sullivan said. “We don’t really know what the long-term results are.”

The Pendulum Swings Back

Several of the pain industry’s core beliefs about chronic pain and opioids are not supported by good science and contributed to the growing use of the drugs, a Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today review of records and interviews found.

http://www.statesman.com/news/local/more-than-100-000-austin-energy-customers-hit-2185031.html
 A malfunctioning bill collection system has created problems for more than 100,000 Austin Energy customers since October, according to estimates of the city-owned utility.

Roughly 1 in 4 customers has experienced a problem with the system, which the city is paying IBM $55 million to build and operate. Austin Energy executives say issues keep cropping up even as others are resolved and blame IBM, an assessment the company does not dispute.

Some customers went months without receiving a utility bill. Others have been charged multiple times. Still others were unable to pay their bill online or were told that payments had been rejected when they actually went through. In some cases, businesses that owed about $3,000 were charged $30,000 or even $300,000.

Austin Energy chose to contact individual customers it suspected were affected, rather than sound a general alarm, partly to avoid the possibility that its customer assistance center could be overwhelmed.

Among the first customers who dealt with the problems was Nancy Davis, 57, who opened her October utility bill and discovered, to her surprise, that Austin Energy no longer considered her poor.

Puzzled, Davis began asking why her discount had been canceled and needed a month’s worth of sometimes contradictory explanations before figuring out what happened. It turned out Davis needed to sign a standard form she never received, probably because it was among the thousands of letters Austin Energy mailed without a home address because of a glitch.

“I probably made a dozen calls before I figured this 

The “Full Moon Saloon” in Nashville TN apparently doesn’t like “OUR” Kinda People, meaning Occupiers. The man owning this business and the Registered Agent per the State of Tennessee is one Mr. Galen R McCullough , who apparently got the bar from his sister originally.

Now, this is not racial nor gender discrimination, but it IS political discrimination.

The address of this “establishment” is as follows:
Full Moon Saloon Nashville - Full Moon Saloon 423 Broadway Nashville, TN 37203 fullmoonsaloonnashville.com

They have a Facebook page and if you are on FB, just do a search of “Full Moon Saloon, Nashville”. If you visit the page, you will see that people are overwhelmingly upset by the intolerance of this place to our brothers and sisters in Occupy Nashville.

My statement is that Mr. McCullough can choose to dislike Occupy, to bar them from the bar, however, Nationally, this bar will become known as the place that is against the 99 percent and the common man.

No one who supports Occupy, supports Anonymous, or who is in either group should visit this place..NOW or EVER.

We do not forgive. We do not forget.

According to David Klinger, a professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and a former Los Angeles police officer, the number of shootings Officer James Peters has been involved in is “highly unusual.”

“Ninety percent of cops never shoot anyone in their career,” says Klinger, who himself shot and killed a man who was attacking his partner with a knife in 1981. His book, “Into the Kill Zone: A Cop’s Eye View of Deadly Force,” examines dozens of police shootings in detail.

The Arizona Republic reports that on Tuesday evening, Officer Peters and two others responded to the home of James Loxas, whom neighbors said had been threatening them with a gun. Loxas reportedly came out of the house carrying his young grandson, and when officers perceived him reaching for a weapon, Peters shot the man in the head.

The child was unharmed.

Although there is no comprehensive national data on officer-involved shootings, according to the Department of Justice, police killed 406 citizens in 2009, the most recent year for which there is data.

Klinger says that there are several factors that may explain why Peters has used deadly force so many times.

“You have to look at his assignments, where was he? What were the circumstances? It could be that he has been involved in 20 situations where he could have shot but held his fire 14 times,” he explains.

According to the Republic, Peters had served on the department’s SWAT team, a notoriously dangerous assignment, where officers often encounter suspects who are armed.

It is unclear whether Loxas was, in fact, armed when he was shot, or whether he had explicitly threatened the officers or the child in his arms. The Republic reports that Peters and another officer told investigators that they saw a black object in Loxas’s hand before shots rang out. A loaded pistol, shotgun and “functional improvised explosive device” were all reportedly found inside the man’s home.

“When I was working a beat in Los Angeles, if I would have shot every time I could have - every time someone pulled a gun - I probably would have been involved in six or seven shootings, and they would have been justified,” says Klinger.

Scottsdale Police Chief Allan Rodbell told the Arizona Republic that Peters has been cleared in all six of his previous shootings.

Klinger told Crimesider that as a member of SWAT, Peters would likely have been trained in “the prioritization of life.”

Music vids I love R disappearing from YouTube. We need to organize a protest against this slow and steady drainage of good music from the Tube. Send me your ideas on how to do it to maximize effect to goodmusicwantstobefree@gmail.com

http://conservativebyte.com/2011/06/government-demands-keys-to-your-kingdom-city-enacts-controversial-mandate-allowing-it-to-enter-private-property/
 http://www.wnd.com/2011/06/310877/ 
http://poorrichardsnews.com/post/6489683605/police-state-cedar-falls-iowa-demands-keys-to-its 
Videos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZQYIawKQug 
http://youtu.be/0E0OTRq39-4 
http://youtu.be/h7U9JRMEs_s 

If you want a certain kind of change, you must work toward that change. So, if you wanna make your city / town, a place where Occupiers are not beaten and jailed, you must either vote the bad one out and a good one in, or become a candidate yourself, and stand up.

This is not a decision to be made lightly. Entrenched incumbents are often very hard to defeat, depending on the issues, how popular they are, and how well their re-election campaign is funded.

However, we are a populist movement, comprised of a broad socioeconomic strata, but more heavily on poor and middle income. Arguably this may make our war chest relatively smaller, but our voting numbers, larger.

A politician said in the past that “All politics are local”, which means that people where YOU live, tend to be interested in what affects them directly at the local level and tend to vote based on that. Whether this is true or not, it can mean that if the streets have giant potholes, they are more apt to vote for a neighbor intent on potholes, than rambling about the living conditions of the poor in Afghanistan.
That said, on a mayoral race, if 60 percent of the population supports Occupy, and is VERY concerned about privacy issues, ACTA, NDAA, SOPA, etc, and your opponent is only interested in giving the police pay raises, then yes, a mayor can be elected on the basis of the incumbent being an out of touch 1%er. 

YOU MUST BE READY FOR PERSONAL ATTACKS 
Although in debates, an “ad hominem” or “to the man” attack in which one targets the personal attributes or failings of their opponent, is consider a very low blow and lowest form of argumentation..it is the bread and butter of politics.

Depending on how vile your opponent, be ready for your past to be scrutinized, meaning, any arrests, any late child support payments, any odd or inappropriate offhanded remark on Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, etc.

If the personal attack is true, the worse thing is to deny deny deny, because if they can prove it, then you add the word “liar” to your resume.

So, what this means is that since social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and the rest, tend to be more public forums for people to hear or read your thoughts, as well as Youtube, if you are planning to run, it may be a good idea before doing so, to “clean up” your accounts, meaning, to re-evaluate posts in light of how they would read on the evening news, and to start posting in a more professional, more goal oriented, focused manner.

DECIDE ABOUT YOUR IMAGE / DRESS FOR SUCCESS
We know what the traditional image of a mayor, a governor, a president is. People tend not to vote for folks with very long hair, and since the 1920s, have not been big on voting for folks with facial hair. In fact, the “conservative look” for men and women is going to make a big impact. I hate to say this because, as I like long hair on myself and guys, I feel more kindly toward a guy with long hair if I don’t know him, but, remember, you are going after that common denominator. Even radicals like Tom Hayden, when he decided to go for pubic office, did the conservative look makeover. So, unfortunately, for guys it usually means a shave, haircut, slacks, sport coat and tie. Obviously, if 99 percent of the 99 percent of your constituency dresses in work shirts, jeans, tennis, then sometimes, you want to culturally echo and appear in public dressed that way, otherwise, you lose both the common touch and their image of your relevancy.

KNOW THE ISSUES 
As previously stated, the issues will be important.  You may be in a city, state, county that really DOES care about Syria, but if people are losing their jobs, the roads are becoming full of potholes, water is undrinkable, and their are people selling crack in kindergarten, perhaps you need to worry about these things as well, and address them with a plan. People want a leader…and that means, someone they feel can isolate the problems, has an understanding of their needs, has a plan to take care of both, and can inspire others not only to see this vision, but be motivated to do something about the issues.

Knowing the issues will mean both talking to people AND doing enough research to come across as someone who gives a damn and who has studied up on it.

HAVE A PLAN FOR SUCCESS
If you fail to plan, then plan to fail. You CANNOT just announce your candidacy and expect folks to be drawn to you like the pied piper of politics, unless you have a plan not only how to fix problems, but how to improve living conditions.

WAR CHEST
Money. We may hate it, but money is the gasoline that drives the engine of politics. Now, it doesn’t mean you have to sell out..but it does mean that you and your supporters need to come up with a workable economic plan covering large events, and such things as traveling expenses from place to place to meet, great, and speak. It may mean, shudder, that you have to ask the people for money and by “the people”, I mean the people en masse, not try to solicit from just one heeled local business person.

RESEARCH THE LAWS
Make sure that you know all the relevant codes, statutes, laws, regarding running for election for the office you intend to run for. If there are residency requirements, if you have to get a certain number of signatures, if you have a filing fee amount and deadline, these all have to be covered.

GET BY WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM YOUR FRIENDS
If you are part of a local Occupy, then you have friends who are able to lend you a hand, who have various areas of expertise from graphic design to speech writing to fundraising. Meet with your Occupy and let them know you are fed up with the status quo and intend to try to make things better, but need their help.
Because, if you are identified with the local Occupy, you WILL need their help because your opponent will try to paint you as a rabblerouser, communist, terrorist, whatever mud they can sling to defeat you. 

WRITE UP A “WHY SHOULD YOU VOTE FOR ME”
Make no mistake, you are selling YOURSELF and YOUR IDEAS. Why should anyone vote for YOU ? If you sit down and cannot make a compelling case for people to vote for you, you may need to re-think your candidacy or, delve deep into your soul and say, “Why would I vote fore me?”.

DON’T GET TIED UP ON YOUR OWN AGENDA
Remember, you will become a PUBLIC SERVANT, not the KING, That means you are there to be a leader yes, but a leader who is doing things in the public interest and sometimes, it means that you must put aside your own agenda and go with what the people need.  For example, if you personally are totally worried about the plight of those in Homs, but your neighbors think “Homs” is a typo for “Homes” and the reason they are thinking about homes is that they are homeless…you need to perhaps do more work on seeing what you can do to work on the homeless situation locally, and perhaps put world politics on a back burner during the election.

KEEP IT ON THE REALZ, ON THE GOOD FOOT, ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE
Does negative campaigning work ? Yes ! That said, taken too far, it can
poison a candidate. If you START going down that road in the war of politics,
it is like the nuclear weapons escalation back in the day. Each of you must ante up with more and more negative scoop and in the end, you will both look like crooks to the voters.

Focus on solutions, on the needs and dreams of the 99percent. Focus on income inequality, police brutality, infrastructure and say yes, things are bad, but with hard work, dedication, solidarity, we can make them better…we MUST make them better for ourselves, for our children, for our grandchildren.

Being positive and offering real world solutions makes you likable, and elections often come down to a popularity contest.

HAVE A DREAM ALREADY !
Without a vision the people will perish. Have a vision for your city, state, whatever level of politics you are in. Talk about problems, solutions, but where you think the people want to head in five years. People care about jobs, polution, things that hit them in the face and pocketbook day to day…marry the dream with their concerns today, be it rising crime, lack of jobs, the environment, whatever.

E PLURIBUS UNUM
One from many. There may be many special interest groups where you live. There may be women’s rights, animal rights advocates, environmental groups, racial equality groups, and many may already be mad at the incumbent because of their comments, their policies, etc. Make a coalition of these groups, and using a Venn diagram, see where their concerns overlap and strengthen your plans in that area.
For example. for many, privacy concerns may be an area of common interest.
If people hate traffic cameras, for example, look into whether the city has a contract with a company, when it expires, and see if you can be the candidate who vows to get rid of these monsters.

BE A HERO, NOT A Narcissistic Prima Donna !

GO PLACIDLY AMONG THE NOISE AND HASTE !
I advocate folks reading http://marilee.us/desiderata.html Desiderata. In politics, one needs not only centering and balance, but perspective. If you seem calm while your opponent acts like a fool, acts like the Clown of the Earth, you may win by default. Balance, perspective, calm confidence is important.

DON’T ASSUME THINGS ARE GOING AS THEY SHOULD 
Ultimately, you are responsible for those who are doing things for you.
Don’t assume your campaign manager is doing the right thing or is competent.
Don’t be a nag or a micromanager, but don’t stick your head in the sand and assume all is legal and all is happening as you want it to. 

I’M JOE BLOW (OR SALLY SUE) AND I AM RUNNING FOR MAYOR. I WANT TO MAKE THIS PLACE BETTER FOR ALL OF US. I NEED YOUR HELP. CAN I COUNT ON YOUR VOTE ? WHAT ARE YOUR CONCERNS FOR OUR CITY (OR STATE OR WHATEVER)
You have to ASK…usually, before you receive. The “meet and greets” are important. Shake hands, be real …LISTEN to what people say…call them by their first name…these are people skills and you must have them.

USE YOUTUBE, FACEBOOK , BLOGS to get your message out.
Social media, networking, and videos are powerful tools, and most are free.
If you do a video, make sure it is as professional as you can do it or afford to have it done. An amateurish video implies an amateurish poorly prepared candidate , and people want to elect “can do” competent people, not people who they PERCEIVE don’t know what they are doing. Make sure you dress in a business casual or at least, clean shirt and jeans. Maintain good eye contact, speak clearly, slowly enough for people not to miss what you are saying, have good lighting (perhaps number one issue)..use a tripod at the very least…and review the video with your friends / supporters before EVER uploading. Make sure it puts you in a good light (pun intended) and with clear and sincere messages.

THIS ARE JUST A FEW NOTES
We need Occupiers not only running, but winning Mayoral, Gubernatorial positions, as well as Sheriff positions and judge positions.

M A K E—-IT—-SO—-NUMBER——ONE ! :)
`99 

This is what a Troll said to me on twitter..in fact…here is the quote in a screen capture in my timeline…

Well, I am not clear if they mean to say my Support of Occupy Oakland means I support “thugs” or my support for Anonymous means I support “thugs”…since that
person was not very articulate in signifying the object of their angst..however,
I am proud to support both Occupy Oakand and Anonymous…because BOTH
are fighting for the 99 percent…something this Clown of the Earth obviously
will never understand. 

“If you tell yourself you are defeated, your enemy has already defeated you” - 99percenters

There is a great old story of an elephant who was tied with a small rope he could not break as a baby, tried and failed, quit trying, and was tied with the same small rope, but though as an adult, he was kept tied with a rope he could break easily if he tried, but he convinced himself the rope was unbreakable, so his mind kept him a prisoner, not the rope. http://www.shlomifish.org/philosophy/psychology/elephant-in-the-circus/

We have people around this world who are ready to fight for change, to die for change, but , some are kept back from pushing forward to real change, and WHY?
Because they believe that change CANNOT be achieved. If it is about going after cops who perform criminal acts, they say “No jury will convict a cop, so don’t file a complaint”. If it is about voting our own Occupy candidates in, they say that voting is fixed, corrupt, and that even if you elect an Occupy candidate, they will become corrupt.

Firstly, if you say that juries will never convict a policeman, you haven’t been checking the facts around the world. Though perhaps it is harder, it does happen and if you say “Impossible” or “No jury would convict a cop”, only ONE such conviction proves you wrong.

Secondly, if you claim that the election process is fixed, I have to counter, then, are you willing to be ruled over by the 1% and their Neo-Feudal lords / mayors ?
What is YOUR solution.

It’s one thing to curse the darkness, but another to try to find a way to create even a little light, because even a small candle can defeat the darkness near itself.

The ONLY way that the Occupy movement can lose, given our numbers, our energy, is to throw up your hands and accept defeat because you think that the world doesn’t ever work the way it should. This is BEYOND apathy, it is defeatism,
it is being a Naysayer, it is obstructionistic.

If David had that mindset, he would have said..”Oh, Goliath has never been beaten, he is bigger than I am..I am a poor shepherd with only a sling..he cannot be beaten, I should run far away and hope he doesn’t find me”. BULLSHIT.

Grow a pair and DO IT. Don’t overthink it..don’t institute planned failure.

The sure way to lose, the sure way to kill change, to doom us to the status quo, is to say, ‘WE CANNOT CHANGE THINGS..”, We cannot change mayors, we cannot put rogue, criminal cops in jail.

IF the colonists had taken that approach, we would be speaking the King’s English and still be a colony with their boot on our throats.

If Americans in the WW II had taken this defeatist attitude, we would be speaking German and have a Fuhrer.

You must NOT take the attitude there is no hope, there is no reason to fight, there is no ability to change things..because if you say that..then yes, YOU are already doomed, you are lost, and things WILL never change.

`99

 http://canopycanopycanopy.com/15/our_weirdness_is_free 
ANONYMOUS, WHICH CAME INTO BEING on the online message board 4chan eight years ago, is by nature and intent difficult to define: a name employed by various groups of hackers, technologists, activists, human rights advocates, and geeks; a cluster of ideas and ideals adopted by these people and centered around the concept of anonymity; a banner for collective actions online and in the real world that have ranged from fearsome but trivial pranks to technological support for Arab revolutionaries. In recent months, Anonymous has announced audacious plans to take down the seemingly invincible Mexican drug cartels; instigated and promoted the nationwide Occupy movement; and shut down the website of the Florida Family Association, which is behind the campaign against the television show All-American Muslim, and leaked the names and credit card numbers of donors. These actions are

sometimes peaceful and legal, sometimes disruptive and illicit, often existing in a moral and legal gray area. Anonymous acts to advance political causes but also for sheer amusement.

The seemingly paradoxical nature of Anonymous has much to do with its origins on 4chan, which has become immensely popular, iconic, and opprobrious since it launched in 2003. 4chan is an image board composed of fifty-one topic-based forums ranging from anime to health and fitness, and is widely perceived to be one of the most offensive quarters of the Internet. The “random” forum, /b/, teems with pornography, racial slurs, and humor derived from defilement. Participants communicate in a language that seems to have reduced English to a bevy of vicious epithets, sneers, and text-message abbreviations. This may be shocking to outsiders, but for insiders it is the

normal state of affairs, and one of 4chan’s defining and most endearing qualities.1

Today Anonymous is associated with an irreverent, insurgent brand of activist politics. Before 2008, however, the moniker was used almost exclusively to stage pranks—to “troll,” in Internet parlance, targeting people and organizations, desecrating reputations, and revealing humiliating information. For instance, in 2009, Anonymous sought to “ruin” an eleven-year-old girl named Jessi Slaughter after her homemade video monologues, which had gained some notoriety on tween gossip site StickyDrama, were posted on 4chan. Anonymous was stirred to action by Slaughter’s brazen boasts—she claims in one video that she will “pop a glock in your mouth and make a brain slushie”—and published her phone number, address, and Twitter username, inundating her with hateful emails and threatening prank calls, circulating Photoshopped images of her and satiric remixes of her videos. When her father recorded his own rant, claiming to have “backtraced” Jessi’s tormenters and reported them to the “cyber police,” he also became an object of ridicule (and a meme). Because of such antics, Fox News had in 2007 dubbed 4chan the

1 Many assume that 4Chan is populated entirely by testosterone-fueled teenaged boys, but since conversations are not archived and users post anonymously, it is impossible to glean demographic data. (4chan is thus unique in an Internet ecosystem largely characterized by the surveillance of users and the mining of their consumer preferences by and for advertisers.)

Definition of Anonymous taken from 4chan message board.

“Internet hate machine”—a barb embraced, if ironically, by Anonymous, which responded with a grim parodic video claiming to be “the face of chaos,” “harbingers of judgment” who “laugh at the face of tragedy.” But in the past few years Anonymous has adopted the strategy of trolling as part of somewhat straightforward protest campaigns. The question is: How and why has the anarchic “hate machine” been transformed into one of the most adroit and effective political operations of recent times?

Looking for insights into Anonymous’s surprising metamorphosis, I began an anthropological study of the group in 2008. That year Anonymous

launched a trolling attack against the Church of Scientology, which within mere weeks came to include earnest street demonstrations organized using conventional activist strategies. Anonymous became even more widely known two years later as a result of Operation Payback, a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) campaign that paralyzed the websites of financial institutions refusing to transfer funds from donors to WikiLeaks, in the name of free speech. But even then, Anonymous was still generally misunderstood, described by news reports alternately as “online activists,” “global cyberwarriors,” and “cyber vigilantes.”

The nature of this confusion is not hard to understand. Beyond a foundational commitment to anonymity and the free flow of information, Anonymous has no consistent philosophy or political program. Though Anonymous has increasingly devoted its energies to (and become known for) digital dissent and direct action around various “ops,” it has no definite trajectory. Sometimes coy and playful, sometimes macabre and sinister, often all at once, Anonymous is still animated by a collective will toward mischief—toward “lulz,” a plural bastardization of the portmanteau LOL (laugh out loud). Lulz represent

“You done goofed!” Jessi Slaughter and her father respond to Anonymous.

an ethos as much as an objective. Even as Anonymous has distinguished itself from 4chan and from trolling for its own sake, the underlying character of the group—and the form of its politics—are still intimately connected to the raucous culture of online message boards. (For more on the culture of anonymity, see David Auerbach’s extensive essay “Anonymity as Culture,” soon to be published in this issue of Triple Canopy.)

The Painted Smile

The spirit of lulz is not particular to Anonymous, the Internet, trolling, or our times. The Dadaists and Yippies shared a similarly rowdy disposition, as did the Situationists and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers; 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 WTO textile-industry conference as a means of controlling workers, to the applause of the management-class crowd. These transgressions serve many purposes, upending the conventions—and highlighting the absurdities—of a political system within which substantive change no longer seems possible, and generating the kind of spectacles that elicit coverage from the mainstream media. But the aforementioned groups were conceived as radical political enterprises, with a limited purview and a vanguardist composition. What sets Anonymous apart is its fluid membership and organic political evolution, along with its combination of feral tricksterism and expert online organizing.

Which is to say Anonymous follows a logic all its own. Partly because of its maverick image and lulzy

A small fire demands constant tending.

A bonfire can be let alone.

A conflagration spreads.

@papersplx

antics, the group has attracted considerable attention—Anonymous was recently named Time’s number four person of the year in the magazine’s “people’s choice” poll—and a tremendous number of adherents, or Anons. Of course, the group’s organizing principle—anonymity—makes it impossible to tell how many people are involved.

Participation is fluid, and Anonymous includes hard-core hackers as well as people who contribute by editing videos, penning manifestos, or publicizing actions. Then there are myriad sympathizers who may not spend hours in chat rooms but will heed commands to join DDoS attacks and repost messages sent by Anonymous Twitter accounts, acting as both mercenary army and street team. Anonymous has developed a loose structure, with technical resources such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) being run and controlled by a handful of elites, but these elites have erected no formal barriers to participation, such as initiation guidelines or screening processes, and ethical norms tend to be established consensually and enforced by all.

Political operations often come together

Dear Fox News video by Anonymous, 2007.

haphazardly. Often lacking an overarching strategy, Anonymous operates tactically, along the lines proposed by the French Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau. “Because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing,’” he writes in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). “Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities.’ The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them.” This approach could easily devolve into unfocused operations that dissipate the group’s collective strength. But acting “on the wing” leverages

Anonymous’s fluid structure, giving Anons an advantage, however temporary, over traditional institutions—corporations, states, political parties—that function according to unified plans. De Certeau pointedly distinguishes this as strategy, which “postulates a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base from which relations with an exteriority composed of targets or threats … can be managed.” Anonymous is not bound to any such place, and therefore does not harbor what de Certeau calls “a Cartesian attitude.”

For example: One infamous attack against security firm HBGary gained steam only after hackers discovered, in the course of some retaliatory trolling, that multiple security companies were conspiring to undermine WikiLeaks and discredit its supporters. Because anyone can take the name—as many different, seemingly unrelated affiliations have done—operations can be intensified quickly after a weakness on the part of the target is discovered, or shut down immediately if trouble or internal controversy arises. And so Anonymous’s overall direction remains somewhat opaque even to those on the inside.

Nevertheless, Anonymous’s activities, however disparate and paradoxical on their surface, have

enlarge image

Letter posted by Anonymous on the hacked HBGary website, 2011.

tapped into a deep disenchantment with the political status quo, without positing a utopian vision—or any overarching agenda—in response. Anonymous acts in a way that is irreverent, often destructive, occasionally vindictive, and generally disdainful of the law, but it also offers an object lesson in what Frankfurt School philosopher Ernst Bloch calls “the principle of hope.” In his three-volume work Das Prinzip Hoffnung (1938-47), Bloch attends to a stunningly diverse number of signs, symbols, and artifacts from different historical eras, ranging from dreams to fairy tales, in order to remind us that the desire for a better

world is always in our midst. Bloch works as a philosophical archaeologist, excavating forgotten messages in songs, poems, and rituals. They do not represent hope in the religious sense, or even utopia—there is no vision of transcending our institutions, much less history—but they do hold latent possibilities that in certain conditions can be activated and perhaps lead to new political realities. “The door that is at least half-open, when it appears to open onto pleasant objects, is marked hope,” Bloch writes.

The emergence of Anonymous from one of the seediest places on the Internet seems to me an enactment of Bloch’s principle of hope. What started as a network of trolls has become, much of the time, a force for good in the world; what started as a reaction to the Church of Scientology has come to encompass free-speech causes from Tunisia to Zuccotti Park. While Anonymous has not put forward any programmatic plan to topple institutions or change unjust laws, it has made evading them seem easy and desirable. To those donning the Guy Fawkes mask associated with Anonymous, this—and not the commercialized, “transparent” social networking of Facebook—is the promise of the Internet, and it entails trading

individualism for collectivism.

The Ways of the Mask

If one term embodies the paradoxical and contradictory character of Anonymous—which is now serious in action and frivolous by design; made up of committed activists and agents of mischief—it is lulz. These four letters denote the pleasures attained from generating and sharing jokes and memes such as LOLcats and the cartoon pedophile mascot Pedobear. But they also suggest how easily and casually trolls can violently undermine the sense of security enjoyed by carefree denizens of the “real world” by, for instance, ordering scores of unpaid pizzas to be delivered to a single address, or publishing one’s phone number and private communications and credit-card numbers and hard-drive contents and any other information one might think to be “personal” or secure. Perhaps most important, lulz-oriented actions puncture the consensus around our politics and ethics, our social lives, our aesthetic sensibilities, the inviolability of the world as it is; trolls invalidate that world by gesturing toward the possibility for Internet geeks to destroy it—to pull the carpet from under us—whenever they feel the urge and without warning.

Nowhere is this sense of a world outside of, and

formed in opposition to, the one most of us inhabit more palpable than on 4chan. Anonymity is essential to 4chan, too; one might call anonymity its ground rule, and the dominant aspect of the culture the board has created. While trolling has often been the purview of boastful, self-aggrandizing cliques—for instance, the Gay Niggers’ Association of America and its ex-president, Weev—on 4chan trolling is largely crowd-sourced, and participants are strongly discouraged from identifying themselves, instead focusing on the collective pursuit of “epic wins.”

Anonymous began trolling the Church of Scientology in January 2008 in pursuit of such an

epic win, impelled by Scientology’s threats to sue websites that refused to take down the infamous internal recruitment video of Tom Cruise praising the church’s efforts to “create new and better realities.” Per the Barbra Streisand Effect (any attempt to censor information that has already been published only serves to draw more attention), the leaked video went viral. Though intended as serious and persuasive, legitimating Scientology through the power of Cruise’s celebrity, Internet geeks (and most others) viewed the video as a pathetic (not to mention hilarious) attempt to bestow credibility on pseudoscience. Once the church deployed its lawyers, one participant told me, Anonymous switched from mischief to “ultra-coordinated motherfuckary”: DDoS attacks to jam Scientology websites, ordering unpaid pizzas to churches across North America, sending images of nude body parts to church fax machines, and relentless phone pranking, especially of the Dianetics hotline.

Anonymous’s willingness to wreak havoc in pursuit of lulz, but also in defense of free speech and in opposition to the malfeasances and deceptions of Scientology, calls to mind the nineteenth-century European “social bandits” described by historian

Eric Hobsbawm in his 1959 book Primitive Rebels. These bandits are members of mafias, secret societies, religious sects, urban mobs, and outlaw gangs; they are ultimately thugs, but, according to Hobsbawn, they nurture a faintly revolutionary spirit: Often when they plunder they also redistribute goods to the poor, or offer them protection against other bandits. Hobsbawm defines the bandits as “pre-political” figures “who have not yet found, or only begun to find, a specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world.” Anonymous has worked toward finding that language with remarkable celerity since it launched Project Chanology. Soon after the DDoS attacks and pranks, Anonymous shifted tactics, disseminating incriminating facts about Scientology and forging bonds with an older generation of dissidents, highlighting the church’s use of censorship and abuse of human rights. An extempore spout of trolling had thus given birth to an earnest activist endeavor. Anonymous had emerged from its online sanctuary and set to improve the world. According to Hobsbawm, this is a conventional path taken by bandits and revolutionaries alike. “The recognition that profound and fundamental changes take place in society does not depend on the belief that utopia is

realizable,” he writes.

Ironically, Anonymous’s transformation coincided with the publication of a video lampooning Scientology: Message to Scientology, which calls for a “systematic” dismantling of the church for “our own enjoyment.” The video, one of many urging people to take action against the church, provoked a discussion among Anons in IRC rooms about whether they should protest in earnest or remain faithful to Anonymous’s madcap roots. One of the editors of Message to Scientology summarized:

<Av>there were people who didnt think anonymous or 4chan should take to the streets 

<Av>but the consensus to actually do it came relatively easily for us after the video

<Av>it seemed to be great timing, the right video at the right moment

And so on February 10, 2008, thousands of Anons and supporters hit the streets in cities around the world for a day of action against Scientology, with events straddling the line between serious political protest and carnivalesque shenanigans. Six months after being labeled “the Internet hate machine,” Anonymous had legions of followers in

Anonymous “Raidfag Wench” protesting the Church of Scientology, 2008.

the real world—not just geeks and hackers hammering at their keyboards—who were seizing on the group’s name, on its ethic of anonymity and concomitant iconography. That evening, men in Guy Fawkes masks and black suits with signs announcing “We Are the Internet” could be seen on cable-news shows around the world. A common refrain at these protests, repeated to me by one demonstrator in Dublin: “At least our weirdness is free.”

For many Anons, the campaign validated work that had preceded Project Chanology: the organization of energies and antagonisms into a political form, through experimentation and practice. In the following weeks and months they continued to protest Scientology’s relentless legal and extralegal crackdown on its critics, especially those who dared to disclose or circulate internal documents (which the church refers to as “secret scriptures”). Other Anons simply returned to their corners of the Internet; many of them now contest Anonymous’s incipient political sensibility, deriding their peers as “moralfags” on 4chan, preferring to troll middle school girls and trade pornography.2 But the moralfags have not disavowed deviance—it

2 It is common on 4chan to use “-fag” as a derisive, if not actually homophobic, suffix.

Message to Scientology video by Anonymous, 2008.

is, after all, part of the fabric of their culture. In 2009, for instance, a group of anons executed Operation Slickpubes, in which a streaker slathered in Vaseline and pubic hair terrorized the New York City Scientology headquarters. Such hijinks contrast with the moral narrative implied by Hobsbawm, whereby bandits could only become viable political actors by giving up their menacing tactics and buying into the conventional forms of power. For Hobsbawm, the bandit is pitted against “the forces of the new society which he cannot understand. At most he can fight it and seek to destroy it.” This explains why “the bandit is often destructive and savage beyond the range of his

myth.” Today’s digital bandits, however, understand the forces of the new society and are adept at harnessing them as means of creative destruction.

#BotnetsforJustice

It is not hard to understand why Scientology is an ideal target among the many geeks and hackers who make up the ranks of Anonymous. Scientology is a proprietary and secretive religion of pseudoscience, complete with a cultish idiom and customs, in thrall of fake technology (most prominently the e-meter) and “advanced technology,” the church’s term for its spiritual teachings. Scientology exists almost as a fun-house-mirror inversion of the geek and hacker world, which is so heavily invested in the production and use of workable technology and the eradication of nonsense. Scientology is the evil doppelgänger of anonymous, geeky Internet culture. But would that desire to congregate under the same alias—what media theorist Marco Desiiris calls an “improper name”—be diminished by a less perfect enemy?

Apparently not—or, the perfect ally works just as well. Two years after Operation Chanology was launched, a different group of Anons initiated a second wave of Operation Payback, again without much foresight or planning. According to an Anonymous source, the enterprise was organized by AnonOps (a branch of Anonymous) on IRC,

announced on a blog, publicized on 4chan and Twitter, and finally picked up by the mainstream media. Thanks to the political firestorm caused by the release of a cache of classified diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks, AnonOps was able to command an infantry of thousands (assisted by botnets) to paralyze the websites of PayPal and Mastercard by running a program called Low Orbit Ion Cannon. “Someone in the media noticed,” recalled one Anonymous participant who took part in the attack.

A: and within a few hrs 

A: it went viral 

A: we sat and watched numbers [of IRC channel population] rise 

A: from around 70 

A: which was about the lowest we had ever been 

A: we were saying wow it’s gonna be 500 soon 

A: (our previous high was ~700) 

A: then we passed that 

A: then we hit 1000 

A: then the madness broke A: and we got to >7000 

A: we had to suddenly increase

server numbers 

A: and it was a crazy crazy time 

A: we were stunned and a little frightened tbh [to be honest]

By the end of 2010, a new Anonymous army seemed to have arisen, and in the ensuing months AnonOps worked to enable citizens to bypass government filtering in Malaysia and hacked the agricultural-biotech giant Monsanto in the name of environmental rights, among dozens of other campaigns. At the time, I had been logging on to IRC as part of my anthropological research, building relationships with people whom I knew only as handles, and often shepherding journalists to Anonymous’s #reporter channel. As the operations multiplied, I became shackled to my computer for nine months, spending hours and hours in various forums. I began giving public lectures on Anonymous; videos were posted online, eliciting ample commentary from Anons. (This is a salient feature of the work of ethnographers who study what anthropologist Chris Kelty has jokingly called, contra the subaltern, the “superaltern”: those highly educated geeks who not only speak for themselves but talk back loudly and critically to those who purport to

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Directions for participating in Operation Payback, posted by Anonymous, 2010.

speak for them.)

By the end of January, Anonymous seemed to be devoting itself entirely to activist campaigns, at the expense of mischief-making, and some Anons lamented the waning of the lulz. though many more were invigorated by their contributing to the historic toppling of dictatorial regimes in the Middle East. Prompted by the Tunisian government’s blocking WikiLeaks, Anonymous announced OpTunisia on January 2, 2011; soon after, AnonOps embarked

on a series of so-called freedom operations to support the Arab Spring. Anonymous attacked government websites but soon began acting more like a human rights advocacy group, enabling citizens to circumvent censors and evade electronic surveillance and sending care packages with advice and security tools. Those packages included this urgent and humorless note clarifying the role of social media: “This is *your* revolution. It will neither be Twittered nor televised or IRC’ed. You *must* hit the streets or you *will* loose the fight.” Though many Anons were invigorated by contributing to the historic toppling of dictatorial regimes in the Middle East, for others there could be no clearer evidence of the ascendance of moralfags.

Then came Operation HBGary. In February Aaron Barr, CEO of the HBGary security firm, claimed to have “pwned” Anonymous, discovering the real identities of top operatives. In response, Anons commandeered Barr’s Twitter account and used it to spew 140-character racial slurs while following the accounts of Justin Bieber, Gay Pride, and Hitler. They hacked HBGary servers and downloaded 70,000 emails and deleted files, wiped out Barr’s iPhone and iPad, then published the company’s

data alongside Barr’s private communications for good measure. Most remarkably, Anonymous unearthed a document entitled “The WikiLeaks Threat,” which outlined how HBGary Federal (a subsidiary dealing with federal contracts) and other security companies might undermine WikiLeaks by submitting fake documents to the site. There was also evidence of plans to ruin the careers of WikiLeaks supporters, among them Salon.com writer Glenn Greenwald.

A small crew of AnonOps hackers had started with retaliatory trolling and had ended up exposing what seemed to be a conspiracy so damning that members of Congress called for an investigative committee to be established. Given that these were private firms, the evidence obtained by AnonOps could never have been procured through legal channels such as a Freedom of Information Act request. Previously, Anonymous rarely hacked to expose security flaws and access politically sensitive information, preferring to deface and disable websites. The success of Operation HBGary launched new wings of Anonymous composed of smaller, more exclusive hacker crews dedicated to exposing security vulnerabilities and generating massive disclosures of emails and

Poster regarding Anonymous’s attack on the website of the government of Nepal, OpEverest, 2011.

documents, further aligning the hackers with the goals of WikiLeaks. Some Anons took issue with the collateral damage wrought by Operation HBGary, especially the excessive leaking of personal information. The necessarily clandestine nature of such hacks was also criticized by those who saw it as counter to the ethos of transparency. At the time, however, most Anons were thrilled. One described the collective effervescence in a private message to me during the post-hack chat-room “celebration”:

AAA: great work was being accomplished 

AAA: but there was a major deficit of lulz 

biella: yep and now it has been restocked 

AAA: i think this is more of a surplus

The message to Anonymous participants and onlookers was clear: Anonymous had not become Human Rights Watch; the pursuit of a more “mature” agenda did not mean an end to lulz.

Here Comes Nobody

Upending the life of a security executive, publishing reams of personal information and corporate communications obtained illegally, and broadcasting the whole affair on Twitter may seem anathema to traditional activists, who might rather urge citizens to call their local representatives. But such acts of lulzmaking are magnetic on two levels, producing spectacular, shocking, and humorous events and images that attract media attention while simultaneously binding together the collective and rejuvenating its spirit. This runs counter to the reductive arguments about whether or not online organizing can breed the conditions necessary for serious, effective activism (see Clay Shirky in the affirmative, Malcolm Gladwell in the negative); the pursuit of lulz, and the shared technology used to do so, are means of creating a common, participatory culture. (Of course, the pursuit of lulz is also an end in and of itself.) Anonymous is sustained—and at times enlarged—not only by the effective use of communication technologies but by a culture that thrives on the tension between order and disorder, cool and hot, seriousness and lulz, anonymity and transparency.

Though Anonymous participants must cloak their

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AnonOps participants discuss the choice of targets for their attacks.

identities and often conceal their actions, the group demands transparency from state and corporate actors. To Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg, transparency means sharing personal information constantly; he has gone so far as to declare the death of privacy.3 Anonymous offers a provocative antithesis to the logic of constant self-publication, the desire to attain recognition or fame. The ethos of Anonymous is in opposition to celebrity, with the group configured as e pluribus unum: one from

3 While in 2008 Zuckerberg avowed that privacy is “the vector around which Facebook operates,” he now views Facebook’s treatment of personal information in less reverent terms: “We decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.” Nevertheless, contradictorily, he maintains that Facebook is merely “updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.”

many. It is difficult, if not impossible, to discern what or whom lies behind the mask. In a world where we post the majority of our personal data online, and states and corporations wield invasive tools to collect and market the rest, there is something profoundly hopeful in Anonymous’s effacement of the self (even if there is something deeply ironic and troubling about doxing and hacking in order to make that point). The domain of Anonymous enables participants to practice a kind of individuality beyond what anthropologist David Graeber identifies as “possessive individualism,” defined as “those deeply internalized habits of thinking and feeling” whereby we view “everything around [us] primarily as actual or potential commercial property.”

While anonymity often functions as an unspoken ethical imperative—a default mode of operation—Anons have also explicitly theorized the sublimation of identity. For instance, while preparing an op-ed for the Guardian last winter, dozens of Anons contributed to a document outlining the power and limits of anonymity. “It is the nameless collective and the procedures by which it is governed, which in the end prevail over the necessarily biased and single-minded individual,” one comment reads.

“Yet, at the same time, the individual’s ability to contribute to this communal process of the production of knowledge has never been greater.”

These ideas are often tested in practice. In late January 2011, I shared an article about Anonymous from the Washington Post on one of the group’s IRC channels. After reading the piece, many participants were indignant: The featured Anon had revealed details about his personal life to the reporter, an infraction only made worse by the fact that he had contributed little to recent operations. One highly respected IRC operator assessed the situation: “Attempting to use all the work that so many have done for your personal promotion is something i will not tolerate.” A number of Anons then called this person into a different channel, asked him to justify his actions. Unsatisfied with his answers, they z-lined him, banning him from this particular server. (A3 is the offending Anon; A0 is the IRC operator.)

A0: talk now 

AS: A3 

AS: A3 

A0: before i remove you from here 

AS: A3 

AN: A3 queir 

AN: quiet 

AS: cus he knows hes fucked 

A3: hahahaa 

AS: ohai 

A3: you believe half of that shit is true 

A0: you thinki ts funy? 

[…] 

AS: it seems about spot on from what Ive heard and seen 

A0: youre saying [the newspaper] lieD? 

A0: I WILL BRING THEM HERE NOW 

A3: Because I would never state where I live 

A0: and we will see 

A3: First of all 

A0: and what my parents do 

AS: well you tell us you are in X [the city where A3 lives] 

A0: yo would if you seek glory 

A3: I live in X 

AS: derp 

A3: That’s all 

A0: we all know where you live 

AS grabs the shotgun 

AS: A0 lets go shall we? 

A3 *runs* 

AS Master-IT brings the M16 

A3 left the room (quit: Z:lined ( dunbass)).

Yet even as Anons collectively enforce a prohibition against seeking personal fame, they do not suppress individuality. Anonymous 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. For instance, few of the Anons participating in Project Chanology were fans of the DDoS campaigns that were at first the main political weapon of AnonOps. Some, if not all, in the AnonOps network think the Project Chanology network is too small and narrowly focused to be effective. In recent weeks, these tensions have become more palpable thanks to actions organized by an offshoot called Antisec, which made donations to charities from stolen credit-card accounts in honor of “LulzXmas.” One longtime Anon accused Antisec of being “destructive and malicious and serv[ing] no good purpose other than to bring heat on this [Anonops] network.” But even if Anons don’t always agree about what is being done under the auspices of

Anonymous, they tend to respect the fact that anyone can assume the moniker. Of course, despite the lack of stable hierarchy some Anons are more active and influential than others. Anonymous abides by a particular strain of meritocratic populism, with highly motivated individuals or groups extending its networked architecture by contributing time, labor, and attention to existing enterprises or by starting their own as they see fit.

This has all left the news media quite puzzled, especially as worldwide coverage has ballooned in the wake of Project Chanology, Operation HBGary, and Operation BART, launched against San Francisco’s mass-transit agency this summer after it shut down cellular service in train tunnels to disrupt a planned protest against police violence. Anonymous has become a paradox of the age of twenty-four-hour infotainment: a cause célèbre in opposition to celebrity. Very few Anons have come forward to reveal details about themselves, despite the solicitude of the media. At the same time, Anonymous has succeeded in spreading its message as widely as possible, through every media channel at its disposal—in contrast to criminal groups that seek to remain hidden at all

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Open letter from Anonymous regarding the campaign against San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit, 2011.

costs. Anonymous manages to achieve spectacular visibility and individual invisibility at once. Even after studying Anonymous for years and recently getting to know some of the more active participants (if mostly only virtually), my impression of the group is one of faint figures lurking in the shadows.

TL;DR

In June of last year, NATO published a report entitled “Information and Information Security,” which called for Anonymous to be infiltrated and dismantled. “Observers note that Anonymous is becoming more and more sophisticated and could potentially hack into sensitive government, military, and corporate files,” the report reads. “Today, the ad hoc international group of hackers and activists is said to have thousands of operatives and has no set rules or membership.” In July, Anonymous hackers infiltrated NATO, just days after sixteen alleged Anons were arrested in the US, fourteen of them in connection with Operation Payback. (Scores of alleged Anons had previously been arrested in the UK, Spain, and Turkey.)

The impossibility of forming any comprehensive, consistent picture of Anonymous is precisely what makes the group so unsettling to governments. Anonymous has, until last summer’s arrests, effectively evaded state power. But even while eluding surveillance, Anonymous has worked to expose the collection and mining of personal information by governments and corporations—and in doing so deflated the notion that such a

thing as “private information” exists, as opposed to information in the public sphere. This distinction is one of the foundations of the neoliberal state, the very means by which individuality is constituted—and tracked. Anonymous has made it clear that there’s no difference between what we imagine to be our private and public selves—between singular individuals and fragmented “dividuals,” in Gilles Deleuze’s terms; or, at least, Anonymous has

revealed that the protection of information (which helps guarantee that difference) by a benevolent security apparatus is a myth. At the same time, Anonymous has put forward its own model—the practice of anonymity—for maintaining that very distinction, suggesting that citizens must be the guardians of their own individuality, or determine for themselves how and when it is reduced into data packets.

This message is inextricable from the platform Anonymous has established for thousands of individuals to collectively articulate dissent and to combat particular corporate and government actions, such as the passage of the controversial National Defense Authorization Act on New Year’s Eve. By unpredictably fusing conventional activism with transgression and tricksterism, Anonymous has captured the attention of an incredible variety of admirers and skeptics. And even while empowering individuals who take part in Anonymous campaigns, the network has steadfastly avoided any reformist agenda, always pointing to the disquieting fact that existing political channels so often are unlikely or unable to accommodate the demands and represent the needs of most people, no matter how clearly and correctly they are communicated.

Since last summer’s arrests Anonymous has dispersed, becoming even more decentralized, with participants relocating to obscure nodes and communicating through private IRC channels; even the AnonOps IRC network where I have spent so much time in the past year vanished for more than a month due to internal strife and a vigorous DDoS attack. But as Anons have burrowed deeper

underground, the reach of their icons has increased, especially after Anonymous began acting as a crucial, though informal, public-relations wing for Occupy Wall Street in the fall, generating videos and images and circulating information supporting the movement’s aims. (Many Anons have since become involved in various Occupy groups as organizers or by providing technology support.)

One of Occupy Wall Street’s most powerful gestures has been to position its radically democratic decision-making process, represented by the agora of the General Assembly, against the reining corporate kleptocracy. Though this brand of horizontalism has a rich history with many roots, there is a particularly strong resonance in the relationship between the formal structure and the political aspirations of Anonymous. And Anonymous is organized not only around a radical democratic (at times chaotic and anarchic) structure but also around the very concept of anonymity, here constituted as collectivity. The accumulation of too much power—especially in a single point in (virtual) space—and prestige is not only taboo but functionally very difficult. The lasting effect of Anonymous may have as much to do with

Video made by Anonymous in support of Occupy Wall Street, 2011.

facilitating alternative practices of sociality—upending the ideological divide between individualism and collectivism—as with attacks on monolithic banks and sleazy security firms. This is the nature of the threat posed by Anonymous, and it is aptly symbolized by the Guy Fawkes mask: a caricature of the face of a sixteenth-century British failed regicide and the namesake of a holiday marked by bonfires celebrating the preservation of the monarchy; used by a dystopian comic book and then Hollywood film as the visage of anarchist terrorism and now turned into an icon of resistance—everything and nothing at once.

“Internet hate machine”—a barb embraced, if ironically, by Anonymous, which responded with a grim parodic video claiming to be “the face of chaos,” “harbingers of judgment” who “laugh at the face of tragedy.” But in the past few years Anonymous has adopted the strategy of trolling as part of somewhat straightforward protest campaigns. The question is: How and why has the anarchic “hate machine” been transformed into one of the most adroit and effective political operations of recent times?

Looking for insights into Anonymous’s surprising metamorphosis, I began an anthropological study of the group in 2008. That year Anonymous

launched a trolling attack against the Church of Scientology, which within mere weeks came to include earnest street demonstrations organized using conventional activist strategies. Anonymous became even more widely known two years later as a result of Operation Payback, a distributed-denial-of-service (DDoS) campaign that paralyzed the websites of financial institutions refusing to transfer funds from donors to WikiLeaks, in the name of free speech. But even then, Anonymous was still generally misunderstood, described by news reports alternately as “online activists,” “global cyberwarriors,” and “cyber vigilantes.”

The nature of this confusion is not hard to understand. Beyond a foundational commitment to anonymity and the free flow of information, Anonymous has no consistent philosophy or political program. Though Anonymous has increasingly devoted its energies to (and become known for) digital dissent and direct action around various “ops,” it has no definite trajectory. Sometimes coy and playful, sometimes macabre and sinister, often all at once, Anonymous is still animated by a collective will toward mischief—toward “lulz,” a plural bastardization of the portmanteau LOL (laugh out loud). Lulz represent

“You done goofed!” Jessi Slaughter and her father respond to Anonymous.

an ethos as much as an objective. Even as Anonymous has distinguished itself from 4chan and from trolling for its own sake, the underlying character of the group—and the form of its politics—are still intimately connected to the raucous culture of online message boards. (For more on the culture of anonymity, see David Auerbach’s extensive essay “Anonymity as Culture,” soon to be published in this issue of Triple Canopy.)

The Painted Smile

The spirit of lulz is not particular to Anonymous, the Internet, trolling, or our times. The Dadaists and Yippies shared a similarly rowdy disposition, as did the Situationists and Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers; 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 WTO textile-industry conference as a means of controlling workers, to the applause of the management-class crowd. These transgressions serve many purposes, upending the conventions—and highlighting the absurdities—of a political system within which substantive change no longer seems possible, and generating the kind of spectacles that elicit coverage from the mainstream media. But the aforementioned groups were conceived as radical political enterprises, with a limited purview and a vanguardist composition. What sets Anonymous apart is its fluid membership and organic political evolution, along with its combination of feral tricksterism and expert online organizing.

Which is to say Anonymous follows a logic all its own. Partly because of its maverick image and lulzy antics, the group has attracted considerable attention—Anonymous was recently named Time’s number four person of the year in the magazine’s “people’s choice” poll—and a tremendous number of adherents, or Anons. Of course, the group’s organizing principle—anonymity—makes it impossible to tell how many people are involved.

Participation is fluid, and Anonymous includes hard-core hackers as well as people who contribute by editing videos, penning manifestos, or publicizing actions. Then there are myriad sympathizers who may not spend hours in chat rooms but will heed commands to join DDoS attacks and repost messages sent by Anonymous Twitter accounts, acting as both mercenary army and street team. Anonymous has developed a loose structure, with technical resources such as Internet Relay Chat (IRC) being run and controlled by a handful of elites, but these elites have erected no formal barriers to participation, such as initiation guidelines or screening processes, and ethical norms tend to be established consensually and enforced by all.

Political operations often come together haphazardly. Often lacking an overarching strategy, Anonymous operates tactically, along the lines proposed by the French Jesuit thinker Michel de Certeau. “Because it does not have a place, a tactic depends on time—it is always on the watch for opportunities that must be seized ‘on the wing,’” he writes in The Practice of Everyday Life (1980). “Whatever it wins, it does not keep. It must constantly manipulate events in order to turn them into ‘opportunities.’ The weak must continually turn to their own ends forces alien to them.” This approach could easily devolve into unfocused operations that dissipate the group’s collective strength. But acting “on the wing” leverages