dan mcquillan's List: social media campaigning IS71055A - lecture 7 - hacktivism

• Himanen (2001) argues that hacking should be understood as a new philosophy of business. He believes hackers have created a new way of working appropriate to the twenty–first century that can be captured in seven values: passion, freedom, social worth, openness, activity, caring and, the highest value, creativity.

    

  “… creativity — that is, the imaginative use of one’s own abilities, the surprising continuous surpassing of oneself and the giving to the world of a genuinely valuable contribution.” [1]

• In opposition to this business orientation, Wark (2004) believes hackers are the new radicals of the twenty–first century. Hackers in their pursuit of free creativity turn out to be, for Wark, the revolutionary class of the twenty–first century.

    

  “To hack is to differ … . Hackers create the possibility of new things entering the world. Not always great things, or even good things, but new things. In art, in science, in philosophy and culture, in any production of knowledge where data can be gathered, where information can be extracted from it, and where in that information new possibilities for the world produced, there are hackers hacking the new out of the old.” [2]
• Yet, from a different angle, Wark and Himanen are similar because both see the hack as a moment of creativity or of making a difference. This means that both definitions of hacking have become detached from material practices related to computer, communications and network technologies and have made hacking into an abstract process of creativity or of producing differences. Their analysis eliminates empirical specificity, lifting hacking out of time and space and making it into an abstract “difference engine”. For this reason their work has limited value despite their seeming identification of the core of hacking.
• To move an understanding of hacking forward we can adopt the claim that hacking means creativity but remember that hacks are also material practices that generally take place in relation to computer, communication and network technologies. Hacks involve interactions with such technologies and are thus also material practices, as opposed to the abstract practices proposed by Wark and Himanen. A hack is a form of material practice that creates a difference in computer, communication and network technologies.
• To this initial definition we should add two conclusions that emerge from the most significant existing empirical work on hacking which is found in Taylor (1999), Turkle (1984) and Thomas (2002). All three find that hackers are attracted to illicit acts, both in individual moments when they may transgress a law or social convention and in collective moments when they set up alternative technical infrastructures.
• From their work we can also draw the second proposition that hackers are deeply concerned with differentiating and identifying themselves in relation to each other through arguments over the quality of hacks couched in technical language.
• Drawing on this prior work on hackers, I suggest the initial definition to be that a hack is a material practice that involves making a difference in computer, communication and network technologies, which may well be illicit and be subject to seemingly technical criteria of excellence through which community relations are negotiated.
• o place this initial definition into the world we can look at, in turn, the two central types of material practices of hacking and their communities: cracking and free programming (free software and open source).
• Acts can be briefly outlined through four different types of cracks: day zero exploit, day zero+one exploit, social engineering and script–kidding. The acts are different types of “cracks”, and the community in which these actions are taken can be understood as being driven by a particular interaction between peer recognition and peer education. I will briefly outline these in turn.
• We can already see that at heart cracking is about taking a social ambition (to control a computer or network) and reordering technologies to fulfil that ambition, while at the same time starting from a technological basis (only being able to take certain actions due to the technologies to hand) from which only certain social ambitions may be realised. There are a number of elements here that need untangling and which this argument will return to, the core three being social, technological and causation/determination. Cracking is about using social norms to determine technological constraints and it is about using technological determinations to cause different social norms.
• Hacking the social and hacking the non–hack
• These kinds of technological determinism places technology at a “social” or macro level in which technological changes, usually a series of in retrospect linked technological changes, force widespread social change. Such views have been widely disproven across the social sciences, for a number of reasons but chiefly because they position technology outside of society and extended work in the social studies of technology and science demonstrates that technologies are as much social enterprises as anything else (Mackenzie and Wajcman, 1999). Yet despite the widely accepted refutation of technological determinism that social studies of technology offers, hacking suggests a difficulty with views that fail to take account of some kind of mutually determinative power between technologies and societies. An absolute rejection of technological determinism in any form makes activities such as FOSS programming very difficult to understand because of the interaction between determinations that constitute it.

• It follows that it is important to acknowledge a problem with accounts of technology that imply or argue that technologies do not have specific material and determinative effects. Hutchby’s work is relevant here [15] and he suggests the concept of affordances provides an answer.

    

  “… different technologies pose different affordances, and these affordances constrain the way that they can be read. … The concept of affordances is associated with the work of Gibson in the psychology of perception. For Gibson, humans, along with animals, insects, birds and fishes, orient to objects in their world (rocks, trees, rivers, etc.) in terms of what he calls their affordances: the possibilities that they offer for action. … Affordances may differ from species to species and from context to context. However, they cannot be seen as freely variable. While a tree offers an enormous range of affordances for a vast variety of species, there are things a river can afford which the tree cannot, and vice versa.” [16]

• Hutchby suggests that while technologies can be read or utilised in variable ways, they also possess “affordances” that constrain the range of actions that can be taken with a particular technology. This is useful for this account of hacking because captures the sense in which technologies both are and are not open to social influence and it reasserts the influence of technology on society. It is this mutual sense of determination and redetermination that is at the core of hacking. A further aspect of Hutchby is worth drawing out as, though he does not use the term, the everyday seems to be the site of these mutual determinations.

    

  “… the uses and the ‘values’ of things are not attached to them by interpretative procedures or internal representations but are a material aspect of the thing as it is encountered in the course of action. We are able to perceive things in terms of their affordances, which in turn are properties of things; yet those properties are not determinate or even finite, since they only emerge in the context of material encounters between actors and objects.” [17]
• Affordances productively point us toward the ways technologies are open to re–use and re–interpretation by different people, leading to different uses of technology, while at the same time noting that an individual technology is not open to any use; you cannot make ice cream with a word processing programme, though you can edit an ice cream–making recipe.
• This re–insertion of the material into everyday actions (leaving aside the issue whether the actor is human or not) allows a politics of technology to emerge in the ways different technologies create different sets of possible actions which in turn build different social norms and institutions. This politics is inaccessible to those who reject any discussion of determination and seek the neutrality of connections and associations, instead of the politics of affordances and determinisms. To keep this notion of politics to the fore in the analysis I have proposed, it seems appropriate to pull the notions of affordance and determination together. For this reason, hacking can be thought of as a community engaged in constant determinative affordances between technology and society in the realm of computer and network technologies.

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• FloodNet. This applet repeatedly tried to open nonexistent Web pages at targeted sites, such as those of former Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo, former U.S. President Bill Clinton, the Mexican Stock Exchange, and Chase Manhattan Bank. Participants in EDT's actions were asked to select words for use in constructing "bad URLs" (Web addresses of pages that don't exist on the targeted server). For example, participants were asked to input the names of Zapatistas killed by the Mexican Army in military attacks on the autonomous village of Acteal, forcing targeted servers to return an error message each time one of these "bad" URLs was requested. In a deft conceptual gesture, this process inscribed the "bad" URL in the server's error log as a way of symbolically returning the dead to those responsible for their murders. If enough people had run the applet simultaneously, they would have overloaded the server, so that when a regular visitor tried to access the site, pages would have loaded slowly or not at all.
• This disabling of a site in this way is known as a "denial of service attack." EDT's actions are analogous to sit-in demonstrations in which protestors block the entrance to a public building. Taking the civil disobedience actions of the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s as a model, EDT's members avoid destroying data and use their real names rather than hiding behind aliases. "The idea," according to Dominguez, "is not to destroy or disrupt these Web sites. It's to disturb, in the same way that paper airplanes coming through your window are going to annoy you." Dominguez alludes here to the symbolic Zapatista air force, composed entirely of paper planes.
• The FloodNet software was used again in actions against the World Trade Organization and, in 1999, the group released their online civil disobedience software to the public as part of the "Zapatista Disturbance Developer's Kit."

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• The more WikiLeaks has enjoyed mass media attention, the less it has been actually functioning as an organisation and as the service it is there to provide. At the time of writing, WikiLeaks no longer has a working infrastructure for submitting leaked documents. Curiously enough, except the tech community, nobody seems to have noticed that WikiLeaks isn't operational anymore.
• The reasons for the dysfunctionality of WikiLeaks are not simply governmental and corporate pressures, but first of all the schisms inside WikiLeaks in which the main actors are now fighting each other with lawyers. By turning itself into a personality show, WikiLeaks has become its own worst enemy and seems to have destroyed itself more efficiently than any outside operation could have accomplished.
• 4. Therefore, WikiLeaks has little new insight to offer

  • ...but it still made an impact in tunisia (everyone knew: but now everyone knew that everyone knew...)
• Disclosing diplomatic, business and military secrets, WikiLeaks aims to make the public aware that their leaders are not acting in accordance with their own public maxims and discourse. But ever since Machiavelli, this has hardly been news. While it is not news, it makes news, thus making WikiLeaks and Machiavellian politics two systems that sustain each other.[1]
• 7. The leaked cables have more literary than political quality
• Karl Popper's 20^th century model of the 'open society' continued enlightenment philosophy all the while trying to immunise itself against Jacobinism, categorical imperatives and totalitarian utopias in the tradition of Plato's republic. Hacker culture, of which WikiLeaks is a part, however turned the 'open society' back into a categorical imperative and therefore into another Platonic republic
• The leaked US cables on the corruption of the Ben Ali family, for instance, amounted to a (minor) puzzle piece in the Tunisian blogs prior to the revolution.
• WikiLeaks' scandalous but little reported abuse of the allegedly anonymous TOR web proxy system (by running TOR 'exit node' servers and monitoring their traffic to find leakable data) shows that indeed, privacy is no serious concern for the initiative. If its former anonymous operation was therefore hypocritical, the present celebrity book contract mode is just the flip side of the same coin.
• The protean potential of WikiLeaks isn't just the vaporous byproduct of rhetoric or a lack of analytical rigor. Rather, it's intrinsically related to the question it poses: Leak? Not some abstraction like 'leak as metaphor' or categorical exercise like 'what is a leak?', but leak as a verb that beckons, an invitation. One of the abiding mysteries of the modern world, given how much perfidy is perpetrated so knowingly by so many people working in consort, is how very few of these people ever repent, turn coat and rat out their friends (let alone their enemies). Before WikiLeaks, leakers and leaks were marginal in every respect: wanderers of the mediascape; lone, 'disgruntled' whistleblowers who risked their livelihoods; quixotic, precarious journalists; gruff, skeptical editors and conflicted publishers who finally, reluctantly Do the Right Thing; all of this leading, in all but the rarest cases, to whatever-happened-to?... sagas that trailed off into oblivion. Only a lunatic would do it (and kudos to them). Leaking is still completely nuts, but it's become something different now: it's gained a kind of substance‚ a site, a centre, a place, a face, a voice and above all has become a cause. One could even begin to think of it as a human right. (No one has suggested that possibility -- yet.)
• WikiLeaks has sparked serious debates about some of the most basic tenets of the national security state‚ secrecy, compartmentalisation, operational security and the like. But these debates won't play out solely as commentarial abstractions; instead, they'll take the form of policies as myriad state entities struggle to adapt their operations to leaks of every size and shape. But to the extent that these policies aim to assign meaning and structure knowledge, let's call them by their real name: epistemologies. Dueling epistemologies, maybe, but epistemologies nonetheless.
• In its hybrid of justifiably paranoiac networked OPSEC and the most banal social 'meatspace' tensions (rock stars versus roadies, sexual conquests and betrayals, etc.), WikiLeaks is a deeply individual, collaborative entity. In its insularity and secrecy too, it remains fairly bricks-and-mortar, structurally inadequate to its ambitions: it can't scale as quickly as the forces it antagonises.
• Nevertheless, WikiLeaks was, if not born, then at least educated‚ through several years' of Assange's participation on the Cypherpunks mailing list, a milieu where cryptographically untraceable 'transactions' were seen as heralding the end of the state and the inauguration of a new, stateless era: cryptoanarchy.[4] Assange drank heavily from that well, but unlike the borderline-sociopathic rightism that dominated the list and its project of establishing a new and utterly privatised antisocial contract, he's set out on a reformist mission.
• Where the leak involved the press mediating the shift of knowledge or documentation between government and business, there is of course a new kind of leakage that's much more systematic and on a scale that very regularly dwarfs Cablegate. It's endemic to networks and the corporate consolidations they enable, but we still don't have a good name for it: hack, compromise, exploit, ID theft, and dataleak are the most common names, but poor ones‚ they're all hopelessly burdened with baggage and they shift emphasis from agency to the event and the product, two hopelessly commodified forms.
• The word may not exist yet, but the phenomenon does; and Assange and WikiLeaks have played a pivotal role in its development. Anonymous began as a networked-in-real-life counter to the 'Church' of Scientology (itself a business founded on dogma and ritual). Initially, they adopted the Guy Fawkes mask from V for Vendetta as a practical measure during street protests, due to the CoS's history of surveilling and persecuting critics. But with the coordinated governmental and commercial effort to deny WikiLeaks cover and support, Anonymous mutated: it's much bigger and its disorganisation is much more advanced. The mask itself has become an aesthetic in the deepest sense: the general face of a general cause that's neither an ethical 'ethic' or an unethical 'unethic', call it an anethic ('for the lulz'). And their generality isn't the lonely, half-mad obscurity of the leaker or the criminal, syndical pseudonymity of  fraudsters; it's a spectacular public performance. To their list of epithreats‚ ‘Anonymous is legion. Anonymous does not forgive. Anonymous does not forget.'‚ they could equally add: ‘Anonymous takes.'

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• Also this year, Anons released documents on, or d0xed, several police organizations and one prominent police vendor in retaliation for heavy-handed law enforcement reaction to occupations associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement.
• NYU Professor and Anonymous researcher Biella Coleman compares Anonymous to the trickster god archetype.
• “The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the phreaker, the troller (all of whom, have their own unique elements of course, but so does each trickster),” she wrote in Social Text.
• The trickster isn’t the good guy or the bad guy, it’s the character that exposes contradictions, initiates change and moves the plot forward.

• It wasn’t until I downloaded and listened to Lulz: A corruption of LOL’s second album, Corruption, that I grasped what Anonymous really is.

   

  It’s a culture.
• It is no wonder we in the media and the wider culture are often confused. Any study of Anonymous must be anthropological, taking into account the way people exist in different societies
• The lulz (a corruption of LOL, online shorthand for laugh out loud) is the most important and abstract thing to understand about Anonymous, and perhaps the internet itself. The lulz is laughing instead of screaming. It’s a laughter of embarrassment and separation. It’s schadenfreude. It’s not the anesthetic humor that makes days go by easier, it’s humor that heightens contradictions. The lulz is laughter with pain in it. It forces you to consider injustice and hypocrisy, whichever side of it you are on in that moment.
• Cultures don’t emerge from vacuums, and Anonymous is no exception. The birthplace of Anonymous is a website called 4chan founded in 2003, that developed an “anything goes” random section known as the /b/ board. 4chan itself comes from a Japanese-language predecessor called 2chan, founded in 2001. Before that, the lulz and hacker pranking was alive and well in old-school IRC chat rooms, EFnet, and the 1990s hacker scene.
• But if you’re going back that far, add as influences Mondo 2000, and publications like RE/Search, and a billion shitty zines that were dead by 1996. But those all came from something, too.
• Hacker culture, and almost all of computer culture back in the day is shot through with the Discordian edge of 1960/1970s counter-culture and Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus. So from there it’s the yippies, Andy Kaufmann, and the Situationists we need to first comprehend. Or do we head back to early 20th century absurdists of Dada? Or maybe we venture all the way to that olde booke of epic trolling lulze, Tristram Shandy?
• Perhaps this means the 1960s Discordians are right, and there’s a Ha Ha Only Serious giggle that is cosmic in nature. That there is a part of reality, a force of physics, that is actually a Fundamental Sense of Humor. But the gravity we deal with can only be explained to an even larger amount of Dark Humor, woven into the fabric of the universe.
• Like Alan Moore’s character V who inspired Anonymous to adopt the Guy Fawkes mask as an icon and fashion item, you’re never quite sure if Anonymous is the hero or antihero. The trickster is attracted to change and the need for change, and that’s where Anonymous goes.
• But they are not your personal army – that’s Rule 44 – yes, there are rules. And when they do something, it never goes quite as planned. The internet has no neat endings.
• The trickster as myth proved so compelling that the network made it real.
• /b/ is the id of the internet, the collective unconscious’s version of the place from which the base drives arise.
• At some moment lost in its unrecorded history, /b/ and Anonymous reached an inflection point, and the id spilled into the rest of the net in the form of “ultra-coordinated motherfuckery,” as one anon described it to Coleman.
• They blocked the pool at the online kid’s game Habbo Hotel with black, generously fro’d avatars declaring “Pool is closed due to AIDS” as a protest to perceived racism on the part of Habbo’s admins.

• By enraged, I mean a pissy kind of laughing and spitting at once. For Anonymous being mad meant wanting to troll the church very hard, but it was never to get serious, because getting serious for Anons meant losing.

   

  To accomplish this op (short for operation), Anons created Project Chanology, which arguably marked both the birth of political consciousness for Anonymous, and the development of its methods of taking mass action.
• But Project Chanology was the perfect way for the people who did have a history with Scientology to jump under the wing of the haughty and lulzy collective. Scientology had pursued its detractors with mean spirited ruthlessness, delving into critic’s personal lives, following them with investigators and ruining their reputations.
• Anonymous claimed to do all those bad things too, but didn’t really, and would never promise to take care of you and teach you, but sometimes did anyway.

  • c.f. Church of the SubGenius

• But Anons caring about doing the right thing is about morality, and morality, at least straight morality, is not the lulz. Many veterans saw this as a corruption of the purity of Anonymous — the cancer that was killing /b/.

   

  On February 10, 2008, the “moralfags” took the whole thing to a new level. They set up meeting times and places in cities around the world, bought masks and made signs.
• nons left the internet by the thousands and showed up in front of church locations and Scientology centers around the world, many wearing their new Guy Fawkes masks, V for Vendetta movie merchandise sold by Warner Brothers, to obscure their identities.

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• commentators struggled to describe its ethics, sociology, and history using traditional analytical categories.
• Anonymous functions as what Marco Deseriis defines as an improper name: “The adoption of the same alias by organized collectives, affinity groups, and individual authors.

  • luther blisset
• small cadre of participants in Anonymous are hackers: these are skilled programmers, security researchers, and system administrators who identify as such. Many, although not all of them, are motivated by some version of a desire for information freedom. A much larger group I describe not as hackers, but instead provisionally, as “geeks.” These geek participants hold a number of digital media literacies such as video editing, design skills, collaborative writing tools, and enough technical know-how to be able to use Internet Relay Chat.
• part of Anonymous has over the last three years moved from disaggregated practices rooted in the culture of trolling to also become a rhizomatic and collective form of action catalyzed and moved forward by a series of world events and political interventions.
• It was primarily associated with a phenomenon—trolling—known at times to unfold there. Trolling on 4chan often consists of an unpredictable combination of the following: telephone pranking, having many unpaid pizzas sent to the target's home, DDoSing, and most especially, splattering personal information, preferably humilating, all over the Internet. Since at least 2006, “Anonymous” has conducted many such trolling campaigns. The motivating force and emotional consequence for the instigators of many acts of trolling, including those on 4chan, are cited as the “lulz,” a pluralization and bastardization of laugh out loud (lol).
• featuring Tom Cruise exuberantly praising the practices and theology of Scientology. The Church threatened online publishers, such as Gawker, with legal action (citing violation of the DMCA) if they did not take down the video. Anonymous responded by leading a series of what they call “raids” against the Church between January 15th and January 27th 2008.
• Soon after the first waves of trolling the course of Anonymous veered toward more traditional political territory. What led to this transformation? A set of videos were key instigators in this change of course. Over the span of a week in late January of 2008, the videos were made and circulated, material that led to days of fiery debate among participants in the attacks as to the purpose and meaning of their raiding. The first and the now the most famous declared war against the Church of Scientology. However this video was not a wholly sincere declaration; it was made for the lulz. Five days later another video appeared, this time recorded by a long-time critic of the Church Mark Bunker who asked Anonymous to renounce its trollish ways and deploy more serious and especially legal tactics in order to fight what he and his political cohort understood as a dangerous cult. This was soon followed by a more sincere call for political action by some participants of Anonymous. These home-brewed videos catalyzed a period of heated debate on IRC channels. One of the recurrent questions was whether Anonymous should leave the Internet to protest the Church.
• Enough participants decided to move forward to organize a global day of action—a set of protests remarkably well executed and attended. On February 10, 2008 over six thousand people protested across North America, Europe, New Zealand, and Australia, many in front of Scientology Churches. A sizable chunk of protesters at these first protests lacked what we commonly associate with street protests: political intentionality and consciousness. At the New York City protests the atmosphere was carnivalesque. People were making fun of the Church and speaking in hyper-charged Internet jargon about lol cats, long cats, the lulz, and mudkips. 
• These actions were impressive for their high levels of attendance and aesthetic bravado, which included a performance of their anonymity: Most protesters arrived wearing Guy Fawkes masks, now a staple part of Anonymous' iconography.
• “I came for the lulz but stayed for the outrage,” as one Irish Anonymous participant told me
• In September 2010 the name Anonymous was yet again mobilized on 4chan to launch a new political operation: Operation Payback. Coming in the form of politically motivated DDoS attacks, Anonymous targeted the MPAA (and eventually other organizations and companies) to show support for the famous file-sharing site, The Pirate Bay soon after its servers were DDoSed by an Indian software firm that had been hired by the MPAA to engage in this form of digital privateering.
• Like previous operations this one was first concocted on 4chan, but migrated onto IRC due to the impracticalities of coordinating on an anonymous image board. Although some participants participated in both Operation Payback and the protests against Scientology, the MPAA-targeting operation was sociologically distinct from the protests against the Church of Scientology. They were organized on different IRC networks and initiated largely by a different group of people.
• This operation, which disabled the websites of some of the world’s most powerful corporations for a few days, was exceptional. It led, for instance, to one of the most populated channels in the history of Internet Relay Chat with a large infantry of geeks logging on to IRC to watch or lend a helping hand—at one point there were over seven thousand people on the main channel. Despite the chaotic feel of interactions among these hefty numbers of participants, they managed to control the DDoS with a notable degree of deliberation and care. For instance, participants chose targets through polling, collectively wrote documents to explain who to and who not to attack, and constantly reminded other participants of this on IRC.

  • like a GA + working groups combined
• some, like a number of geeks and hackers, were ethically appraising the use of DDoS as a tactic for protest and dissent.4
• In late December soon after these attacks waned, Anonymous lent a helping hand in what seemed to be an unlikely place: Tunisia. They did so well before the North American and European media started to report with any depth and accuracy on the protests against the government brewing so strongly on the ground.
• On January 2, 2011 Anonymous initiated “OpTunisia” after the government blocked Wikileaks from the Internet and they continued to offer aid as street protests more strongly swept the country. In keeping with tradition, they DDoSed government and tourist websites, but also funneled videos of the street violence out of Tunisia and created packets for Tunisian cyberactivists and protesters providing information for evading governmental surveillance.
• In the Anonymous care packet, some anons also gestured toward the very limits of their own cyberacitivism by stating “This is *your* revolution. It will neither be Twittered nor televised or [sic] IRC'ed. You *must* hit the streets or you *will* loose [sic] the fight. Always stay safe, once you got [sic] arrested you cannot do anything for yourself or your people. Your government *is* watching you."
• OpTunisia represented another turning point in the political formation of Anonymous as a protest movement. Whereas most previous operations resided in the realm of Internet politics or censorship, this operation moved squarely into human rights activism as it converged with an existing social movement. OpTunisia also attracted a large number of participants.
• To grasp some of the power dynamics at play in Anonymous, it is imperative to address the technical architecture where many spend a significant time chatting and coordinating action: Internet Relay Chat. And it is worth emphasizing that there are currently two distinct and unconnected IRC networks where participants coordinate different efforts: Anonet and Anonops.
• There are some channels devoted to social topics and lighthearted and humorous (ie: lulzy) banter, as many participants still value the lulz. The lulz provides “a release valve,” as one participant explained, a valve that makes the hard and sometimes depressing work of political engagement more bearable.

• Finally, to understand the dynamics of power and authority in Anonymous one must confront what is one of the most interesting, prevalent, and socially-vibrant norms within Anonymous: its anti-leader and anti-celebrity ethic. This ethic that modulates, even if it does not fully eliminate, the concentration of power. Anonymous provides what Mike Wesch had described as “a scathing critique of the postmodern cult of celebrity, individualism, and identity while serving itself as the inverted alternative.” 6 It is key to note that participants do not only wax philosophical about this commitment; they enact it. Participants remind each other with remarkable frequency that one should not behave like a leader, nor seek personal attention in the media, calling the practice “name fagging” or “leaderfagging.””7  If you do 'leaderfag', you most certainly will receive a private or public drubbing, and if you have called a lot of attention to yourself, then with a mere keystroke, you might be instantly banished from IRC.

   

    I was recently witness to just this very act after a participant had been too public about himself to a reporter, an anon who had not even built social capital by putting himself at risk participating in the DDoS attacks. After reading the article where he had been featured, one interlocutor condensed the collective mood in a mere sentence: “Attempting to use all the work that so many have done for your personal promotion is something i will not tolerate.” Then he was killed off— exiled from the IRC network
• A more compelling rendition of these power dynamics would examine the dialectic between the creation of centralized power and its dispersal, which is common to many other geeky and hacker domains of collaboration. The uneasy relation between these two tendencies is partially resolved when anons constantly remind each other to refrain from behaving like a leader, and thus push participants to strive for consensus as the preferred mode of decision-making.
• We can locate the political arms of Anonymous by virtue of the IRC networks they use, the regular participants who show up to contribute their time and their labor, the messages they broadcast via videos, manifestos, and messages, and the norms by which they devise, enact, and tranform.
• What we can note about Anonymous is that since the winter of 2008 it has become a political gateway for geeks (and others) to take action. Among other opportunities, Anonymous provides discrete micro-protest possibilities that aren't otherwise present in a way that allows individuals to be part of something greater. You don't have to fill out a form with your personal information, you aren't being asked to send money, you don't even have to even give your name but you do feel like you are actually part of something larger. The decision to engage in political action has to happen somehow, via a concrete path of action, a set of events, or influences; Anonymous is precisely that path for many.

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