Social Change in The Age of Anonymous

We watched We Are Legion: The story of the Hacktivists  in class October 23rd. It is a documentary about Anonymous, a very loosely associated group of hackers or hacktivists, as they've come to be known.

The film explores some of the history of Anonymous, from early hacktivists groups like Cult of the Dead Cow to its beginning on the website 4Chan. Through interviews with those involved, some of which have served or are facing time in prison, writers and academics the documentary paints the collectives narrative as a rise from Internet shits and giggles to a global social movement.

Brian Mettinbrink's story was the most fascinating to me. By participating in a distributed denial of service (DDos) attack Brian was sentenced to a year in federal prison and one year supervised release in which he cannot touch a computer. A DDos attack is the internet version of a sit in. Quite an extreme punishment for an act of protest.

The DDos on Scientology was named Chanology. Anonymous took down Paypal, Visa and Mastercard when they froze transaction to Wikileaks. They helped provide internet during the Arab Spring and have served as tech support to the Occupy movements.

Inspired by the last scene in V for Vendetta, where the masses march to parliament, Anonymous has adopted the Guy Fawkes mask. 

Here is their video announcing that they were joining OWS.

What I like most about the idea of Anonymous is that they are not unified entity with a list of demands. There is no set of tenets they must swear by. Some members do not agree that Anonymous should be involved in social change with an agenda. The fact that enough members have the conviction to use their skills to fight power, to push for what they believe is positive social change, that they have changed what Anonymous is, to me, is extremely encouraging. A ray of hope in a dark world.


11/17/12

Anonymous targets Israel.