Anonymous is a banner used by individuals and as well as multiple, unconnected groups unfurling operations across the globe from Brazil to the Philippines, from the Dominican Republic to India. Since 2008, activists have used the name to organize diverse forms of collective action, ranging from street protests to web site defacement. Their iconography—Guy Fawkes masks and headless suited men—symbolically asserts the idea of anonymity, which they embody in deed and words. To study and grasp a phenomenon that proudly announces itself “Anonymous” might strike one as a futile and absurd exercise or exercise in futility and absurdity. A task condemned to failure.
Over the last five years, I felt the sting of disorienting madness as I descended deep down the multiple rabbit holes they dug. Unable to distinguish truth from lies, and unable to keep up with the explosive number of political operations underway at one time, a grinding doubt settled deep into my mind many times. There was no way I could get the story right, get at all the nuances, much less all the cabals that populate Anonymous, I often told myself. Gaining access and the trust of scores of individuals who tunnel and mine and undermine, who desire to be incomprehensible, concealed and enigmatic to slightly rephrase Nietzsche’s opening to DayBreak, often felt like an impossible task.
They have been devilishly hard to study but not impossible. Time has been a kind friend. Sticking around over a five year period has certainly helped, especially as I met more participants in person. I protested with Anonymous on the streets in New York City and Dublin and attended court hearings as hackers received sometimes light, sometimes stiff sentences. A handful would come by to say hello or thank me heartily after a public talk. I spent time with them in pubs in Europe and bars in North America, and even had the rare opportunity to picnic with a group of them in a sun-drenched park in an area of the world—Ireland—when it was undergoing a rare two week heatwave. Although I preferred evenings in the pubs and day time picnics, I spent most of my time with them online using various chatting protocols, usually Internet Relay Chat (IRC).
As will come as no surprise, the ethical conundrums flowing out of my research were many, so many it is a theme I explore time again in the book now under works. But I can’t help but think of what anthropologist Danilyn Rutherford calls—kinky empiricism—a term she uses to define the (often tortured) nature of anthropological research. By kinky she means to convey a shape which captures the notion that knowledge is not smooth or straightforward but comes with knots and kinks. By kinky she also means to convey a spirit of “S and M and other queer elaborations of established scenarios, relationships, and things.” Foremost, she introduces kinky empiricism to portray the deeply ethical character of anthropological research: “[anthropological] methods create obligations, obligations that compel those who seek knowledge to put themselves on the line by making truth claims that they know will intervene within setting and among the people they describe.”
My obligations to Anonymous have been many and they range from writing letters to judges pleading for leniency, to translating their world to multiple publics. But the one obligation on my mind the most these days is self-imposed and it has to do with my desire to balance between two opposing forces: the rational and the mystical, the Apollonian force of empiricism and logic, and the Dionysian force of pleasure and ecstasy.
In my writings, I want to stamp out misinformation, to be critical of some of their actions, and to clear up the confusion of the so-called chaos in Anonymous; they are sensible, and must be rendered such, given that nation-states and prosecutors and judges would like to cast them as mere criminals unwilling to entertain their actions as politically motivated. But I also want to keep the magic of Anonymous alive. To disenchant them would be, in my estimation, tantamount to breaking my own moral pact and also to miss what makes them interesting.
Only with time and the judgements of others (and, hopefully, through the process of writing my book) will I know whether I have the cunning to simultaneously make chaos seem like order and order seem like chaos, the cunning necessary to give justice to Anonymous. For now, I will leave you with a rather Apollonian nugget, a report I wrote for the Center for International Governance Innovation, that seeks to stamp out some misinformation about Anonymous through a detailed, though basic, introduction to their politics and hope I can bring you some nugget of pleasure and ecstasy in the not so distant future.
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