you know the rules, and so do i
I’ve been researching and browsing the world of 4chan and it has been extremely exasperating. My reactions include: laughter, fear, confusion, anger, and being rickroll’d.
My Night with Anonymous
My attempts to get to know Anonymous met with difficulty, but some small success.
Who is Anonymous? Report
That’s a good question. My research on the group hasn’t lead me to any real cohesive identity outside of the heady dogma that inhabits the Encyclopedia Dramatica pages I’ve already posted to the blog. What I have figured out though, is that sometimes Anonymous is no better than the groups they vilify. I mentioned that Anonymous targeted a white supremacist radio talk show host about a year ago, a guy by the name of Hal Turner. Here’s a video recounting the raid.
WARNING - STRONG LANGUAGE, RACIST HUMOR
However, although Anonymous targeted this obvious scumbag, the Encyclopedia Dramatica site is also swarming with racist humor well beyond what’s acceptable in the mainstream media, as you can see in the video. Additionally, a little searching showed that Anonymous also congregates on the “chan” sites, which are imageboards where users can post a picture and text in different threads without usernames, hence the “Anonymous” name. Since users can post any image or text they want within US law, from what I’ve heard, these sites contain pretty racy content, even for the Internet (I’ve heard of the chans referred to as the “asshole of the Internet,” if you’ll pardon the vernacular).
I have no idea if I should be jumping into these websites, considering most of the content probably isn’t going to be appropriate for an academic setting. However, I’m also really tempted to discover what the background of this Internet culture is, that both attacks racists and acts racist. It’s bizarre. Maybe they are just a random mass of people with no identity, like the overly dramatic descriptions on their website.
War on the Intertubes - Anonymous vs. Scientology
As I mentioned in the introductory post to my topic, there’s currently a “war” raging over the Internet right now, and it’s spilling into the real world. The war involves two sides - the Church of Scientology, founded by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard, and Anonymous, a loosely organized group of Internet users, some of them savvy in the use of hacking and other internet mischief.
As you can probably tell from the flyer, one of the main goals of Anonymous is to spread information about the Church through the Internet. Apparently, from the Internet’s conception, the Church has done their best to prevent information concerning their organization from reaching the Net, citing copyright infringement. Scientology is unique among religions in this regard, as the free circulation of religious texts and information would generally be beneficial to a religion, while Scientology charges more and more money for progressively in-depth texts. While there are many sites to claim free Bibles, Torahs, and Qu’rans (www.freeholybible.com, www.internetmuslim.com/Dawah_Center/library.htm, etc) Scientology’s “Dianetics” will cost you money, no matter how much Internet hunting one does (although Anonymous has apparently made some efforts to spread as many of the Church’s texts as possible through torrents and Rapidsearch).
It appears that Anonymous has taken it upon themselves to attack what most people would consider societal ills. In class, the question was raised as to how Anonymous chooses their targets. As I mentioned, they also have brought grief to pedophiles and white supremacists, although the Scientology protests are the first time their activism has breached into the real world. Anonymous deems themselves a collective mass of Internet users, according to them, “Anonymous is not a person nor a group, Anonymous is an idea. Anonymous is humanity when the gloves come off”. It seems that they’re utilizing the form of free speech that’s touted by other extreme groups, such as white supremacists - ironically one of their targets. Since they’re demonstrating intolerance towards intolerant groups who most would agree the world would be better off without, where does that leave them?
It could be that the Internet is a breeding ground for such groups. There’s been much talk about the negative aspect of the Internet of allowing hate groups and other fringe individuals to unify. However, if anonymous represents what they claim to, ie, the unmitigated majority, do they manage to outweigh the negative groups?
My Media Traveler’s Log
So far, it looks like my media traveler’s log is going to concentrate on the Internet group known as Anonymous. I originally learned about them through an anti-Scientology group on Facebook, and I discovered that this group had planned worldwide protests of the religion on on the 10th of February, coordinating the entire series of events through the internet, largely using YouTube (I have to admit, I breached my no-Google seal to research this topic). They also seem to coordinate through a website known as Encyclopedia Dramatica, which seems to be some sort of bizarre humor site, kind of like Collegehumor for sociopaths. I have a feeling I may be dealing with some unsavory internet characters in this case, given some of their “manifestos” on their website, which largely look ripped out of Fight Club with a few internet-isms thrown in. Fox News, that beacon of reliable and trustworthy information, has run a short piece on the group, with quotes such as this:
“They are hackers on steroids, treating the Web like a real-life video game, sacking Web sites, creating chaos and disrupting innocent people’s lives.”
Apparently the Church of Scientology wasn’t their first target. In late 2006, they apparently also protested (a loose term, as these protests were largely prank calls and low-power hacking attacks) a white supremacist by the name of Hal Turner, and apparently drove his radio show’s bandwidth costs through the roof. Anyone with a goal like that is OK in my book, but right now I’m trying to weigh my interest in this group against having to potentially deal with a group of bizarre internet vigilantes. Whatever the case, it’s interesting, and perhaps inspiring, to see this internet activism phenomenon spill over into the real world.
