Why would you send an anthropologist — as this book’s author, Gabriella Coleman, is — to study Anonymous, the indescribable hacktivist phenomenon whose operations (‘ops’) and giddy, menacing, profane video-manifestos have seized the media and the public consciousness from 2006 to the present day? Because Anonymous is, above all, an anthropological phenomenon.
At first glance, you might think that the Anonymous story — the Guy Fawkes-mask-wearing, meme-spewing, terrifying, hilarious non-collective that hacked the church of scientology, the government of Tunisia, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, and the Pentagon (for starters) — is a story about computer security, or youthful alienation, or political activism.
But political activism isn’t anything new, and activists have always been early adopters of technology. When I was an anti-war activist in 1980s Toronto, 98 per cent of my time was spent addressing and stuffing envelopes, and the other two per cent figuring out what went into them. Activists very quickly discovered that technology could replace stamps and envelopes with free, superior electronic equivalents, and never looked back.
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