From Lulz to Liberation: A primer on Anonymous

Above: An old man uses the internet – could he be “the Anonymous”?

TL;DR Version: What is Anonymous? a) Internet Vigilante Group? b) Internet Hate Machine? c) Millions of web-surfers with black-humour and an appetite for the offensive? d) Hackers on steroids? e) All of the above.

˙ǝʌoqɐ ǝɥʇ ɟo ןןɐ (ǝ :ɹǝʍsuɐ

From Lulz to Liberation
by Michael Toledano

Like so many old people, overwhelmed by the complexity of the internet and lost in an eternal struggle to comprehend “the google” the mass media doesn’t quite know what to make of Anonymous.

Keeping true to their spirit of lazy journalism and political censorship, outlets like CNN, the BBC, and Fox have declined to provide a proper explanation of the group’s make-up, purpose, or structure. Reporting on sporadic waves of Anonymous arrestees or uniformly mislabeling Anonymous as a finite collective of “cyber-pranksters,” “cyber-terrorists,” “hackers,” “cyber-criminals,” or “hacktivists,” the mass media is already exploiting Anonymous as an abstract cyber-threat—a phenomenon which is more worthy of fear than explanation.

Certainly, there exists within Anonymous an increasingly active political contingent, threatening the status quo with real world protests and impressive feats of hacktivism. For instance, a subset of Anonymous now acts as an important affinity group for New York’s ongoing #OCCUPYWALLSTREET protest, while an even larger group famously picketing the Church of Scientology throughout 2008 and 2009. Similarly, Anonymous has been on the frontlines of cyber-war, aiding revolutionaries in Tunisia, Libya, Iran, Syria, and Egypt by hacking down government websites or leaking information, fighting cyber-censorship in Australia (under the hilarious banner of Operation Titstorm), and attacking Paypal, Visa, Amazon, and Mastercard in response to Wikileaks censorship (Operation Avenge Assange).

However, this politically vocal subset of Anonymous activists and hacktivists represents only a marginal division of the Anonymous mass, and one which is comprised of treacherous “moralfags” in the eyes of many Anons (fag denotes everything in Anonymous quarters of the internet—thus “moralfags” are those who wish to rally the power of Anonymous behind the greater moral good, newfags are new users, oldfags are Anonymous veterans, etc.). To focus exclusively on this active, fringe contingent is to misrepresent the group as a whole. Any serious attempt to understand the moralfag phenomenon without taking into account the online atmosphere from which they emerged is already hopelessly misguided. In order to understand Anonymous, we must look to the heterogeneous mass of porn-addicted teenagers and lolcat lovers that make up its human base, its ideological core, and its collective past.

Above: An anonymous poster earns a rare ban on 4chan for suggesting the unthinkable.

It began with a series of simple image-boards, public forums where users could share images, text, and animated gifs. The prototype is Japan’s 2chan.net (2channel), a site for the discussion of anime and otaku culture, comprised of a number of different discussion boards. By default, user comments are posted anonymously and without registration. The site holds no permanent record of posts, meaning that unless a discussion thread is saved in a screenshot it disappears forever once active discussion has ceased. Moderators are present, but act in a limited capacity.

In 2003, this image board format was introduced to English speaking audiences with the launch of 4chan.org. Now an immensely popular hub of discussion and debauchery, with around 700,000 posts per day and 9 million monthly visitors, 4chan has become colloquially known as “the asshole of the internets.” Although 4chan contains 48 separate discussion boards (on topics as diverse as “Literature” and “Sexy Beautiful Women”), its centerpiece has always been “/b/”—a random discussion board with an anything goes ethos. As Mattathias Schwartz wrote for a New York Times piece on internet trolls, “Measured in terms of depravity, insularity and traffic-driven turnover, the culture of /b/ has little precedent. /b/ reads like the inside of a high-school bathroom stall, or an obscene telephone party line, or a blog with no posts and all comments filled with slang that you are too old to understand.”

There is little to be found on /b/ that can be considered inoffensive. In practical terms, anonymous posting, light moderation (effectively a safe-guard against child porn), and archive-free discussion encourage a total lack of self-censorship. Users, rendered mutually unashamed by anonymity, allow the worst aspects of their personality to seep freely out onto the boards.

Above: 1673 anons chime in on a pressing issue.

4chan, alongside other Anonymous hubs (7chan, 711chan, 420chan, Encyclopedia Dramatica, etc.) represent the grotesque id of the internet, providing a mass outlet for otherwise unconscionable topics. Porn addictions, bizarre fantasies, fetishes, or extreme perversions, blacker-than-black humour, overt racism, spectacular feats of human stupidity, radical politics, and general misanthropy are the norm on /b/, discussed and encouraged without shame or recourse. /b/ is a space without repression or political correctness. It is a space where, through sheer over-abundance, offensive words and ideas lose all meaning. Even the rules of the internet—crafted long ago by a handful of Anons—are designed to accommodate the unapologetically perverse ethos of the community. Rule 34, a universal favourite among Anonymous, proudly declares “If it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.”

The radical openness of these Anonymous hubs means that they accommodate users of every political or ideological stripe—although one might wonder how moral conservatives could even navigate the chans without sustaining permanent psychological trauma, one finds an army of Ron Paul fanatics spreading his gospel on these hubs. Just as it is meaningless to identify Anonymous as a cohesive body, or a finite group, it is impossible to pin the collective beliefs of Anonymous anywhere on the political spectrum.

Although typically discussed as distinct from 4chan, the increasingly visible activist/hacktivist/moralfag subset of Anonymous remains ideologically indebted to the atmosphere of cyber-chaos which spawned them. Anonymous is an idea and a phenomenon, set into motion by mass participation among disparate individuals around the world. The Anonymous group now occupying Wall Street or hacking away at the cyber-presence of middle-eastern dictators (or avenging Julian Assange, etc.), despite ridicule, disapproval or even disdain among other members of the Anonymous community, have internalized the latent, ideological lessons now being taught to legions of masturbating teenagers on /b/. The existence of /b/—a place where truly anything goes—is in itself a radical affirmation of free speech and freedom of information, and a concrete gesture against internet censorship.

For the most part, /b/tards (anyone who frequents /b/) and Anons are unified by the common imperative of achieving lulz (laughs or kicks, often won at the expense of others). Communicating through an exclusive lexicon of constantly evolving inside jokes, Anons mobilize dada-like nihilism, or otherwise absurd humour, to transform anything and everything into the subject of memes (internet fads/viral jokes). Once the theme of a meme is established through a persistent presence on the board, photoshop savvy /b/tards generate their own endless variations. As one might expect, no subject is sacred.

Sometimes referred to as a “meme factory”, the structure of /b/ has helped produce many now-mainstream internet phenomena, including lolcats (an evolution of 4chan’s ritual feline frenzy, “Caturday”), Rick-rolling (baiting internet users with the promise of enticing content and then tricking them into hearing Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”), altered motivational posters, and more.

Consider Longcat, an eternal favourite of /b/tards everywhere:

Above: Longcat’s original likeness.

Above: Longcat wins the war.

Above: An accurate diagram of Longcat in comparison to other long structures.

Above: Longcat drops in on 4chan.

Originally posted on 2chan, then renamed by the internet, Longcat holds an important place in the collective conscience of Anonymous. Transformed from a mortal cat into an internet legend, Longcat’s presence on the chans is ubiquitous. For years, he has endlessly re-appeared in fresh (or stale) photoshopped images, each generated by members of the anonymous mass.

This absurd re-casting of Longcat, his transformation into a permanent joke of the chans, is a phenomenon which could only have occurred through mass consensus and collaboration, and in this regard it is indicative of meme creation in general. A theme (an image, some text, or a joke, etc.) is presented, saved by members of Anonymous, and then cast into a cycle of endless re-circulation where it will organically evolve through anonymous alterations. The same images mingle with new ones, which, if successful, are constantly re-uploaded in relevant (or irrelevant) threads and anonymously revised.

This process of meme creation, at once egalitarian (the meme creator remains only an anonymous catalyst as the meme takes on a life of its own) and a product of mass collaboration, is mirrored by the structure of actual image-board threads as well. The humour of a thread is often a derived from the collective effort of several Anons.

Above: An OP (original poster) delivers a premise, anon delivers a punchline.

To the moralfag activists occupying Wall Street, the lesson of collaborative procedure has not been lost. In his astute article, “#OccupyWallStreet is More Than a Hashtag”, Nathan Schneider notes that the individual affinity groups who have dominated press coverage—Adbusters, Anonymous, US Day of Rage, etc.—are only important in so far as they participate in the protest’s general assemblies, meetings between occupiers which have netted a list of demands and a course of action through “a leaderless, consensus-based decision-making process”. While Anonymous is by no means responsible for these protests, it is not difficult to discern that they are already ideologically aligned with the general assembly process. Members of Anonymous are already prepared for a radical revision of democracy.

Mass collaboration among Anonymous yields not only threads and memes, but raids (co-ordinated assaults on other websites, individuals, etc.) and direct actions. Functioning as a leaderless, collective intelligence, Anonymous has often branched out from its disdained corner of the internet to wreak havoc upon mutual enemies and enforce its own communal sense of justice.

Above: Fox 11’s mostly false and entirely incredible report on Anonymous.

Indeed, Anonymous is flattered by the epithet “Hackers on steroids” and has self-identified as an “internet hate machine.” But rather than blowing up mysterious yellow vans, or bringing nuclear material to football stadiums, Anonymous contends (on Encyclopedia Dramatica) that “The Internet Hate Machine is a force for good and were dubbed an invaluable Internet Vigilante Group by the Toronto Police Department after they were alerted to a child molester in their midst by this 1337 Cyber Posse, tireless Internets crusaders who doesn’t afraid of anything.”

Above: Through collaborative detective work, The Internet Hate Machine gets big lulz from exposing a pedo.

In the past, Anonymous has launched coordinated assaults on a number of infamous internet assholes. Through an arsenal of techniques including prank calling, sending black faxes, ordering unwanted pizzas, and hacking, Anonymous has helped jail pedophiles (see Chris Forcand), caused emotional damage in white supremacist radio hosts (see Hal Turner), and rescued kittens from abusive owners (see Dusty the Cat)—all with the end objective of achieving lulz.

In 2008, Anonymous launched Project Chanology, declaring war on the Church of Scientology. In particular, the sustained assault on Scientology responded to the Church’s long history of internet censorship (and its removal of a hilarious Tom Cruise video), its various criminal actions, its tax exempt status, and the economic exploitation of its members. As with earlier raids, prank calls, black faxes, and d-dos attacks (a common hacking method of collectively overburdening a web-server) were unleashed against the Church in a number of successful efforts to disrupt its operations. Additional tactics included driving articles on Scientology scandals to the top of Digg.com through collective “digging”, and google bombing (generating websites to influence google’s search results) so that Scientology would be the first search result for “dangerous cult”.

On February 10^th, 2008, a radical shift in Anonymous tactics occurred. Answering a youtube “Call to Action” over 8,000 members of Anonymous brought masks (generally of Guy Fawkes—a favourite Anon icon) and placards to picket Scientology churches in cities around the globe—for the first time, the collective super-consciousness of Anonymous showed itself in the flesh. The internet walked the street, chanting memes and finding their collective presence quite hilarious. While not all Anons were in support of the protests, noting that they brought unwanted attention to Anonymous and were in direct violation of rules 1 & 2 of the internet (the very same rules I’m breaking in this article—“You do not talk about 4chan” and “You do not talk about 4chan”), most Anons remained supportive due to the hilarious potential of the campaign.

Above: Artist rendering of Project Chanology.

The campaign of IRL (in real life) protests continued tirelessly throughout 2008 and 2009, and as many Anons observed, they grew less and less funny with each subsequent protest. As the protests grew less lulzy, Anonymous support for the campaign dwindled. The result was an internal rift within Anonymous and a pivotal moment in their collective history. Those Anons in support of the campaign, now acting for the greater good as opposed to just “for the lulz” were deemed moralfags and were disowned by the Anonymous mass as part of “the cancer that is killing /b/”.

Now, in 2011, the moralfag/activist/hacktivist subset of Anonymous makes headlines regularly. Their public visibility, and the quantity of their actions, has sharply increased. Hacking government websites (including those of Zimbabwe, Libya, Syria, Tunisia, Egypt, Malaysia, Australia), leaking confidential NATO, corporate, or financial documents to reveal corruption, attacking pro-copyright organizations and law firms, defending Wikileaks, threatening a cyber-assault on the Marine Corps Brigade where Bradley Manning is being held and tortured, and offering cyber-retaliation for various activist arrests, many members of Anonymous have left the lulz behind. But they will ‘nevar’ forget their roots and their values—whether achieved through the immense accumulation of pirated Japanese porn, or the takedown of government websites, Anonymous is a force working for freedom.

Above: A clever Anon finds a careful balance between lulz and moral fagottry.