Not only because the fascist brainwashing corporation is a worthy target, but because Anonymous has so much potential and it's a pleasure to see them not just saying things like "faggot" and "pool's closed due to AIDS" over and over again.
As always happens in a revolution, practice has shot far ahead of theory on this issue. There are attempts to write off Anonymous due to (justifiable) disdain for the strong racist, misogynistic and homophobic memes in their culture. These resemble the recurring meme among the cultural-technician classes that the proletariat - or certain ethnic or social groups - cannot be revolutionary because of prevalent backwards social attitudes (with the corollary that a revolution has to be run by an "enlightened few" with the "right culture", generally including the person who made that statement). As some Russian once said:
To imagine that social revolution is conceivable... without revolutionary outbursts by a section of the petty bourgeoisie WITH ALL ITS PREJUDICES [italics in original], without a movement of the politically non-conscious proletarian and semi-proletarian masses against oppression ... --to imagine all this is to REPUDIATE SOCIAL REVOLUTION.
I also note that the mealy-mouthed response from the "community of long-term critics" is very similar to the attitude with which gutless liberals always greet militant (and therefore effective) anti-fascist action. The alt.religion.scientology and Operation Clambake crowd have, I think, settled into a comfortable stalemate (almost a mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship) with the cult and are don't want anything happening that might change the balance of forces. Sadly, this is common in any political campaign that goes long enough - people get used to nothing happening and build a comfortable, ritualistic lifestyle around it. This leads to the same kind of degeneration that happened to the Marxist left in the 1980s.
We are not of course saying anything as dumb as that Anonymous is some kind of revolutionary vanguard, but there are analogies for political practice in the real world - in particular, the way that an idea whose time has come - and which is easy to replicate and distribute - can seize the masses. I would be interested to see if people like the Centre for Tactical Magic take up this lead.
Here's a fascinating discussion of what this project means for applied memetics, the purpose of this blog.
