"Was Project Chanology for the Intarwebz what May 1968 was for French students?" I asked almost precisely two years ago. The answer appears to be "yes". We now live in an era where Anon is taking on governments, the FBI and major corporations, appears to be actively thriving on persecutions and arrests, and is reported as serious news in the mainstream press. This article from around the same time, suggesting that Anonymous had reached its limits because it could not possibly find a more ideal target than Scientology, is laughable in retrospect - obviously the author couldn't imagine them actually going after the Pentagon or the FBI. (But perhaps it was only the intervention of Bradley Manning and Julian Assange which made that possible.)
Also of note is that Anonymous is a "meme", like al-Qaeda or radical right-wing resistance, so nailing individual participants can't stop the signal. The media have never gotten this - they keep going on about "members of Anonymous" being arrested. Newsflash, guys, a "member of Anonymous" is anyone who does anything under the Anon or associated banners. The Clams' "tech" for dealing with enemies is to nail their leaders personally, but Anon has gone past the individual. This is of course what all radical movements should be doing; however, I think we're still addicted to the "leader / Central Committee" structure, which evolved in the case of a Tsarist police state when the telegraph was the cutting edge of information technology. Networked resistance is the next step. Don't let the 4chan crowd or the fascists out-innovate us.
You're all a bunch of ringleaders!
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to compare Al Qaida's meme/diy approach to terror with ABB's Norwegian Knights Templar scheme; the former encourage anyone to do whatever they like, then give a shout-out to my niggaz in Tora Bora or the Pakistani tribal areas; ABB had laid out plans for an army of ascetic urban commandos so detailed that he'd worked out the color of the velvet for the officers' uniforms, rank insignia, and designed a system of military decorations.
Seriously, he makes the your neighborhood Leninist vanguard party look like a bunch of kids playing with bottle rockets...
"If that's mad, then go ahead, lock me up!" - Janor Hypercleats
ReplyDeleteBut seriously - the essential fallacy of fascist groupuscles, as a famous book on the Australian movement put it, is that "everyone wants to be Führer". But leaderless resistance means everyone can be Führer in their own private realities. And then machine gun a bunch of people.
In my days (all 6 of them) amongst the Leninist vanguard, I didn't wanna be the Big V or even The Trotster; I was quite happy to be the equivalent of an illiterate peasant press-ganged into the Red Army and left to freeze to death in one of the various invasions of Finland.
ReplyDeleteIt's a miracle we didn't sell more newspapers with such discipline.
Every time you make a snide joke about Leninist vanguards, please remember that the author of this blog resembles those remarks, more or less. (And I'm restraining a rant about elitist/vanguardist attitudes among anarchists, as well.)
ReplyDeleteJust found your blog; absolutely love it. You're brilliant; never stop.
ReplyDelete-Consensus/Uglycat