Another retraction and apology for one of the big manifesto pieces of "old Chaos Marxism". Six years ago or so I wrote:
The Conspiracy (to use SubGenius lingo) needs you to be you. It needs you to have a forename, a hindname, and an address - an individuality - by which it "interpellates" you into the system... It needs you to be predictable. It needs you to have a place within the system.
... and therefore "Anonymous", not having an identity, was supposed to be liberation from late capitalist "interpellation".
But even at the time I should have realised that this wasn't true, because the problem with Anonymous was that anonymity went with lack of transparency. They weren't like Lawrence Miles' "Remote", autonomous signals-driven nihilist terrorists. There was far too often - maybe always - a man behind the curtain directing the mob.
We used to call it "marblecaking" - /marblecake/ was an IRC channel in which a kind of "invisible Central Committee" made plans for Operation Chanology. As far as I can remember, these were benevolent and sensible plans. But the whole idea that this hidden committee existed - and that many Anons were repulsed when they found out about its existence - should have revealed (to those who weren't too invested in the myth) that an Anon mob is far too easily manipulated by "social engineers".
Someone said once that they suspected that Chanology was in itself a "psyop" - like "someone was testing something", i.e. that it was all "marblecaked" from the beginning, by... who? State spooks? Corporate spooks? I am skeptical about that. But the last 10 years have shown how state and corporate spooks have gotten so good at marblecaking any movement of "meme politics" (as opposed to things which happen in the real world, like #BlackLivesMatter or #MeToo), and how this blog was full of shit at one point.
