Welcome to the future.

It's like all the dreams of Chaos Marxism are coming to rampaging life, in city squares across the planet. And just my luck to have been ill in bed all week. Definitely getting down there this afternoon. Socialists thought I was nuts when I was talking about how Project Chanology was the wave of the future, but who's laughing now, oldthinkers? Tell me that, who's laughing now?

Anonymous: CM prophecy confirmed accurate

"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.

In "self-organization of nerds" news...

... trolls now have their own code of honour. Also worth noting is:

I've come to realize that without some artistic fagmastering all these free speech projects will die on the vine (as they should). I could probably write a Consensus TLDR post about this (by this meaning how you should harblecake such an enterprise) the likes of which r3x's code of trollshido / vibe / insane cocksuckery would be jealous.

(source, referring to this). "Harblecaking" means "exercising leadership in a mass movement", as applied to internet activism, with special reference to this. So the above poster is the troll equivalent of Lenin, or perhaps a Platformist.

Chanology: the state of play

Chanology may turn out to be the sort of thing that can't be duplicated. It's unlikely that Anonymous will ever face an opponent more exquisitely matched than Scientology—a strictly disciplined, hierarchical organization founded on the exact reproduction of relentlessly earnest, fiercely copyright-protected words. Here the assclowns of Anonymous found the perfect antithesis of their own radically authorless, furiously remixed, compulsively unserious culture. Scientology was a target so ideal that there is now almost no point in looking for another. Perhaps this, then, is how Project Chanology will be remembered: not as the first of a new breed of online protest movements, but as the last of the epic trolls.

(source)

On peut pas arrêter le signal

Not only did Operation Chanology [sic] get some of the more serious /b/tards organized, it got their minds more organized as well... [and] gave them the idea that they could do stuff that doesn't involve spamming the Fox News forums with "DESU DESU DESU".

- darksumomo and seiberwing@journalfen, in response to a post on Anon's successful facedown of AT&T. Whole communities of people can learn through practice what they would have never been interested in in a billion years in theory. As I have been predicting here for years now, "the self-organization of intarwebz nerds" is capable of more and more as the years go by.

This happens regardless of the success or otherwise of various individual projects - and it seems at least that Chanology gave heart to some pretty senior Clams to break with their cult. Many commentators correctly predicted that 4chan et al. would quickly lose interest in the "moralfaggotry" of trying to do good in the struggle against Scientology. What I think they didn't predict is what the consequences would be for the evolution of consciousness of the people who did learn the right lessons from their Chanological experiences. Was Project Chanology for the Intarwebz what May 1968 was for French students?

Anon-tech just kicked in yo

Okay. You guys will remember that 4chan and associated intarwebz nerds declared war on the cult of Scientology at the beginning of last year. What you might not have heard since then: 4chan and similar fora have disowned Chanology, mainly on the grounds of it getting boring and respectable and about something other than the lulz, a phenomenon referred to in their usual tasteful manner as "moralfaggotry". However,
Chanology is still going (and scoring some hits), so therefore we must distinguish between "old Anonymous" (aka /b/tards, SomethingAwful goons, and other Chaotic Neutral intarwebz denizens) and "new Anonymous", which is pretty much a "chaotic good" hacktivism network.

Well, now "new Anonymous" has taken up the cause of the Iranian uprising. As mentioned below, we have been skeptical about the attempts of intarwebz denizens to climb on the barricades watered with the blood of real live Iranians to give themselves a moralistic hardon. (So perhaps CM disapproves of moralfaggotry as well.) However, this is serious business, as "new Anonymous" are clearly no longer a single-issue campaign, but an example of the self-organisation of intarwebz nerds, which yesterday's post suggested was the logical outcome of the digital revolution. More fundamentally - "new Anon"'s campaigns are being supported by The Pirate Bay.

A hundred years ago, Marxists and revolutionaries knew perfectly well what had to be done. Lenin said that the working class were spontaneously socialist and revolutionary (of course, he said this about five years after saying the precise opposite, which is why arguing from quotation is of limited value.) Therefore - the goal of Marxists and others with an actual ideology and a plan to change the world was to unite with these spontaneous radical forces - and attempt what Rosa Luxemberg called "the merging of workers and science". Learning and teaching, combining concrete experience with theoretical rigour, left brain plus right brain of a new collective class consciousness.

Well, intarwebz denizens are certainly not spontaneously socialist. But they certainly are spontaneously libertarian (much like the broader "information-processing classes" are spontaneously socially liberal), and they certainly do NOT tolerate anyone fucking around with their intarwebz. Remember, that's how Scientology got in the shit in the first place, trying to censor Tom Cruise spouting clam-speak on YouTube. And now the Islamic Republic of Iran have put their foot in it as well. It remains to be seen exactly how much use "Green Anon" is going to be. But - especially given the broader political implications of the involvement of the Pirate Bay, the first ever website to have a political wing - it behooves us to watch carefully and try to draw sensible conclusions.

Revolutionaries of the 21st century are going to have to take the self-organisation of internet nerds as seriously as the self-organisation of the working class, and let's start now. The question that can only be resolved in practice is: can the information-processing class in the Internet era be part of a revolutionary coalition that can change the world for a better, and if so, what possibilities are there for common cause and action with the industrial proletarians, the global slum-dwellers, the peasant masses, and other oppressed groups? Traditional Marxism suggests that the industrial workers will be the basis of a new world, but we're far beyond traditional Marxism now.

ETA: Holy Toledo Batman, the Pirate Party has a damned functioning international already. Serious business, as I said.

I am a Moralfag and I approve this message.

A rogue Anonymous (as if there were any other kind) covered himself with vaseline and pubic hair and ran around touching all the books in a Scientology cult outreach centre.

Now that's the kind of stuff that we've been missing here. Some of you might have wondered whether Project Chanology was still going, and I kind of wondered that myself. It seemed to be degenerating into staid, morally upright protest politics, of the kind which have completely failed to dislodge the cult for decades. Now we see "the chemo that is curing Chanology", as the trolls put it - the movement must walk on two legs.

Like South Africa needed a political as well as a military fight against apartheid, so the fight against Scientology requires a SERIOUS BUSINESS wing and a RANDOM INSANE OFFENSIVE SHIT wing, organisationally independent from each other. Only thus can the constituency spread and the meme gain new life. The "troll" is the irregular partisan of meme warfare.

Even Germans know about the serious business

"Most 4chan users made themselves useful for the first time in their lives against the cult." (Harsh call? You be the judge.)

Can't stop the signal

Project Chanology's main meeting place is back and in action, for all your Xenu-baiting needs. On the subject of the Anonymous memetic complex, did you hear some channer hacked into Sarah Palin's Yahoo! account?

Also, take note of perhaps the first "mainstream" blog to actually understand what Anonymous is. I particularly liked this bit:

Millions of Internet users all over the world leave comments on myriad websites with nothing to publicly identify the sources of these comments other than the shared monicker “anonymous”. If the term is viewed as a name rather than a descriptor, “anonymous” might as well be “Bob”. What if millions of Internet denizens all posted anonymous comments on various Websites and, instead of “anonymous”, were identified by the sites as “Bob” when they didn’t specify names for themselves?

===

Seriously, folks, here's the penultimate secret of the Illuminati:

If you repeat it often enough, you will at least start to believe it. This is a mathematical fact.

I found this out the hard way after reading Encyclopedia Dramatica for too long and realising that the words "faggot" and "nigger" made me giggle instead of get angry. I'm not sure this is a good thing, but of course it can be easily remedied.

===

In lighter news, I hope you're all as amused by the accelerating collapse of neoliberal capitalism as I am. (The downside of course is that the masses aren't organised enough to provide a feasible alternative yet, but that's just something for you at home to work on, isn't it?) Just a reminder that that awful man Lenin predicted this all in 1916, beeyotches.

Chanology: The Evolution of a Movement

A recent drama-bomb dropped on enturbulation.org (ably summarised for the confused here) proves the aphorism that a "leaderless group" in fact means "a group where leadership is secret or not acknowledged". However, this isn't in the crude manner that the OSA goons seem to believe - they would go from this to believing that all you would have to do is destroy #marblecake and the whole thing collapses. On the contrary, that would just mean a new leadership or wannabe-leadership-faction would grow. Best to see #marblecake as a "political party" or "faction" within Chanology. It's a good thing, by the way, that Anonymous has grown its own leadership groups, rather than continuing to take the advice of the "Old Guard" (who, in general, are a little bit off the pace of what constitutes vibrant cultural activism in the 21st century).

Actually, Chanology is having to deal with the question which plagues every movement which goes on long enough to be somewhat institutionalised and have to work out a long term strategy - factions will always exist. The question is how to deal with factions - the belief in the "self-regulating hivemind" is revealed as the utopian/anarchoid dreaming it always was, which did nothing but simply encourage #marblecake and the various other factions which no doubt exist to be in private. The traditional solution in the Leninist tradition is to allow factions (or at least platforms), but to restrict their activities to "internal consumption". But that simply won't work in a totally decentralised movement like Chanology.

Seriously, this flap is not really going to derail the movement. One or two talented individuals and/or groups thereof may be lost to the movement, temporarily or permanently, but it has shown its ability to continually replace them.

To sum up our lesson here: every mass movement must have leadership otherwise nothing will ever happen. But the movement creates the leadership, not the other way around.

Lesson #4 from Chanology

The relationship between the old-school anti-Scientology battlers and the massed ranks of anonymous shows us precisely what the relationship between a vanguard party and the revolutionary masses should be.

Yes, I know, it doesn't look much like the model we're always being fed by the Leninist sects. Which is of course a problem with those sects and their warped parroting of phrases from Lenin and/or Trotsky that they don't actually understand. Let's examine the model closer:

A long-term, close knit group of activists grow up around a common struggle. They built a tight network, supporting one another, swapping information and intelligence, but lack of mresources and mmanpower prevent them from making any breakthroughs. Suddenly, a "spontaneous" movement from the classes - actually stemming in origin from the vanguard group's propaganda over the years - breaks out. What do the vanguard do?

Some write off the new masses, declare that they're "just kids" or "lumpen elements" or "internet nerds", critique their methods in a negative rather than a comradely way. Some insist on their own right to lead the movement, or point to reasons why it's not the right sort of movement, that some of the memes it regulates by are wrong or even offensive, and how it will have to change before they'll be involved. Some even fret that the new movement is some kind of diabolical enemy plot, or a potentially reactionary force, and find in those a reason to stay away from or even condemn the movement. These people have proved themselves worse than useless.

However, others engage with the new mass forces properly. They give constructive, comradely criticism, giving helpful and practical suggestions, based on long experience rather than book-leraning, how their struggle can be more successful. They seek to give helpful advice to the leadership of the new mass forces, rather than insist on becoming the leadership of the new mass forces.

Why, then, do the mass forces listen to these vanguard activists? Because their advice now makes sense in the context of their own experience in the struggle. Because they don't insist that they have the right to lead just because they've been doing it longer. Because they know things about the enemy that the newly mobilised forces don't know. Certainly not because "we are in the possession of the one true theory and we are going to fight tooth and nail to make sure that we and our comrades are in control of this". That would of course kill any movement stone dead.

All you commies, anarchos, radicals and trots out there, learn from Mark Bunker and Tory Christman how to show actual leadership in a mass struggle. They wouldn't thank me for saying so, but they're acting in the best traditions of people like Lenin or Che Guevara or Malcolm X. Make yourself relevant. Don't lecture, but learn as well as teach. You are only worth anything in your self-proclaimed leadership if you can actually win the trust and confidence of the masses - you don't earn it by being "orthodox", by spouting the right memes. Memes are in fact irrelevant except insofar as they directly influence action.