is anonymous our future?

[xchrom]

http://www.nationofchange.org/anonymous-our-future-1328106234

The enig­matic In­ter­net-dri­ven col­lec­tive Anony­mous, thank good­ness, has an an­thro­pol­o­gist in its midst. For a few years now, Gabriella Cole­man has been ar­du­ously par­tic­i­pant-ob­serv­ing in IRC chat rooms, watch­ing Anony­mous turn from a prankster moniker to a herd of vig­i­lantes for global jus­tice. In an ex­tra­or­di­nary new essay at Triple Canopy, “Our Weird­ness Is Free,” she sum­ma­rizes what Anony­mous is all about this way:

Be­yond a foun­da­tional com­mit­ment to anonymity and the free flow of in­for­ma­tion, Anony­mous has no con­sis­tent phi­los­o­phy or po­lit­i­cal pro­gram. Though Anony­mous has in­creas­ingly de­voted its en­er­gies to (and be­come known for) dig­i­tal dis­sent and di­rect ac­tion around var­i­ous “ops,” it has no def­i­nite tra­jec­tory. Some­times coy and play­ful, some­times macabre and sin­is­ter, often all at once, Anony­mous is still an­i­mated by a col­lec­tive will to­ward mis­chief—to­ward “lulz,” a plural bas­tardiza­tion of the port­man­teau LOL (laugh out loud). Lulz rep­re­sent an ethos as much as an ob­jec­tive.

The more I learn about Anony­mous, es­pe­cially in light of the of­fline, on-the-ground praxis of the Oc­cupy move­ment, the more I’ve been won­der­ing whether we’re see­ing a glimpse of the fu­ture for all of us.

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1. They're hackers -- they see a broken system and they want to debug it

There's more to Anonymous than pranks -- even idealistic pranks.

There's a philosophy there, at least in some of them. Part computer hacker, part would-be wizard or Jedi -- many of them seem to see their job as one of identifying the stuff in the world that isn't working right and fixing it.

So far, this aspect of Anonymous only shows up in the occasional protest sign or tweet, but I think we'll be seeing more of it.