Anonymous: Invisible Political Body
“Anonymous is a group, in the sense that a flock of birds is a group. How do you know they’re a group? Because they’re traveling in the same direction. At any given moment, more birds could join, leave, peel off in another direction entirely.”
–Chris Landers, Baltimore City Paper, 2008
A loose coalition of internet denizens, probably the offspring of the anarchic early era of the WWW (Phrack gone global), Anonymous is the unhinged ego of the democratic corpus. It is the ultimate “coalition of the willing”, a political order completely driven by consensus, the territorial overlap of the desires of a multitude of, as they refer to themselves, “fags.” Anonymous is real.
Hal Turner vs. 4chan.org: January 2007, Anonymous took white supremacist’s Hal Turner’s website off-line through a denial of service attack.
“Distributed Denial of Service:” At its height, 4chan.org was one of the most visited websites on the planet. 4chan was a manifestation of democratic power, the force and wrath of its “flock” could be directed instantaneously, flooding networks with images, videos, emails, until those systems were rendered useless, offline, deaf. 4chan poses the problem that is ultimately resolved by myspace, youtube, facebook, and google. “How do we create a forum that connects millions of people while simultaneously deny them the power that their consolidation creates?”
Another example: distributes anti-blocking software to specifically work around Iran-regime specific internet censorship tools.
