anonymous - book - 2011 - Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4Chan's Army Conquered the Web

Epic Win for Anonymous: How 4Chan’s Army Conquered the Web

Cole Stryker

Overlook Duckworth

2011

304 pages

By now the phenomenon of Anonymous, an unspecified and unorganized mass of computer pranksters and social activists (popularly known as... ugh... ‘hacktivists’) is a part of the common imagination.  Everyone has at least seen images of protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks (referencing not just the 17th century English anti-parliament terrorist but also the technique of mass identification with a social movement or anti-establishment attitude via obscuring one's individual identity as shown in the 2006 film V For Vendetta) or heard stories about members of anonymous hacking such and such institution or organization or declaring war via internet against a repressive regime. Less known (but still pretty well known) is that Anonymous, as a social movement, emerged from a specific online location, 4chan.org.

4chan.org was started in 2002 by a kid who calls himself m00t, real name Christopher Poole, who wanted to emulate Japanese anime discussion boards (specifically one called matsubara or 2chan). The site is interesting, in part, because it does not save any of the content that users contribute to it (some of the effects of which have been observed by an MIT research team) and therefore everything has to be constantly renewed. The repetition and variation on the forms that appear on 4chan have led to site users (who post under the name ‘anonymous’ and are not required to enter a username to contribute) to develop a large number of different graphic memes that have transcended the site, some of the more popular forms, like the LOLcats, have become mainstream pop culture phenomena. 4chan.org is the opposite of Facebook and as a contemporary internet phenomena, is far more interesting (Facebook itself is not interesting at all but the discourse surrounding the service is.) While Facebook is a global data-mining operation posing as a good-vibes world funfest where people can post their opinions and expect only agreement in return, 4chan is a carnival of all of the most transgressive subjects and images including discussions about gore, pornography, drugs, etc.

Cole Stryker is a freelance journalist who appears to focus on trends in network communication technology and its cultural uses. In Epic Win for Anonymous he gives a fairly detailed history of 4chan and a survey of its uses. Stryker’s text is not heavy on analysis, cultural or otherwise, but it still helps a lot in forming an understanding of the phenomena of Anonymous, their origins in hacking and online trolling/flame wars, as well as predecessors to 4chan site that fostered the kind of transgressive (verging on nihilistic attitude) that appears to dominate. Epic Win for Anonymous is a descriptive history of 4chan, its origins, and the actual social movements that have emerged out of it.

What interests me about Anonymous is that it’s never really clear what it is, because it isn’t something in particular. At its surface level it appears as a protest tactic, similar to the Black Bloc in its core emphasis on the intersection of mass protest and the protection of personal identity. On another level though, it is a form of mediated mass protest that appears to permit its participants to engage with their social causes to the extent that their individual technical abilities allow. If a target for direct action is selected (by whom, I’m not sure) then some Anons might proceed by breaking the target’s network security and obtaining documents, others make up mocking graphics with their photoshop skills, others might pile onto a denial of service attack, and some will don their Fawkes mask and attend the street protest.

Anonymous was, for example, instrumental in ensuring justice during the recent Steubenville rape trial, with Anons obtaining and disseminating the videos and images that served as evidence at trial, and also picketing the town through online action and street demos. Interestingly, this murky group that has grown out of an underground website largely devoted to exploring transgression had established a stable moral position with regards to that crime while much of mainstream America were perfectly willing to blame the victim for what happened to her, and to falter over what constitutes rape in their country.

The other level at which Anonymous is interesting, which Stryker discusses in his book, was the collective problem solving potential of the group. Anonymous is geographically dispersed yet they are localized (ugh...) virtually to 4chan. Occasionally a problem is brought to the group, sometimes in the nature of an image of an animal or child abuser, for example. The users of 4chan will use their collective knowledge to try to identify features of that image which can be used in identifying the abuser to authorities. This aspect of Anonymous reveals how much greater potential 4chan has at motivating people to action than the major social network websites. Facebook may be orders of magnitude more popular than 4chan, but 4chan’s impact on the culture has been immensely more meaningful than Facebook’s.

ku klux klan - book - 1992 - The Invisible Empire in the West: Towards a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s

The Invisible Empire in the West: Towards a New Historical Appraisal of the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s

Shawn Lay (ed.)

University of Illinois Press

1992, 2004

248 pages

The Invisible Empire in the West is a collection of essays on the presence and activities of the Ku Klux Klan in a number of then small cities in the Western United States. There are a total of seven essays and six are focused on specific urban centres: Denver, El Paso, Salt Lake City, Anaheim, Eugene, and La Grande. Each of these essays focuses on the specific details of each localized Klan unit, and the challenges that the social composition of each of these cities presented to the Klan in those regions.  

This volume is edited by Shawn Lay, a professor of history and current chair of the Department of History, Philosophy and Religion at Coker College in Hartsville, South Carolina. Lay has written a number of books on Klan history and it appears as though this may be the domain of his expertise.  Many of the contributors to his collection also appear to be Klan historians, and this book may represent the efforts of a particular generation of KKK experts (Lay, in his conclusion to The Invisible Empire, uses the phrase “klan studies”) to impose a radical new historical vision of the once national, ultra-conservative organization.  In the introduction and the conclusion, Lay discusses how recent research into the Klan during the early 1920s (when the Klan was modeled after fraternal groups such as the Lions Club) has revealed the organization to be, at that time, primarily urban and middle class in its cultural situation and composition, and that it was not necessarily focused on preserving privilege for white Americans.  

Lay insists that the view this book presents of the KKK is radically different from the representation produced by earlier Klan historians such as David Mark Chalmers (in his book Hooded Americanism) or Wyn Craig Wade (via his book The Fiery Cross). Lay’s arguments rest on the fact that these earlier historians constructed the Klan as a phenomenon that arose out of rural backwardness.  The historical representation of the Klan as constructed by Lay and company is certainly radically different from that of earlier histories, however I prefer when a historian is also willing to account for the previous, in his or her eyes inadequate or inaccurate, interpretation of a historical phenomena.  Lay simply points out that Wade, Chalmers, and a selection of other Klan historians, simply failed to properly apprehend the KKK of the early 1920s.  

While many of the essays are quite interesting in their investigations of the Klan in various regional contexts (including, for example, an essay about the tensions of a predominantly and militantly protestant KKK recruiting in the almost entirely Mormon Salt Lake City, Utah), Lay’s own assertions about this new vision of the Klan is not really supported by his fellow “Klan Studies” academics.  In his conclusion, Lay argues that this book has shown the Klan of the 1920s to not have been overtly bigoted or violent.  Certainly, the Klan held many prejudices, not just their world famous disdain for blacks, and Lay’s book shows that they were also opposed to Catholics and Jews. The essays in The Invisible Empire in the West, recant numerous instances of local Klaverns (the KKK name for a regional chapter of the organization) expressing their not-so-positive opinions on these other, non-black, socio-cultural groups. Perhaps the specific regional contexts spotlighted by the authors of these essays gave more opportunity to the Klaverns that formed there to target Catholics with their bigotry than they did for other groups. Furthermore, while physical violence may have been rare, the essays include a fair number of accounts of the Klan using intimidating and threatening language against their targets in their crusade to maintain a social order that privileged white protestant Americans.

animal liberation - film - 2011 - Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Rupert Wyatt

Twentieth Century Fox

2011

105 min

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is probably among the top movies of the last two years and it is undoubtedly better than all of the nominees for Best Picture for 2011,along with The Muppets. It was certainly better than The Artist. The film provides the backstory to the “classic” sci-fi film The Planet of the Apes which Rise also far outshines. It is essentially a story of animal evolution propelled by human technology, resulting in armed revolution by animals against humans.

The story begins with a research scientist who conducts studies on chimpanzees pertaining to an alzheimer's treatment that may not only restore the subject’s brain functioning but even increase intelligence. This scientist has an ailing father whose suffering drives his son’s urgency to achieve success in his research.  One of the first successful test subjects, a chimp called Bright Eyes by the research team, goes on a rampage in defense of her infant son, and is killed right at the moment when the scientist is presenting his research to a corporate board meeting. The scientist then takes care of the infant chimpanzee, whom he names Caesar, and subsequently realizes that this young ape had inherited the superior intelligence of his mother.

The scientist administers the chimp-tested treatments to his father, whose condition improves. The father, Cesaer’s adoptive grandfather, shows the most emotion and concern for Caesar, and his quality of life, out of all of the film’s human characters. The elder man and the young ape experience their life changes at the same time, and at the moment when the grandfather relapses into alzheimers, Caesar is put into an ape refuge, a moment that comes after Caesar had defended his elder from a bullying neighbor. The moment of the grandfather’s death is also the moment where Caesar becomes that refuge’s alpha male.  This kind of pattern is interesting as it also charts the rise of the ape - as, of course, Caesar inevitably becomes a leader of an ape uprising, first against their refuge handlers, and then against law enforcement - against the decline of man, who, by film’s end, die out as a virus that the apes are resistant to spreads across the world along international flightpaths.  

Earlier in this post I referred to The Artist, and I think it is important to note that Rise of the Planet of the Apes is just one example of a movie that effectively carries the silent film, in part, into the present era. Rather than being some corny pastiche of 1920s era Hollywood, Rise shows the animals behave in often intensely expressive ways without verbally communicating. The emotions and meanings expressed by the apes are clearly conveyed by facial and bodily gestures, and the actions of the apes are clear as well. Whole tracts of the film are gripping in their portrayal of animal suffering without any words being exchanged or even human characters present to speak on their behalf.  

The uprising of the ape’s is a great scene. First, it includes aspects of revolutionary activity which are often neglected in other representations. For example, the apes have a symbol for their movement, the design of the windowframe from the attic of the scientist’s house where Caesar grew up. There’s a whole motif of looking through windows and glass in this film that may provide the base material for a film studies student’s course paper someday! Furthermore, the apes in revolt almost immediately find a revolutionary hero-martyr in the gorilla of the refuge who hurled himself at a helicopter machine-gunner - bringing down the aircraft even though it killed him. Meanwhile, Caesar is the quintessential revolutionary leader (with strands from Joseph Campbell’s Hero of a Thousand Faces), who fearlessly fights his enemies with whatever means are at hand while unfolding brilliant strategies to defeat the San Francisco Police Department with limited manpower and weaponry. It seemed as though the apes won their fight against well armed and armoured men with few casualties and little effort. Finally, Caesar also feels intensely for his people, as shown when he cradles the body of the fallen gorilla after the battle had ended.  

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is probably the great film of animal liberation, imagining a fantasy of the animals liberating themselves at the same time that humanity falls, never to oppress or exploit apes again.

pacifism - book - 1966 - Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History

Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History
Staughton Lynd (ed)
Bobbs-Merrill
1966
530 pages

Nonviolence in America is a large anthology of texts that all share the advocacy of non-violent resistance as a means of effecting social change. The book is edited by Staughton Lynd, an American dissident and historian who, over the course of his life as an activist, has taken on a variety of social causes and deployed an equally diverse number of strategies to raise awareness of them. Nonviolence in America is one of the first publications in a fairly lengthy and impressive bibliography that has continued up until 2011.

Lynd’s anthology of writings by American authors espousing techniques of nonviolent civil disobedience was published in the mid-1960s and it was likely compiled, in part, as an inspiration to the burgeoning anti-war movement and the new left, to show a long history of such forms of activism in American society. The earliest writings include late 18th century texts written by Quaker abolitionists, and proceeds from there to the contemporary-to-publication Civil Rights and anti-war movements in the United States.  The anthology is great for including items such as Henry David Thoreau’s classic essay Civil Disobedience in their entirety rather than reducing such an important piece to excerpts or key passages.  Furthermore, the book also includes pieces from seemingly unlikely sources such as anarchists like Voltairine De Cleyre and labour leaders describing auto-worker sit-down strikes during the most dramatic period of organized labour history in America.

The anthology never waivers from its focus and demonstrates a strong history of effective non-violent direct action activism in a society that appears obsessed with violence. It is a testament to the historical repetition of the enormous moral power of enduring violence without returning it. The book was published in the year before the Black Panthers formed their first chapter in Oakland and fingered the trigger of revolutionary violence in 1960s America. The emergence of the BPP produced an already forming schism in the American Civil Rights movement and inspired other groups such as the SDS splinter group, The Weathermen, to pursue violent action. Lynd’s anthology was published again in 1995, when the anti-globalization movement was building, and the debates of the merits of violent vs non-violent protest tactics were renewed and continue today.

utopian communities - book - 1870 - History of American Socialisms

History of American Socialisms
John Humphrey Noyes
JB Lippencott & Company
1870
678 pages

John Humphrey Noyes was the founder of the Oneida Community, one of the most successful utopian-socialist societies of the United States. Founded in 1848, the community thrived until 1881 upon principles of communal sharing of property and the belief that Christ’s return had already occurred and therefore the heavenly kingdom may then be built upon earth. The journalist Charles Nordhoff, in his 1875 book The Communistic Societies of the United States referred to Noyes group as the perfectionists and he devoted a chapter to describing their customs and lifestyle.

Noyes

Noyes wrote his history of other utopian communities, originally published in 1870, in response to an unpublished book of a history of such groups written by an A. J. MacDonald who was a great admirer of these societies and their philosophical inspirations such as Robert Owen and Charles Fourier. According to Noyes introduction, MacDonald died some time in the 1850s and Noyes and his associates had found MacDonalds research notes and from those materials he constructed this text in combination with his own views and some additional research. Yale University, in their rare books and manuscripts collection, actually has MacDonald’s research papers and notes, which were given to Yale by Noyes as a gift.

History of American Socialisms is a long and comprehensive book about the phenomena of Utopian societies in 19th century America. Over the course of 48 chapters, Noyes gives the details of virtually every aspect of utopian communities, from their philosophical influences, to the aspect of religion, to the individual and specific communities, and in rare cases, the specific effect of certain influences on certain communities (such as the chapter on Swedenborgianism on the venerable Brook Farm community). The longest chapter in Noyes history was on the Wisconsin Phalanx (the phalanxes were societies specifically based on the utopian socialist ideas of French idealist philosopher, Charles Fourier) and Noyes’ own Oneida Community, which was one of the longest lasting of these societies, and the one which the author could speak about at length with great authority.  

Noyes also inserts many of his own views, and in particular, the importance of religion to these societies was often stated by the author. Noyes himself was a theologian who “discovered” that Christ had made his second coming in 70 ad, a peculiar perspective that provided the ground for the beliefs of his society.  Furthermore, the author notes that most of the utopian societies barely survived a year, and he believes that those societies that had cleaved themselves to religious principles were more successful. 

Noyes view that a mix of socialist politics and millenarian religion keeps a group together has a truth to it that, I'm sure, most contemporary activists who admire socialistic communities would like to dismiss. At the time of this book's publication, Noyes own community was in its second decade, and most of the other groups he describes were long gone. The Oneida Community is now long gone too but some communities continue, and are hardly acknowledged as countercultural by current activists, who would love to establish long-term socialist communities, because they cannot conceive of spiritual belief as anything other than a strategy deployed by authorities for the purpose of deceiving unsophisticated adherents into obedience. Noyes history reveals that people can successfully and sincerely combine socialist politics and religion into the theoretical foundation for a new way of life.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2004 - The Brotherhoods: Inside the Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs

The Brotherhoods: Inside the Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs
Arthur Veno
Allen & Unwin
2004
300 pages

Arthur Veno is, along with Rebels author Daniel R. Wolf (whom Veno refers to as “the late”), one of the only sociologists to look at the outlaw biker phenomenon. Wolf has looked at the clubs in the Canadian context and Veno worked primarily in the Australian. As of March 2013 no one has published research, in book form, on outlaw bikers in the American context.  

Veno is currently either an adjunct professor of social sciences and psychology at Victoria University in Melbourne Australia, or he is an adjunct professor of criminology at Monash University in Melbourne, I don’t know which although he has held a number of other academic appointments in the past. Outlaw bikers appear to be his major research interest and all of his recent publications, according to his CV, are biker related, including a now out of print book about the women of the outlaw biker subculture.  

The book covers much of the same sociological ground as Daniel Wolf’s The Rebels, and Veno positions himself to his object of study in a similar manner as Wolf had, that is, as a cool outsider that the bikers can hang out with and talk to. In The Rebels, Wolf presented himself as a dedicated researcher who loves riding his bike enough that he was accepted by the club he researched. The Rebels ends with Wolf stating that he was ultimately rejected by new group of Rebels who he never rode with or made any agreements with regarding his research. Veno presents himself as someone who is, and will continue to be, an intermediary between the outlaw bikers of Australia, and agents from other social spheres, including law enforcement and media. The Brotherhoods is, at times, Veno’s personal account of life as someone who studies bikies (that’s the Australian term for bikers, by the way). Mostly, however, Veno’s book is a proper, albeit readable, sociological overview of the bikie subculture.

One aspect of the subculture I was hoping to read more about in The Brotherhoods were the self-mythologizing of the bikies. In the US and Canada, biker gangs emerged at the intersecting point between thrillseeking ex-air force returning from war, and delinquent youth gangs - but the myth bikers tell themselves and try to project into the world is that they’re the last living remnant of America’s wild west frontier. I hoped that the Australian bikies would claim to be living out Road Warrior fantasies but instead Veno’s book begins with a quotation from an Australian Hells Angel who claims lineage with Ned Kelly, an Australian bandit and folk hero of the late 19th century.

computer underground, Anonymous - 2010 - /b/: The Random Anonymity Culture and a New Direction for Anonymous

/b/: The Random Anonymity Culture and a New Direction for Anonymous
Mint Lily Cherbet-Bouchard
2010

Last year I had written a research paper about the use of images on the imageboard website 4chan.org, a home to transgressive and offensive communication and the emerging point for the activist/hacker “group” called Anonymous. When I was searching for books about 4chan and Anonymous I came across this Createspace published text that had pretty poor reviews on Amazon.  Well, I ordered the book regardless of everyone’s warnings and, as it turns out, it is just as irrelevant as the reviews suggested. Its major problem is that the book does not distinguish between 4chan.org users and Anonymous.

I don’t know anything about the author aside from the fact that there’s a facebook page stating that she is a student at UC Berkeley. She also apparently uses 4chan.org and I guess an enthusiastic professor or course instructor encouraged her to publish something based on this phenomenon that has, so far, little literature devoted to it. The book itself is all text (despite being about an image-oriented website), and is largely composed of semi-coherent discussions of aspects of the Anonymous/4chan subculture (including ruminations on anonymity and mainstream media portrayals of the group, and thoughts on things like the use of offensive language). 

 The other major component of the text is excerpts of posts to 4chan’s /b/ (random) board, where people have outrageous discussions about weird things and make jokes about suicide and post bizarre images with their writings. Cherbet-Bouchard discusses a mostly incomprehensible vision for what Anonymous can be.

Black Panther Party - comic - 2011 - Portland's Black Panthers

Portland’s Black Panthers
Sarah Mirk
Khris Soden (illustrator)
The Dill Pickle Club
2011
Comrades: A Local History of the Black Panther Party is a collection of scholarly essays on the histories of a number of Black Panther chapters outside of Oakland. While Comrades features the BPP in a number of mid-sized American cities such as Indianapolis and Winston-Salem, there was no essay on the Black Panthers chapter in Portland Oregon. A small organization devoted to publishing materials about Portland history called The Dill Pickle Club (now called Know Your City) has published a small (quarter-size) comic book titled Portland’s Black Panthers (available on their website and also through Pioneers Press) that gives a brief, illustrated history of that particular, less acknowledged and celebrated, chapter of the party.  

The story of the Portland Panthers follows a similar pattern to the chapters of other cities as discussed in Comrades. Founders Kent Ford, Percy Hampton, and others came together to protect the local black community from police harassment and relentless racism, and struggled to provide a variety of social service (including breakfast programs for children and testing for illnesses) to the poor.  While Portland’s Black Panthers does detail a large degree of conflict with local law enforcement, FBI, and the political establishment of the city, it also more or less portrays the chapter as fairly successful in achieving its goals of improving the conditions of Portland’s black community.

As far as I can tell from their respective websites author Sarah Mirk and illustrator Khris Soden’s interest lies in telling the (forgotten) history of the city of Portland through the comics form. Portland’s Black Panthers is one volume of a set of ten comics about different aspects of Oregon’s history, other topics include the state highways and voting rights for women. Each set is written by Mirk and illustrated by a different artist. Soden’s drawing style for Portland’s Black Panthers is very crisp and linear with little to no use of shading throughout the publication.

computer underground - book - 2006 - Commodork: Sordid Takes from a BBS Junkie

Commodork: Sordid Tales from a BBS Junkie
Rob O’Hara
2006

Rob O’Hara’s self-published memoir of his relentless obsession with software piracy is an important contribution to the world of literature on the computer underground.  O’Hara’s book is highly relevant for two reasons, the first is that the BBS (bulletin board system) is a largely forgotten communications medium that has been completely overshadowed by the rise of the internet. I’ve already discussed the forgotten medium of the BBS in my posts about the Phone Losers of America Complete zines book and the Cult of the Dead Cow book, but for a long time, BBSs were the chief mode of communication for the computer underground. The collective users of all the BBSs in the land produced a huge library of literature (mostly in the form of .txt files), engaged in extensive file trading, and developed a number of other practices that were unique to the medium.  

The second reason why O’Hara’s book is interesting is because it focuses on the social practice of software piracy rather than the practice computer hacking which dominates the literature on the computer underground. While elements of computer hacking are featured in this book, the primary focus is on the lengths O’Hara went to to find new software for his Commodore 64 (and later, other computers, of course). Commodork is by no means an authoritative or scholarly look at software piracy, but its a start to a body of literature that should exist yet doesn’t. O’Hara also discusses other lesser aspects of the computer underground, including the demoscene and the lit scene.

This book presents the memories of computer usage of one man who had a strong drive to accumulate software. This book is a self-published work, which permits its author to blend personal anecdotes about attending parties and going to college into his stories about copying files from floppy discs. Like I had written in my previous post about outlaw biker Doug Ford’s Patch Holder, I am strongly in favor of more individuals from various subcultures publishing books about their experiences.

outlaw motorcycle clubs - book - 2011 - Patch Holder

Patch Holder
Doug Ford
2011
72 pages

Patch Holder is a short autobiography by outlaw biker who shows a definite knowledge of the subculture although he never states his club affiliation. The book is self-published via CreateSpace (Amazon’s self-publishing service) by the author, Doug Ford, and as it details the life of a man who is, as far as I know, not known outside of his own social circle. I highly doubt that this book was ever intended to be read by people, like me, who don’t personally know its author.

While Ford does discuss being a biker towards the end, much of the book covers the details of his life outside the outlaw biker subculture - his childhood, his career (as a sign painter for film studios, and later as a tattoo artist) his struggles with alcohol, and his later family life. The fact that this book is titled Patch Holder, a phrase that pretty explicitly identifies Ford as a member of a motorcycle club, while the discussions of living as a biker are so minimal, leads me to think that he had written his memories down to be read by people who know him, and already take his status as a bike for granted.

Anyways the book is pleasant and sometimes tragic, and it ends with Ford listing in brief all of his little thoughts about contemporary society - a very personal form of writing. The cover of the book is great - a display of a whole bunch of the little introductory cards that bikers hand out to each other and to citizens from members of a variety of different gangs including the Booze Fighters and the Vagos (one of the “big four” outlaw clubs). The book points to the potential for people who are not underground celebrities or leaders to write their experiences and publish them via an outlet like CreateSpace without regard for publishing conventions.

bandits - book - 1969 - Bandits

Bandits
E.J. (Eric) Hobsbawm
Weidenfeld and Nicolson
1969
126 pages

Bandits by Eric Hobsbawm is probably one of the most significant scholarly works in the field of countercultural studies. Hobsbawm, who died on October 1, 2012, takes a structuralist approach to history and proposes a pattern to the tradition of the bandit, and to the support a bandit might find within its community, much like how Joseph Campbell, in his Hero with A Thousand Faces claims to identify a pattern to hero stories in myth and literature. Hobsbawm is perceiving his pattern in the popular discourse surrounding the figures of banditry, noting not simply the actual bandit, but also the socially constructed bandit figure. My copy, that I am discussing here, is the original 1969 edition that runs a mere 126 pages in length. My understanding is that the most recent edition contains more than 100 new pages of text.

The active bandit, according to Hobsbawm, can gain popular support via banditry when the establishment is perceived as hopelessly corrupt in the eyes of the populace. Then a bandit may even victimize members of the population that they draw support from as long as they also antagonize the dominant system. Hobsbawm also argues that the stories of bandits often involve an absent sovereign, which is the case in the Robin Hood stories, where the king is away and a despotic prince and his gooney sheriff strictly enforce taxation rules. This allows a populace who invests in the bandits glory to still believe in the dominant system, as the current state of society is a temporary aberration.  

Hobsbawm does not only discuss the structure of the Bandit story as it lives in folklore, he investigates the concrete historical bandits that inspired the trope of bandit folklore. He uses a variety of examples from history including Robin Hood (who, he speculates, may never have actually existed), but also figures such as the Australian Ned Kelly, Sandor Roza of Hungary, Gaetano Meomartino of Italy, and many others. The book includes a lot of images taken from popular sources throughout history, ranging from 17th century circulars featuring woodcuts of Robin Hood, to 19th century photographs and even 20th century film stills.