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.

radical right - book - 1987 - Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right

Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right
James Coates
Hill and Wang
1987
294 pages

Armed and Dangerous: The Rise of the Survivalist Right is one of the earliest books to investigate the contemporary white nationalist and patriot movements in the United States.  This book is somewhat uneven, as it discusses what author James Coates describes as the ‘survivalist right’ which is an assortment of groups or individuals who are of disparate backgrounds and ideological bent (albeit within the sphere of right-wing radicalism), many of whom are not necessarily survivalist.   The author’s title phrase, likely conceived as an attempt to provide an appropriate umbrella term to evoke an emerging socio-cultural phenomena, is pressed into use by the author even if its not always appropriate.  Many of the groups the author discusses are white power organizations, some of whom are survivalist.  Some groups discussed are anti-government in the “paranoid style” and fit into a tradition that extends into the past and continues to this day with groups such as the Oath Keepers and the American Resistance Movement.  

James Coates is currently a retired investigative journalist who worked for decades at the Chicago Tribune.  He worked as a Pentagon correspondent and the Tribune’s White House reporter during the late-1970s to mid-1980s.  He was also an early adopter of personal computer technology and from 1993 to 2008 Coates wrote a computer advice column for his newspaper.  His interest in network communications and computer technologies are apparent in Armed and Dangerous as he discussed the use of bulletin board systems as a means for white nationalists and anti-government “patriots” to stay connected.  Coates even included a sampling of some of the menus and text that was featured on an anti-Semitic system called Chicago Liberty Net, creating a sense that these fringe groups were on the cutting edge in the use of consumer communications technologies.  Towards a similar horizon, Coates also discussed the survivalist right’s use of other media to disseminate their message, including the distribution of a popular tabloid published by the Liberty Lobby called Spotlight, and a public-access cable TV show titled Race and Reason produced by neo-nazi group White Aryan Resistance leader Tom Metzger.

Coates investigations into the political fringe came at a time when there appeared to be a turn towards greater violence by the adherents of the ‘survivalist right’.  The publication of this book, however, predates a number of significant developments in the ‘survivalist right’, including the rise of the citizen’s militia movement, Timothy McVeh, the Unabomber -Theodore Kaczynski (who began mailing bombs before 1986 but did not cause serious injury to a target person before 1985), and the emergence of the internet (designed as a tool to maintain communications in a nuclear war scenario) to build upon the communications networks already established via BBS systems.  The far-right groups and individuals of the 1990s were even more fringe and dramatic than those of 1980s, and what Coates describes are the predecessors of some of the most extreme pre-Millennium survivalist-right adherents.  Coates discussed The Order, a radical and violent vanguard for the white nationalist movement.  The Order, lead by Robert Matthews (a man who, according to Kevin Flynn in his book The Silent Brotherhood, was alleged to have joined the far-right John Birch Society at the age of twelve) provided funds for a number of white nationalist groups through a series of armed robberies and counterfeiting ventures.  The Order also planned assignations against anti-racist enemies including lawyer Morris Dees (founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center) and caustic liberal Denver area radio personality Alan Berg, whom The Order murdered in 1984.  

Operating over a brief two-year period, The Order provided some of the most dramatic material in Coates book.  Robert Matthews perished in a fire that began during a gunfight with the FBI.  Coates also discusses other dramatic episodes of the ‘Survival Right’ however, including Gordon Kahl, a Posse Comitatus leader who in 1983 died in a shootout with law enforcement after he was already being hunted for the murder of two Federal Marshals.  The Posse Comitatus is a loosely connected social movement that refuses to recognize any form of authority above the county level.  They consider the US federal government to infiltrated by Jewish agents, the federal income tax as illegal and, according to Coates, their leaders gave seminars to instruct failing farmers to refuse to repay their federal loans.  

In addition to the Gordon Kahl episode, Coates described other dramatic scenarios with the survivalist right including the murder-house survivalist compound inhabited by serial killer Charles Ng.  Ng’s inclusion is a partial deviation from the theme of the book, which is to identify emerging trends in a crossing of far-right ideologies with a violence-driven survival instinct in anticipation of a (racial/political/nuclear) catastrophe.  Ng was an ex-Marine survivalist, but his status as a sadistic serial killer does not fit into any model of far-right behavior or organization.  Of course, Coates was attempting to identify a new form of cultural activity that appeared to be emerging at the time of his writing, and perhaps the inclusion of Ng appeared appropriate as him and a number of other survivalists were individualist “trust no one” paranoid types.  Ng was a hypermacho sadist survivalist, and he resembles, in attitude, the fictional Holnists of David Brin’s post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel The Postman. 

The only real pushback against these groups that is detailed in Armed and Dangerous comes in the form of law enforcement shootouts or IRS investigations.  The year after Coates text was published, in 1988, the Southern Poverty Law Center successfully sued Tom Metzger into near-inactivity.  In 2000 the Southern Poverty Law Center sued Aryan Nations (a white nationalist religious group) for over six million dollars.  The SPLC strategy of seeking financial damages against white power groups has proved very successful in undermining the strength of what Coates has called the survivalist right.
 
Books that survey the ultrafar-right groups often show difficulty in interpreting those groups along more than one axis of understanding. Coates text is likely one of the closest (that I’ve read) in achieving such a synthesis.  Not all of the groups Coates discussed are intrinsically survivalist, but most of them are, and they do all preach violence and most preach racialized hate.  Morris Dee’s mid-90s book, Gathering Storm, about the citizens militia movement, attempted to portray all such organizations as racist, which was not entirely true.  Meanwhile, Richard G. Mitchell’s 2002 book Dancing at Armageddon: Survivalism and Chaos in Modern Times hardly acknowledges the racist aspect of these movements (although there is a brief discussion of Aryan Nations), even though Robert Matthews’ widow, Zillah Craig, appears in the text.  Mitchell rather emphasizes the millenarian aspect of the groups, which is also featured in Coates analysis of his subject.  Finally, Coates describes numerous elements of mainstream culture that appear to touch upon the virulent attitudes expressed by the right-wing’s radical edge 

communal living - book - 1875 - The Communistic Societies of the United States

The Communistic Societies of the United States
Charles Nordhoff
1875
Hillary House Publishers, Ltd.
439 pages

Ahoy, Netizens, I purchased The Communistic Societies of the United States from the Victoria College book sale that happens every fall at the University of Toronto.

The Communistic Societies of the United States, by Charles Nordhoff, was first published in 1875.  During his life, Nordhoff was a well known journalist, who investigated a number of spiritually oriented communal societies that flourished in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.  Today the communities he observed may be referred to as ‘communalist’ rather than ‘communist’, as the latter term has acquired some very specific political connotations over the past century that deviate from the social phenomena described in this book. The groups and communities discussed by Nordhoff include the Shakers (a still thriving community that was founded in the eighteenth century upon the belief that a woman, Ann Lee, was a prophet of Christ’s second coming) The Amana, the Icarians, and a number of others.  All of the communities discussed emerged in the United States, although many were organized by recent immigrant communities, and some existed in Europe and were carried into the United States by emigrating adherents.

The groups discussed by Nordhoff consistently formed around a set of spiritual ideals, and also often around a particular spiritual leader.  The societies also were formed by a collective will for the groups to create their own means of living.  Typically everyone shared in the necessary work of a society, and individual community members were typically very industrious.  Many of these groups had grown to be quite wealthy by the time Nordhoff investigated them.  In the book’s final chapter, Nordhoff compares the different communities and notes the importance of the modest lifestyles enforced by many of these groups upon their members, however he also laments the ascetic adornments of their villages when many of them are, in fact, materially rich.  Also noted by Nordhoff were any unique practices found to exist in specific communities.  The Oneida community, for example, practiced 'criticism', which were social sessions in which the community would voice criticisms of an individual's character.  The benefit of this practice, supposedly, was that individual members   Nordhoff also claimed that many of the groups have reaped a variety of social and material benefits by imparting equality to both of the sexes.  Finally he was impressed by the democratic structure of communal decision making that many of the societies had instituted.  

The book chapters are filled with detailed information as well as beautiful illustrations, mostly of the commune churches or other important buildings.  Here are some examples:  

Nordhoff profiled a number of these communities in depth, having devoted a chapter to each of the major societies.  In these chapters he profiled each group’s history, their belief system, methods for organizing the community (both spatially and with regards to practical matters, such as the sharing of labour and resources).  Nordhoff also includes the full texts of spiritual songs, prayers, and writings by leaders of the various groups.  Furthermore, he includes transcripts of conversations he has had with community members.  He provides some criticism of the groups in his final chapter, although he is mostly laudatory, and he attempts to construct for the reader as comprehensive a view as possible of his subject matter.

The text was originally published in 1875, however my edition was reprinted in 1961.  One aspect of the 1960s counterculture was a ‘back to the land’ ethos of communal living and working.  I do not know if or how the communes of the 1960s were influenced by the kinds of communities described by Nordhoff, however a number of earlier books about these communities, including Nordhoff’s, were reprinted in the period leading into the countercultural 1960s, and the subject matter was revisited in a number of texts published later in the decade.

Note: The Communistic Societies of the United States can be read for free at:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/utopia/csus/index.htm