Cyber Disobedience: Re://Presenting Online Anarchy

by Jeff Shantz

  During the various red scares the image of the anarchist was deployed in a manner that prefigures the official response to anti-globalization movements today. According to Hong:

  The symbolic anarchist enemy came to personify the challenge of anti-capitalist ideas and values. It was constructed to evoke associations that fostered dependency on authority, freezing political perceptions and conceptions within an acceptable framework. By putting the ‘anarchist beast’ beyond the pale, it kept citizens within the fold. (1992, 111)

  While some have claimed that the period of globalization has been marked by a decline in the nation state, it is more accurate to suggest that within the present period states have responded to social transformation through the exertion of a strengthened nation-state and of values that support it (in new laws, military mobilizations, trade agreements, and so forth).

  As Hong (1992, 110) suggests the first Red Scare against anarchists, which marked the beginning of an American political tradition, is significant “because it produced an evocative condensation symbol that has retrained its power into contemporary use. An excess of democracy can still be discredited as the threat of impending anarchy.” The anarchist beast remains, even a century after it was supposedly vanquished, a key ideological symbol in hegemonic efforts to legitimize state or corporate discourses and practices. This is, perhaps, especially so in the face of growing opposition movements against capitalist globalization and for a global commons.

  As anarchists have noted, such characterizations of organizing and resistance will always be put forward by corporate media regardless of the presence or threat posed by any actual anarchists. This is a lesson also learned by media historians:

  The intensity of Red scares far exceeds the actual threat the scapegoat groups represent. This makes sense, insofar as the primary object of these campaigns is not to defeat the weak and resourceless enemy but to win favor for elements within the governing elite and to accomplish the ideological rearmament of a population. (Hong 1992, 127, n. 4).

  At the same time, anarchists, as well as many media analysts, also recognize that corporate media are not forums for explaining complex issues. Neither are they venues for positively presenting anti-corporate sentiment. Yet, the corporate media are not the only ones to get anarchism wrong, misrepresenting the movement to the public.

  Writing Anarchism All Wrong: Literary Re://Presentations of Anarchy

  The literary presentation of the anarchist as a fanatic is most forcefully, and artistically, provided by Joseph Conrad in his great work The Secret Agent. In Conrad’s telling, the supposedly “anarchist” Professor is actually a Spencerian, a social Darwinist, who seeks a world where only “the fittest” survive—the complete antithesis of anarchism. The weak, he rants, are simply the “source of all evil” (Conrad 1967, 243). His prescription—an actual horror to nonfictional anarchists—is to exterminate all of them. In the vile words of the Professor:

  They are the multitude. Theirs is the kingdom of the earth. Exterminate, exterminate! That is the only way of progress. It is! Follow me Ossipon. First the great multitude of the weak must go, then the only relatively strong. You see? First the blind, then the deaf and dumb, then the halt and the lame—and so on. Every taint, every vice, every prejudice, every convention must meet its doom. (Conrad 1967, 243)

  Another potent, and more humorous, portrayal of the shadowy figure of the anarchist is provided by G. K. Chesterton in his wonderful The Man who was Friday. There the anarchist is a mysterious, even spectral, figure who moves within secret global networks. This is actually the image of the underground terrorist network. The vision of the anarchist as nihilist is extended in a passage in which Inspector Syme, on the trail of anarchists, speaks with a police officer. The officer, referring to the anarchist conspiracy’s inner circle, relates to Syme the anarchist vision as he understands it:

  They are under no illusions; they are too intellectual to think that man upon this earth can ever be quite free of original sin and the struggle. And they mean death. When they say that mankind shall be free at last, they mean that mankind shall commit suicide. When they talk of a paradise without right or wrong, they mean the grave. They have but two objects, to destroy first humanity and then themselves. That is why they throw bombs instead of firing pistols. The innocent rank and file are disappointed because the bomb has not killed the king; but the high priesthood are happy because it has killed somebody. (Chesterton 2007, 46–47)

  For the anarchists, as described by Chesterton, even thought is like a bomb. This is expressed by the anarchist Secretary (!), in his argument for the new method over the simpler and more direct form of the knife attack:

  The knife was merely the expression of the old personal quarrel with a personal tyrant. Dynamite is not only our best tool, but our best method. It is as perfect a symbol of us as is incense of the prayers of the Christians. It expands; it only destroys because it broadens; even so, thought only destroys because it broadens. A man’s brain is a bomb,’ he cried out, loosening suddenly his strange passion and striking his own skull with violence. ‘My brain feels like a bomb, night and day. It must expand! It must expand! A man’s brain must expand, if it breaks up the universe. (Chesterton 2007, 67)

  Another version of the anarchist as mysterious fanatic appears in The Princess Cassamassima by Henry James. This grand novel, the most literary of them all, set in Victorian London is peopled with characters drawn directly from the London anarchist community of the day. The titular character, despite the gender change, is a representation of the anarchist prince Peter Kropotkin himself—the expatriate noble who abandons a life of privilege to take up the cause of the oppressed. A portrayal of Johann Most, the most notorious figure of Victorian anarchism is offered in the form of the immense man of mystery, Diedrich Hoffendahl. The leader (!) Most (Hoffendahl) is portrayed largely as a calculating instrumentalist:

  He had exactly the same mastery of them that a great musician—that the Princess herself—had of the keyboard of the piano; he treated all things, persons, institutions, ideas, as so many notes in his great symphonic massacre. The day would come when—far down in the treble would feel one’s self touched by the little finger of the composer, would grow generally audible (with a small sharp crack) for a second. (1977, 295)

  The anarchist revolutionaries are represented as addled and murderous, seeking only terror and the slaughter of the rich. Anarchism is described as “an aggressive, vindictive destructive social faith” (1977, 18). Anarchists are “the stupid and the blind” who play a part in the career of the protagonist Hyacinth Robinson (James 1977, 10). As if this is not enough, the anarchists are also shallow but earnest (certainly a deadly combination). Take this description of the dreary performance of anarchists at their (inevitably) secret meetings:

  There were nights when a blast of imbecility seemed to blow over the place and one felt ashamed to be associated with so much crude fatuity and flat-faced vanity. Then everyone, with two or three exceptions, made an ass of himself, thumping the table and repeating some phrase which appeared for the hour to constitute the whole furniture of his mind. (James 1977, 243)

  These all too familiar caricatures are portrayed sloppily despite the evidence of years of tireless and selfless organizing among anarchist communist to develop collective ownership and free exchange in relationships of peace and goodwill. Only a cursory study of anarchist activities in London would have made this obvious to James. On the other hand, state order is beautiful, for James, and the protagonist, his values so shallow and fickle, is drawn to withdraw from his revolutionary beliefs by romantic love.

  Once again the anarchists (despite their contempt for hierarchical authority) are said to have a headquarters (James 1977, 294). In other words the portrayal is the antithesis of all anarchist organizing in the real world. For the unfortunate protagonist, the anarchist simply follows orders:

  He shouldn’t judge, he should simply execute. He didn’t pretend to say what good his li
ttle job might do or what portée it might have; he hadn’t the data for appreciating it and simply took upon himself to believe that at headquarters they knew what they were about. The thing was to be part of a very large plan, of which he couldn’t measure the scope—something that was to be done simultaneously in a dozen different countries. (James 1977, 294)

  On the extent of anarchist conspiracy, James writes in raging terms:

  ‘It’s beyond anything I can say. Nothing of it appears above the surface; but there’s an immense underworld peopled with a thousand forms of revolutionary passion and devotion. The manner in which it’s organized is what astonished me. I knew that, or thought I knew it, in a general way, but the reality was a revelation. And on top of it all society lives!…In silence, in darkness, but under the feet of each one of us, the revolution lives and works. It’s a wonderful, immeasurable trap, on the lid of which society performs its antics.’ (1977, 290–291)

  The opinions of the anarchists on public matters are accused of being “poisoned at the source” (James 1977, 19). Anarchism is said to be only one corner of the “‘shady’ underworld of militant socialism” (James 1977, 18). Never mind the sharp anarchist criticisms of socialism and the heated debates between anarchists and socialists over philosophy and strategy.

  Within the portrayals offered by Chesterton, Conrad, and James there are certain caricatures that are repeated, despite the quite different styles and moods of each. Revolution is presented as conspiracy. Its actions are dynamite and assassinations rather than the mundane community and workplace organizing undertaken daily by anarchists. Anarchists are presented as impotent and desperate. On the whole the anarchist conspirators made up only “a little band of malcontents” (James 1977, 245). Social inequality and oppression, the motivating factors behind anarchist organizing to end injustice, are presented merely as excuses. In The Princess Cassamassima the protagonist is drawn into a commitment to serve the cause at the possible cost of his life. His cause, the supposed anarchist cause, though, is that of a murderous fanatic: “Very likely it would be to shoot someone—some blatant humbug in a high place; but whether the individual should deserve it was not one’s affair” (James 1977, 294). James refers melodramatically to the “sinister anarchic underworld, heaving in its pain, its power and its hate” (James 1977, 21). In each case the esteemed authors have no direct familiarity with the subject matter—the people who might make revolution—and no attempt is made to gain real understanding of them.

  In these portrayals the anarchist was uniformly a shadowy underworld figure predictably attired in black trench coat, black hat pulled low, with a cartoon bomb (bowling ball with lit fuse) under his cloak. Often the anarchist figure was portrayed, interestingly, in a manner currently used to describe the anarchist tech geek. Of course, Anonymous has self-consciously taken up this representation in its own imagery today.

  Anarchists, then as anarcho-techies now, have been portrayed as socially awkward, of questionable hygiene, hanging out in the darkness of subcultural joints and back rooms where they engage in obscure discussions of arcane that they pursue obsessively. Often, too, those discussions were of a technological nature. For the trench coat bomber (note allusions to the so-called Trench Coat Mafia of the Columbine massacre) of the nineteenth century, the discussion was bomb making—for the contemporary cyber anarchists, the making of cyber bombs.

  As is illustrated in a following chapter, many of these same tropes have been carried forward in contemporary representations of hackers and other techtivists in modern media—particularly in Hollywood film representations. With the mania over the “war on terror” in the twenty-first century, there has been a great renewal of interest in the era of attentat of the late nineteenth century. Recent books on the topic include various works of fiction and non-fiction. Some examples include:

  The Dynamite Club by John Merriman; Blood and Rage by Michael Burleigh; Murdering McKinley by Eric Rauchway; and The President and the Assassin by Scott Miller.

  Fin de Siècle Fears, Again: The Unabomber and the Dawn of the Internet Age

  In the late 1990s the figure of the anarchist terrorist made a brief, if spectacular, reappearance in national headlines in the United States. The cause was the rather dramatic police hunt for the so-called Unabomber, the mysterious, even mythic, figure sought by authorities for decades over a series of bombings targeting researchers and corporate figures associated with advanced technological development. Eventually the police hunt would lead to the arrest and conviction of Ted Kaczynski, a once well-regarded Ivy League scientist.

  The Unabomber served as an almost perfect condensation point for mounting social fears over rapid technological change and the zeitgeist of anxiety pointing toward a sense of social-technical collapse in the panic of system failure that would manifest most spectacularly (and futilely) in the Y2K phantom. This zeitgeist of anxiety over broad technologically driven social and cultural transformation was expressed by social theorists like Ulrich Beck in the notion of the “risk society.”

  The Unabomber came complete with a pseudo-anarchist manifesto that touched upon a wide range of late twentieth century concerns over hyper technologization and the associated domination and destruction of the natural world upon which the advanced technological infrastructure rests. In addition to the destruction of nature (and human communities as well) by technology—and the authoritarian structures of state and capital that drive technological expansion, the Unabomber Manifesto identified various threats to human development, on personal and social levels. Indeed, the Unabomber attacks were holistically aimed at an entire technological civilization and the supplanting of direct human community by a technological oligarchy that is understood to threaten life on the planet itself. The Unabomber expresses what is sometimes called an antitech/anti-civ (anti-technology and anti-civilizational) approach which opposes all manifestations of advanced technology rather than the specific mode of production associated with capitalism and capitalist uses of technology.

  In this the association, already emerging as part of popular lore in the internet age, of the anarchist as Luddite found rather strong, and easy, expression. This earlier version of the anarchist as techno-primitive (or “future primitive” to use John Zerzan’s phrase) or latter day Luddite machine smasher provided the main popular image of anarchists in the early years of online development. This image would also allow for, and encourage, a replaying of the popular mythology of the anarchist as primitive rebel—the enraged opponent of progress who, lacking other means, turns to terrorist acts of propaganda of the deed to smash the machines (or the megamachine of technological civilization) or blow up the edifice of industry (and its technologically meditated social relations).

  The construction of the Unabomber as anarchist is, however, entirely ideological. The Unabomber, in his lengthy manifesto, actually reserves most of his condemnation for progressive groups, movements, and perspectives associated with anarchism or with which anarchists have lent support. These include leftism broadly, socialism, labor, feminist and gay and lesbian movements and animal rights.

  At the same time, and perhaps more underground (or undernet), actual anarchists of a more collectivist or communalist orientation were developing networks in the web. These early hackers, technophiles, designers, online organizers, and programmers were exploring convergences of anarchism with the (pre)internet. For these online anarchists the emergent web (which they were instrumental if unacknowledged in developing) shared much in common with longstanding features of anarchism: decentralized, horizontal, participatory, democratic, and based in do it yourself (DIY) production and gift exchange. These anarchists saw themselves as web workers—as a new wave of artisanal producers, much like the watchmakers of Jura who provided an early impetus for anarchist communism in the 1800s.

  The anarchists viewed the net as a means of self-production and self-determination (in labor as much as in anything). The main threats, in their view, were the state (and regulation and sur
veillance) and capital (and enclosure and privatization)—the dominant forces of political economy in capitalist societies. These were the twin forces that had always provided the social opposition for anarchists.

  A Note on “Terrorism”

  The term terrorism is a politically volatile, even slippery one. As philosopher Alain Badiou suggests: “It has no neutral currency” (2011, 19). Terrorism initially referred to a certain exercise of state power (leveled against targets designated as opponents of the state). The term has come, over time, to signify precisely the opposite—the actions of non-state actors who oppose a prevailing order. Those who maintain that order designate opposition as unacceptable—as terroristic (Badiou 2011, 18). All that remains the same is the targeting by states of non-state opponents, real or imagined. No longer is any distinction made between civilian and state victims of violence.

  How can the acts of 9/11 be connected to the assassinations of the 1900s? How can those attacks be rendered the same as the events of 9/11. Clearly the current attempts to link individual acts of violence targeting state figures (in the nineteenth century) with the mass violence of 9/11 are performing an act of contortion. The term “terrorism” is, as Alain Badiou suggests “an intrinsically propagandistic term” (2011, 19).

  On the whole we might conclude with Badiou: “It is clear that ‘terrorism’ is a non-existent substance, an empty name. But this void is precious since it can be filled” (2011, 20). None have been more proficient at filling it that the imperial powers (especially the US, Britain, and Canada) and the corporate mass media who mimic them in the West.