It was earnest—but earnestly a joke. This poetic imagery of a rising-up was rhetoric—but it was so compelling, so enticing as a lulzy direction, that it entrapped the Anonymous trolls into a commitment to the systematic dismantling of Scientology. They got caught up—like so many tricksters before them—in their own trickster trap. Anonymous, in its sudden commitment to a lulzy politics, gave birth to the reviled “moralfags” and “leaderfags.” These Anons—tainted, somehow, by an accidental taste for justice—effectively catalyzed one of the most potent protest movements of our times.
The accidental train of events went like this: The video unexpectedly sparked a debate as to whether Anons should hit the streets to protest the Church or remain faithful to their madcap roots in raids and lulz. The timing helped make the decision for them, tipping things in favor of street demonstrations. Gregg Housh, one of the video’s editors and an original member of marblecake, explained it as follows during an interview: “There were people who didn’t think anonymous or 4chan should take to the streets but the consensus to actually do it came relatively easily for us after the video. It seemed to be great timing, the right video at the right moment.”
Even if Anons were leaning toward protest, they did not want to ditch trolling completely; rather, they wanted to expand their repertoire. One Anon on IRC captured the full spectrum—legal, illegal, lulzy, serious—that these hordes of trolls were increasingly inhabiting (or wanting to inhabit) between mid-January 2008 and the first street protest (her pseudonym has been changed):
On January 24, 2008, Anonymous announced that February 10 would be a day of protest. A few days after this initial call to action, Scientology critic Mark Bunker seized the high octane moment to push for the use of legal tactics alone. Like the trickster of communication and crossroads, Eshu, he reached out to the trolls in a video (holy Xenu!), praised them (smart), and asked them to join the cause (holy Xenu!). His message was to simmer the hell down, rein in the lulz, and please, please refrain from anything straight-up illegal. On a lengthy post to a forum on whyweprotest.net, Bunker explained what motivated him to make the video: “After seeing Anonymous’s ‘Message to Scientology’ I was worried that I had helped to spawn attacks that would potentially scare Scientology staffers and also get Anonymous members in legal trouble so I decided I needed to make my initial tape to Anonymous.”4
Although many had already been thinking along these lines, not everyone was on board with the vision offered by this hefty, bear-like man in his fifties whom Anonymous renamed “Wise Beard Man” for his erudite posturing and white facial hair. (Only a few years later, new activist networks would arise that embraced militant, illegal digital tactics like the DDoS, not for trolling but for political dissent.) Nevertheless, enough of them shifted gears and darted down the path of activism; Bunker’s arguments nudged Anonymous toward the use of (mostly) legal tactics for its first major demonstrations.
The cake of marble, beavering away largely in secret (a cohort of outsiders knew of its existence), was aware that the great majority of potential participants were likely protest neophytes. If these Internet nerds, geeks, hackers, and trolls showed up en masse to protest without any prior activist experience, it would almost certainly be a recipe for ruin. So they had to get them up to speed—and rather quickly. They delivered a crash course on the mechanics, challenges, and components of peaceful protest in a video called “Code of Conduct.”5 Posted on February 1, 2008, a robotic voice lists twenty-two rules. No detail is overlooked: the video reminds participants to wear comfortable shoes, drink plenty of water, keep particularly geeky and objectionable Internet jokes to themselves (because these would likely offend bystanders), refrain from any violence, obtain necessary permits, use catchy slogans, and record the event. Since marblecake knew that Scientologists would use all available means—including high-definition photos—to identify and subsequently harass protesters, one rule exhorted participants to cover their faces, but noted, in a statement that now appears ironic, that there was no need to use masks: “Rule #17: Cover your face. This will prevent your identification from videos taken by hostiles, other protesters, or security. Use scarves, hats, and sunglasses. Masks are not necessary, and donning them in the context of a public demonstration is forbidden in some jurisdictions.”
Necessary or not, as thousands of Anons and supporters hit the streets in cities around the world, masks appeared everywhere. By then, the Guy Fawkes mask was a pop cultural icon thanks to the Hollywood blockbuster V for Vendetta. The movie portrays a lone anarchist’s fight against a dystopian, Orwellian state. The mask had also appeared previously on 4chan, worn by a beloved meme character with a penchant for failure—Epic Fail Guy. Well known, easy to purchase, and imbued with an undeniable symbolic energy—both on account of its history and its more recent iteration—the Guy Fawkes mask became the mask de jour to deter the prying eyes of Scientology. After, it would function as Anonymous’s signature icon.
The day’s events straddled the line between serious political protest and carnivalesque shenanigans. Why did so many people show up? During an informal chat, one long-time Anon and member of marblecake reasoned to me (correctly, I think) that “hearing [about] the first reports of east Australian protests on February 10, 2008, really set things in motion … Had those not materialized I figure the turnout elsewhere wouldn’t have been as important.” While much of the Western world slumbered, in Australia an estimated 550 to 850 protesters poured into the streets, conveying their numbers in real time to others in video clips and photos, setting off a domino effect felt across much of the Western world. In London the crowd swelled to six hundred, and this success was matched in North America, where protesters hit the streets in small cities across the heartland and in major metropolitan centers like Los Angeles, where a whopping one thousand people turned out.
Six months after a local Fox News station labeled Anonymous “the Internet Hate Machine,” they had legions of followers in the streets—not just geeks and hackers hammering at their keyboards—who were seizing on the group’s name, its ethic of anonymity, and assorted concomitant iconography. That evening, men and women in Guy Fawkes masks and black suits with signs announcing “We Are the Internet” could be seen on cable news shows around the world.
While this may have been the first time Anons demonstrated in large numbers in the streets, previous trolling campaigns had a quasi-activist flair. For instance, in 2007 Anonymous targeted right-wing radio personality Hal Turner, not only for lulz (and revenge) but also because he was a “racist.” Anonymous had first targeted him in 2006 with a series of prank phone calls and computer attacks that took down his website. Hal Turner countered by publishing the numbers of the prank callers, prompting Anonymous to hit hard at the heart of his radio empire, trolling and hacking the heck out of him. The following blog post, published by an Anonymous participant before the second round of raids, conveys the undeniable political sensibility compelling the action:
Those of you who spend any time around the troll pits of the internet, such as 4chan, 7chan, YTMND etc will undoubtedly know of this already, but its worth repeating.
Hal Turner is, in short a Nazi [sic]. A Nazi with his own radio show. Unfortunately for him, he also hasn’t really got a mass following, except from the /b/tards and other various trolls, who decided to absolutely ruin his life online. As the Fox News belo
w [sic] clip of him advocating the murder of a US judge shows, he isn’t exactly someone to feel sorry for.6
Chanology differed from these previous raids in one crucial respect: it became a permanent fixture in the political landscape. In the weeks and months following the first street demonstrations, Chanology continued to protest Scientology’s relentless legal and extralegal crackdown on critics and those who dared to disclose or circulate internal documents. As one protester explained to me during a street demonstration in Ireland: “Came for the lulz; stayed for great justice, epic win, and moar lulz.” But why? How did such a chaotic ensemble organize themselves? And could the lulz still thrive when seeking justice?
Why (and How) We Protest
Every time I reflect on the constitution and perseverance of Chanology, it strikes me as a minor miracle in the annals of political resistance. To be sure, a subset of trolling (like the Hal Turner raids) struck a political chord, but the energy behind these early raids tended to dissipate after a few days or weeks. Chanology was sustained in an environment not exactly conducive to long-term deliberate political organizing; it behooves us to consider the social dynamics behind Chanology’s success, especially in light of the many tensions—for instance, between lulz-driven action and moral goals—which bedeviled it from the start.
To begin with, the formation of a sustained political will was secured by the widespread media coverage of the February street demonstrations. From the first day, people in Guy Fawkes masks were all over the news. Hundreds of photos and dozens of homemade videos from local protests were shared through IRC and popular social media sites like Digg, Myspace, Yahoo! Groups, and LiveJournal. For many Anons, the external representations validated Project Chanology and Anonymous. This dynamic of success and amplification repeated many times in the organization’s history.
Also significant were ulterior motives: while activism was a significant factor for many Anons (and the lulz were always enticing), many turned out for the rare opportunity to meet some of their Anonymous brethren. Some stayed, others returned to their dark corners of the Internet and contested this incipient political sensibility, sometimes deriding their peers as “moralfags” and redoubling their trolling—even targeting Chanology itself as a source of lulz. Take, for instance, the following proposal—a call to reclaim Anonymous from the moralfags in order to resurrect the Internet Hate Machine—proposed on Chanology’s very active virtual town square, the web forum Enturbulation.org (which was eventually ported to WhyWeProtest):
Fellow brothers and sisters,
Six months ago we started on a jihad to ensure that our internets would be free of faggotry. A call to arms went out and we answered it as legion. Today, when looking back at our naïve efforts it is obvious that what is ours by right has been stolen from us.
Our name, our memes and our efforts have been hijacked by people who do not understand and do not realize that our strength came from being diverse, uncaring and unrelenting. While normally this would not be an issue those who have stayed in the trenches protecting our ideals are now at an impasse.
We need your help, I am bent on hand and foot [sic] asking that those that have left Project Chanology return and reclaim it. Bring back the lulz, bring back the hate machine, do not let some rather forceful detractors sway you.
We started this to ensure our internets were free from tyranny and while I agree there are fights ahead that maybe [sic] more important to this end, this is the first one. Where we mold the newfags into hardened trolls and ensure that when the man comes to claim what is rightfully free we are all well versed in ensuring that cannot happen.
Over the coming weeks you will see some old faces raid your channels, your boards, your IRCs to ensure that Anonymous retains what is ours. Reclaim Chanology once and for all, burn anything that opposes us to the ground.7
The binary between moralfags and “hardened” lulz-seekers was, and still is, less clear-cut than this post suggests. On the IRC channels dedicated to political organizing, a small but rather vocal minority offered technical aid for political gain while also insisting on lulzy action, including horrific forms of trolling. Among these trolls, a single individual, named CPU (not his real name), stood out. Widely considered a talented hacker, he freely offered technical advice. But he was also a fierce critic of the moralfags and would clamor for vicious forms of trolling. For instance: on March 16, 2008, CPU suggested the following on the IRC channel #internethatemachine, a chat room for criticizing the moralfags (all names have been changed):
Whether CPU and the others on the channel went on to execute this campaign is unknown—but someone did. On March 22, 2012, trolls engaged in one of the most morally reprehensible and notorious attacks to date, invading an epilepsy forum and posting bright flashing images which induced seizures among some of the forum’s members. Nearly every piece of reporting incorrectly attributed the attack to Anons fighting Scientology, which was not likely the case; various threads on different image boards blamed another notorious board infested with trolls: eBaum’s world. Even if Chanology was not behind the attack, the raid left a dark stain on the name Anonymous, infuriating some members of Chanology.8
It must be noted that while the anti-Scientology crusaders were mortified by the epilepsy forum attack, these nascent moralfags did not altogether disavow deviance or the lulz—it is, after all, part of the fabric of their culture. Instead, Chanology dabbled in a kinder, gentler breed of lulz. For instance, New York City is home to an annual (and rather sizable) zombie flash mob, whereupon a thousand ghoulish, bloody, slow-moving, groaning bodies drag (or sometimes rollerskate) themselves through the city streets. Chanology organizers in New York thought it might be lulzy if this zombie mob paraded in front of the Scientology Church on the day of Anonymous’s monthly protest there. The zombie mob happily obliged. They sauntered down 46th Street in slow motion, yelling obscenities at the Church while the Chanology protesters rofled and snickered at Scientology, obviously proud of the theatrical (and mostly G-rated) lulz they managed to stage.
But there is no better example of activist Anons’ engagement of carnivalesque humor than Operation Slickpubes in January 2009, also orchestrated by the Chanology cell in New York. It consisted of a nearly naked person (he was partially covered by a veneer of smeared Vaseline and pubic hair) streaking through a Scientology Org. The aim of this over-the-top endeavor was not simply to antagonize and anger Church members through an act of defilement (though this was no doubt part of it), but also to revitalize what some participants saw as the flagging spirit of the lulz. The forces of Apollo had to be balanced, eternally, with a bit of Dionysian trickster revelry. Later, Chanology members wrote about the incident in a blog post on motherfuckery.org, a site designed to commemorate their roots:
What resulted in the fol
lowing months could only be described as “lulz” and “u mad”, as the record of the Slickpubes operation made its rounds throughout the world of Chanology, anonymous, and the higher ranks of Scientology. Those who thought Chanology was too tame rejoiced.9
Within this emerging politically oriented Anonymous, the lulz were often deployed, as in Operation Slickpubes, in a jocular, Dionysian form: risqué yet also risky. They worked by simultaneously making one laugh, making one cringe, and also offering a politics of subversion. But not without consequences. Indeed, in the case of Operation Slickpubes, the greasy streaker was arrested for his antics. The incident also prompted the NYPD to begin secretly monitoring Anonymous (a necessary baptism for any new political group, and what better way to attract law enforcement than through pubic hair?).10 Wise Beard Man may have tamed the Anonymous trickster, but he did not fully eliminate its mischievous spirit.
Anonymous’s willingness to wreak havoc in pursuit of lulz and free speech (and in opposition to the malfeasance and deception of Scientology) calls to mind the nineteenth-century European “social bandits” described by historian Eric Hobsbawm in his 1959 book Primitive Rebels. These bandits are members of mafias, secret societies, religious sects, urban mobs, and outlaw gangs; they are ultimately thugs, but, according to Hobsbawm, they nurture a faint revolutionary spirit: some of their plunder is typically redistributed to the poor who they further protect from bandits other than themselves. Hobsbawm defines the bandits as “pre-political” figures “who have not yet found, or only begun to find, a specific language in which to express their aspirations about the world.”11 Anonymous has worked toward finding that language with remarkable celerity since it launched Project Chanology.
Such hijinks nevertheless contrast with Hobsbawm’s moral narrative, whereby bandits can only become viable political actors by giving up their menacing tactics and buying into conventional forms of power. For Hobsbawm, the bandit is pitted against “the forces of the new society which he cannot understand. At most he can fight it and seek to destroy it.” This explains why “the bandit is often destructive and savage beyond the range of his myth.”12 Today’s digital bandits, however, understand the forces of creative destruction, consciously deploying them for political purposes.
Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy Page 7