Something about the pseudonymous environment likely helped cultivate this cosmopolitanism. By cloaking markers of the self, like ethnicity, class, and age, all sorts of different possibilities are opened up. Studies confirm that we tend to seek those who are familiar (or similar to us)—and fellowship via shared identity is nothing to scoff at, nor eliminate.25 Nevertheless, it is also important to create and experiment with spaces that mute markers of class, age, and background to help form connections that might not otherwise be made. In a way, it could be that self-defined membership in Anonymous itself becomes enough of a shared identity to foster these connections.
While we can showcase surprising examples of diversity within Anonymous, this is not to say that heterogeneity is not notably lacking. Particularly when it comes to gender: Although Anonymous boasted key female participants and organizers (like darr, featured earlier in this book, and a feisty activist named Mercedes Haefer whose actions will soon be examined in depth), the only “femanon” hacker in LulzSec turned out to be a guy passing himself off as one—Kayla.
Anonymous mirrors the structural inequities prevalent across the computer science world. While most of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields have narrowed the gender gap, computer science is not one of them. Indeed, peak equity in college enrollment occurred more than twenty years ago when 37 percent of undergraduate computer science degrees awarded in 1985 went to women. Today the number hovers around 20 percent.26 And while numbers are harder to harvest for the hacking scene (given the informal nature of many associations), all indicators point to even lower rates of inclusion.27 In certain sectors, such as free and open-source software, many projects have responded with initiatives to increase diversity.28 But among law-breaking hackers, the only females I have met or heard about are those who have switched genders, which is actually—and perhaps, for many, surprisingly—more common than one might imagine. (Conversely, it bears noting that—whatever the reason—females are more common among trolling communities.) Even though there are no formal studies on gender and the hacker underground, the low numbers are likely the combined result of structural forces, the legal riskiness of the activity, and the insular, braggodocious boys’ club mentality within the established community.29 Occasionally, hearing constant belittling of female contributions from certain Anons, I would find myself wondering, “Is this sexism or just trolling?” knowing full well that the distinction is rarely clear-cut.
Being specific about diversity and gender dynamics allows for more interesting questions to be posed: Why, for instance, are gender benders, queer hackers, and female trolls common and openly accepted categories, but female participation in technical circles remains low? Some identities become accepted while others continue to be viewed with skepticism.
Dismantling the stereotypes also allows a greater appreciation of the motivations held by many of these participants. We may disagree with the tactics—hacking, DDoSing, doxing—but we should distinguish these tools and their significance from the composition of Anonymous itself. Time and again I witnessed participants acting with political conviction, and it is likely some of them were political newcomers.
This becomes entirely lost if we understand Anonymous through the gross fetish of stereotypes. Many journalists who have interviewed me as an “expert academic” ask, in some form or another, about “the kind of person who seems to get into Anonymous.” Though it is not the answer anyone wants to hear, I often say that there is no kind—except, again, that many tend to be geeks and hackers. Those who identify as being part of the Internet are diverse in background, interests, and political sensibility. But behind the question, the asker likely has something in mind: socially alienated, white, angry, libertarian, American youth. And if we assume the default hacker and geek is generally male, middle-class, libertarian, and white, then it is much easier to treat a hacker’s political interventions as juvenile and suspect—arising from a baseline of teenage angst, instead of the desire for politically conscientious action.
CHAPTER 6
“Moralfaggotry” Everywhere
This 2011 chat log between a core Anonymous organizer and reporter was given to me in 2013. Upon reading it, a flood of emotions and memories washed over me. It reminded me how the quintessential anthropological life cycle—the alienation of initial entry, followed by the thrill of finding your footing, and the painful end of extraction—characterized my research on Anonymous. Anonymous9’s prediction was right—following Operation Tunisia I became intimately involved with Anonymous, and this entanglement has waned over time, especially when I started to write this book. Soon after reading this leaked conversation, I assured Anonymous9, one of my closest Anonymous confidants, that he would remain a friend even as I moved on to other research subjects (but only on the condition that he realizes that I am no longer a college student).
Anonymous9’s statements also reminded me that it took only the single month of January 2011 to graduate from a confused outsider to a confused semi-insider. The transformation was underwritten by the hours I clocked for research: five hours a day online—at least—every day of the week. I tuned in to between seven and ten IRC channels at a time, observing and absorbing the comings and goings of Anonymous. Additionally, I was spending roughly ten hours a week doing interviews with the media about Anonymous. I spoke with over one hundred fifty different reporters in two years. As a result, I now hold the dubious distinction of teaching more journalists about IRC than anyone else in the world.
Over time, the vertigo that came from wading through so much data, day after day, was replaced by a sense of belonging. I began participating in discussions and became known, and more-or-less accepted, in a number of the sub-communities and channels that were constantly popping up, like mushrooms in a forest after a good rain. No longer lost in the woods, I became part of the woods. Like all forests, danger lurked in certain areas—but at least I became increasingly aware of where the enchanting parts could be found as well. I found that my home became the AnonOps IRC channel called #reporter.
Settling into my new home was far from a smooth transition. No matter how many times I psyched myself up to say something, speak up, introduce myself, like now, this very moment—I always backed down. I was terrified to say anything for weeks, scared, quite simply, of being kicked out of the channel and losing such an incredible opportunity. This group of Anons, unlike those from Chanology, was fiercer and rowdier. I had watched, in rapt attention, others get banned from the channel for violating some codes of ethics that weren’t so clear to me and also, even more terrifying, for no other reason than the lulz.
It wasn’t until early January 2011 when I first spoke up. And it wasn’t entirely voluntary. Seemingly out of the blue, they noticed me. I had been observing safely, nobody paying any attention to me, until suddenly it was as if the lidless eye of Sauron had swiveled his gaze to my corner of the room, melting the shadows I hid behind and bathing me in a fierce beam of light. I was away from the computer getting some food in the kitchen. When I came back, I found this on the screen:
: i talked to her today but…
: if she would send me a DM on twitter, i could.
: yes, if she’s the biella from twitter, i talked to her before
ts from here in just a bit.
You have been kicked by q: (hi biella, could you DM me on twitter please? Thanks!)
My heart pounded. I groaned. It sucks to get kicked off a channel. It means you can no longer see what is happening and you don’t know why you were summarily removed before you could defend yourself. It is embarrassing—one has to wonder what they say about you when you aren’t there—and you are not sure if you are going to be allowed to return. You might get “z-lined” or “q-lined,” actions that operators can take to permanently ban your IP address from the entire server, which would mean that I would get removed from all channels at once. Thankfully, that is not what they had in mind. It turns out that they didn’t ban me from reentering the channel. And so ten minutes later, racked by anxiety, I logged back on:
They responded immediately:
[…]
: biella, can you send me a DM on twitter?
[…]
: yar, can only say good things about biella. just wanted to be sure it’s the same her :)
Phew. Come to think of it, it was more like PHEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWW. It was a make-or-break moment. Had they called me out as lame or untrustworthy, it would have spelled my end—or at least converted the prospect of trust and access into a Herculean feat. Those on #reporter held more authority than your average Joe or Jane Anon. Their opinions counted.
Perhaps my painless acceptance bears further explanation. Recall that I was two years into researching Project Chanology. While AnonOps’ political culture was distinct from the anti-Scientology crusaders, there was enough of a cultural connection so that when participants rummaged through my work, it struck a familiar chord. From my video lectures especially, it was not hard get a whiff of the degree of sympathy I held toward Anonymous—enough at least to determine that I enjoyed the lulz.
And I was not alone. There was a confederacy of about half a dozen outsiders given extra access in exchange for functioning as Anonymous media mouthpieces. A hacker turned reporter named Steve Ragan dished out the most detailed and nuanced technical articles relating to Anonymous for the Tech Herald. A business writer for Forbes, Parmy Olson, churned out waves of stories, eventually becoming LulzSec’s private reporter. Two of its members, Sabu and Topiary, spilled their guts to her, even admitting—almost unbelievably—to law breaking. Writing for Wired.com, Quinn Norton’s long-form reporting shone brightly during Occupy as Anonymous converged with the 99 percent. Filmmaker Brian Knappenberger spent over a year tirelessly interviewing more than forty Anons on IRC, video chat, and in person for a full-length documentary. (Brian and I would eventually team up in a hunt to film Sabu, which failed miserably.) Asher Wolf, geek lady extraordinaire, talked to many Anons behind the scenes and managed, like no one else could, to capture its esprit de corps in chunks of 140 characters or less on Twitter. Amber Lyon, then a reporter for CNN, won special points for doing the most un-Internety thing of any of us: she trekked across a remote mountain pass from Washington State into British Columbia with the Anonymous fugitive hacker Commander X (Christopher Doyon) as he fled the United States to avoid prison.
Anonymous’s exchanges with media figures and researchers are as contradictory and varied as the collective itself. Most participants worked with journalists as respectfully and transparently as the clandestine nature of Anonymous allowed. The primary goal, typically, was to gain publicity for their causes, such as the turmoil in Tunisia, but they also sought, whenever possible, to carefully manage their own image. On a few occasions, the goal was to troll particular journalists as well.
Image management or trolling was aided by some in-house publicists adept at framing content toward both goals, who populated #reporter alongside the reporters and outsiders like myself. Two in particular were known for speaking to journalists with panache: Topiary, who was eventually revealed to be eighteen-year-old Jake Davis from the remote Scottish Shetland Islands (self-described on his Twitter bio as a “simple prankster turned swank garden hedge”) and Barrett Brown, a fair-skinned, honey-haired Texan whose home den was strewn with books and a taxidermied bobcat posed as if about to pounce off the wall. During OpTunisia, tflow had invited Topiary into the inner sanctum, and he proved himself so adroit at spinning lulz-fueled and delightful propaganda that he remained a core member. After Brown wrote a short article praising Anonymous, Gregg Housh (one of the original members of marblecake) pulled him in.
Topiary and Barrett Brown were also AnonOps’ resident tricksters—each with a distinctive brand of chicanery. Inspired by twentieth-century avant-garde art pranksters the Dadaists and the Situationists, Topiary found his knack in spinning 140 characters of brilliant nonsense and absurdist media manipulation. On the reporter channel, he would brag of exploits and scheme aloud:
Topiary, who held the admiration of many Anons, was a masked joker—adopting the pseudonymity almost unanimously deployed by his peers. His name was only revealed upon arrest. On the other hand, I did not include Brown’s covert nickname—because he did not have one. He was just Barrett Brown—sometimes semi-naked, as you will see—but always Barrett Brown. He assumed the role of Anonymous’s spokesperson in winter 2011 and held it until May, when waves of critics nudged him to take a step away. He also played the part of AnonOps’ court jester. Like any self-respecting trickster, he enjoyed a really hot bubble bath while sipping (presumably cheap) red wine. After announcing his plans on Twitter—“Going to get red wine. Will have live bubble bath when I return in 15 minutes”1—spectators could log into Tinychat, a live video chat service, and watch him half-submerged in water as viewers lobbed offensive and trollish comments his way, in this case, “rape jokes.”
Arriving with name in tow, he was informally booted with name in tow for violating an originary rule of Anonymous (hinted at by the name itself): drawing attention and fame to one’s name is the ultimate taboo. Brown attempted to iconoclastically occupy a liminal—betwixt and between—zone/ status. He acted like an insider but never concealed himself. He was tolerated for so long only because he poured significant work into both the network
and the larger cause. A journalist by training, he was adept at afflicting the powerful with ironic, scathing parodic writing. In one Vanity Fair piece praising the investigative journalist Michael Hastings (now deceased), whose unflattering profile of US General Stanley McChrystal in Rolling Stone led to the general’s downfall, Brown mockingly suggested, “McChrystal would have been better off talking to Thomas Friedman, who is so amusingly naive that in 2001 he declared Vladimir Putin to be a force for good for whom Americans all ought to be ‘rootin’,’ a term he chose because it rhymes with Putin.”2 Brown possessed an excellent feel for media dynamics, and he freely offered advice to other Anons. In an interview, one Anon who worked on writing press releases put it this way: “It was Barrett who told me about how to get the attention of journalists, how to get [press releases] published, how to utilize the news cycle and get the timing right and that sorta thing.” Eventually through his antics, and the fact that he assumed the role of flack, sat too uncomfortably with the dominant ethics at work in Anonymous. AnonOps informally banished its own court jester.
Not Tolerated: Personal Promotion
In the middle of December 2010, Washington Post reporter Ian Shapira contacted me. I debriefed him about Anonymous’s history and strongly encouraged him to pay a visit to IRC, specifically #reporter, for the story he was working on. I am not sure if he ever did, but on January 22, 2011, he published a substantial article featuring a Washington-area AnonOps participant:
He goes by the code name AnonSnapple to keep secret the fact that he’s part of the Internet collective of cyber-pranksters and activists called Anonymous. Few at his D.C. private school know that the 17-year-old senior attends Anonymous’s public protests, where he wears the movement’s signature face mask of a grinning, mustachioed Guy Fawkes …
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