99% Invisible - 99% Invisible-42- Recognizably Anonymous

Episode Date: December 9, 2011

Anonymous is not group. It is not an organization. Rob Walker describes Anonymous as a “loosely affiliated and ever-changing band of individuals who… have been variously described as hackers, hacktivists, free-expression zealots, Internet troublemakers, and assorted combinations thereof.” But when … Continue reading →

We get support from UC Davis, a globally ranked university, working to solve the world's most pressing problems in food, energy, health, education, and the environment. UC Davis researchers collaborate and innovate in California and around the globe to find transformational solutions. It's all part of the university's mission to promote quality of life for all living things. Find out more at 21stCentry.ucdavis.edu. This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Hello, we are anonymous. Over the years, we have been watching you. First off, we should describe what anonymous is. It's not an organization. It is a non-organization. A sort of ever-changing band of individuals.

Sometimes describe as hackers or activists or free expression zealots or just internet troublemakers. You can't even call them a group. I tend to call them a phenomenon. We are anonymous. And for someone who writes extensively about brands and brand identity, Rob Walker became intrigued. My name is Rob Walker.

I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine and for design observer. Because this non-group called anonymous, somehow created its own visual identity. It was so compelling and immediately recognizable, which is a task that corporations are political campaigns. It's been millions and millions of dollars to achieve, and these people seem to have done

something very effective without any organization or any budget or even any coherent plan. There are two basic images used for anonymous. One is a logo. A headless figure in a suit juxtaposed against a kind of world map that's very blatantly derived from the United Nations Globe logo with a question mark where his head should be. The other major visual image is a mask. That is a sort of stylized visage based on Guy Fox although no one really recognizes Guy Fox. It's the mask wornwarmed by the protagonist

and the graphic novel in that movie, V for Vendetta. The original mass design was by the artist David Lloyd. And it comes in handy when you're trying to stay anonymous in the real world. And it is sort of leeched over into just street protests in general. Street protests like the non-affiliated Occupy Wall Street movement.

Anonymous has its roots in the anonymous postings on the Slash B-Sash message board on ForChand.org. I would openly discourage your listeners from visiting the Slash B-Sash message board. Yeah, some things you just can't unsee. It's really pretty harsh. But an anonymous came together as a kind of movement when they decided to take on the church of Scientology. There was an embarrassing video of Tom Cruise that people were posting and people representing the church of Scientology were taking it down. We are the authorities on getting people of drugs. We are the authorities on the mind. And people associated with an anonymous had a problem with that because of their kind of general

free expression point of view and decided that they would band together and keep reposting that video and then that sort of escalated into what else can we do to basically cause problems for the Church of Scientology. It was an ominous YouTube video produced by a small subset of anonymous where a more unified voice began to form. I was absolutely blown away by this video. It's directed to the Church of Scientology.

It's not directed to the world at large. It just sort of says, you know, attention, Church of Scientology, we are anonymous. And here's what we have to say. And we're coming after you. And we recognize you as a formidable opponent, but we're going to take you down. And the visuals, it's just sort of rolling clouds over buildings.

And there's this kind of ominous music playing in the background. And the voiceover is this robot voice. Which turned out to be an online AT&D text to speech translator. But it sounds really creepy. There are a few notable moments and turns of phrase in the video, but the first one to grab Rob's attention said, We are anonymous and we're going to do this for the good of your own followers, for the good of mankind, and for our own amusement, kind, and

for our own enjoyment. Which just sort of like really encapsulates this like we're righteous and we just sort of feel like doing this right now because we find it fun. Which is really kind of a scary combination of ideas. The video ends with what has become the anonymous tagline. And parts of this tagline I learned had been kind of floating around on 4chan that slash be slashboard. We are anonymous.

We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us. Expect us is so like, you know, you just almost immediately want to sort of freeze up at your keyboard and look over your shoulder to see if they're there. Around the same time as this video, the aforementioned headless suitman in front of the UN flag logo was created. Again, using elements that have been floating around the slash B-slash board for quite some time, they also created a website, and all this because a media savvy member of anonymous

warned the others that if they didn't brand themselves, someone else would do it for them. You need some kind of a solid identity to present to the press because they're going to come up with their own if you don't and you want to control that message. Rob Walker got the inside story of the early days of anonymous from Greg Housh, who was part of the early planners of various anonymous actions. You could say directing the action, but you know, with anonymous everyone knows that you can only make suggestions that if they're good enough and people like them, they'll do it.

But they could have easily been ignored. In the process of being as bombastic as they could towards Scientology, they sort of accidentally created this ominous self-image that is simultaneously scary but also very attractive, I think. So this video that they did took off, currently it has over 4.5 million views, and they decided the next logical step was street protest. We decided right then and there, that's what we're gonna ask everyone to do. We're gonna send the internet outside. People are leaving their mother's basement. But by this point there

was sort of legal stuff in motion with church Scientology was really going after them. The first thing that came to my mind was okay we're gonna need to cover our bases. So we need a mask, what mask do we use? We build a short list of you know-Mask. He means the V for a Vendetta mask. That's kind of symbolic, a Batman mask. The actual one that came in kind of second in our voting that night was Old School Masquerade masks, where you would actually hold the little thick and hold it up.

And we came up with like five or six masks. And then they got really pragmatic about their choice. We called around to comic book shops and costume shops in most of the major cities in the world from Paris to London to New York to LA, I mean, everywhere. And we asked, you know, do you have any of these and you know, what do they cost? And the most thing we found was nearly every costume

and comic book shop on this planet had that beef of a net a version of the Guy Fox mask for six to $10, depending on your local currency. And it was just, it was okay, there we go. It's available, it is cheap, and it's in every city in the world. Not only do we like it, but it's the right choice. And basically the upshot is enough people went along with that, that the day after these Scientology protests

happened, there were photos and videos of people wearing this mask all over the place and it just caught fire. It was a powerful thing that people sort of saw it and said that's anonymous. Another quality of the V for Vendetta mask is that it has its own twisted version of a Mona Lisa smile that you can't quite figure out if he's laughing or mean or laughing at you in a mean way. And I think having fun and menace, you know, it's not really that surprising that those two ideas would be linked. It is a statement of anonymity, of personal privacy, but it's also a statement of wild freedom of expression and absolutely through a combination of birth and menace.

So when I ask Rob Walker why he thinks these two images, the headless suitman and the v for vendetta mask work, he gives two basic reasons. One is that they're just graphically pleasing. Sometimes what hangs people up is like, what is your empirical proof that this is good? And it's like, well, I don't really have any empirical proof. What I have is, I look at it and I say, that's awesome. And the second reason is that the two symbols are easy to manipulate. With a very simple graphics program, you can put the GuyFox mask thing over the headless suit guy. You can manipulate these things in any number of ways, which is a strategy that a traditional, say, corporate brand or political campaign wouldn't maybe not be so into.

But in this case, there was no creative brief, there was no set of brand standards. People just seem to intuitively know that you can play around with these things and draw on the power of them, but make them your own, and in the making them your own, you're doing it in a way that rebounds back to the original images and makes them even stronger. And that's just like the message board meme culture that spawned anonymous to begin with. You can make the images your own and be one of them. Or use it for your own purposes and have nothing to do with anonymous at all. No one will know the difference.

And these icons and anonymous will live on. 99% Invisible was produced this week by Rob Walker and me Roman Mars. It's based off an article that Rob wrote for Slate. I'll have a link on the website. This program is made possible with support from Lunar, making a difference with creativity. It's a project of KALW, 91.7 local public radio in San Francisco, the American Institute

of Architects in San Francisco, in the Center for Architecture and Design. 99% invisible is distributed by PRX, the public radio exchange making public radio more public, find out more at PRX.org. The program intern is named Sam Greenspan. You can find the show and like the show on Facebook, you can follow me on Twitter at Roman Morris or you can just join us at the website at 99%Invisible.org. you