Benjamen Walker's Theory of Everything - If you dislike like, then you will… (the dislike club part III)

Episode Date: December 3, 2014

This week Anthropologist Gabriella Coleman tells us about the internet’s original Dislike Club, Anonymous. Biella has spent the last eight years hanging out with Anons both on IRC and in IRL. Her new book “Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: the many faces of Anonymous”  is the definitive book on the topic, nothing else comes close.  Biella also gets me to watch V for Vendetta, something I have refused to do out of my fanboy respect for writer Alan Moore (who refused to watch it or put his name on the movie). I wish I could un-see it already.  Also: Commodify your dislike!

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Episodes every other week at neverpo.st and wherever you find pods. You are listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything. This installment is called If You Dislike Like, Then You Will... Hello, we are Anonymous. Over the years, we have been watching you. In 2008, when the internet group Anonymous announced that it would be taking on the Church of Scientology,

Gabriella Coleman was there. This was when she started hanging out with Anonymous on the IRC, often for more than five hours a day. And she did this for eight years. She's been there for the highs, the lows, and the lulls. That's actually really funny. Gabriella Coleman, or Biella as she likes to be called, was there back when internet noobs were complaining

about something called anonymous trolling. She was there when anonymous discovered the meaning of hacktivism. And she was there for the great anonymous motherfuckery versus moral faggery debates. She put in all this time because Biella is an anthropologist. This is what we do. By sticking around for a long time, you really are able to talk to 40, 50, 60 people

as opposed to 2 or 3 or even 10. And by talking to 60 people, you start to, first of all, be able to triangulate things so that you can verify certain stories as being, if not true, at least relevant, right? These are two different things. And the other thing you can do is paint a portrait of sociological dynamics. Anonymous attracts all kinds of people. And in her new book, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, The Many Faces of Anonymous, Biella introduces us to many men and women, boys and girls, libertarians and anarchists, vegetarians and fast food lovers. There's really only one thing that categorically defines the group as a whole. One of the really strong threads that connect all the different eras of Anonymous

and all the different political nodes is this taboo against fame-seeking. Anonymous is a social laboratory where people can experiment with creating content without seeking anything back for it. And that's really hard to do. I actually created one video while I was in Anonymous with like three other people, and I think it was a pretty great video. But I can't tell you what video that is

because that's not how it works. It's just out there, and I don't have to get any kind of recognition for it. Anonymous first came to prominence on sites where anything and everything was possible and postable. Sites like 4chan. On 4chan, which is the message board where anonymous first came into being, anonymity is enforced through a technical default. And everyone posts with anonymous

anonymous anonymous and you don't have persistent pseudo anonymous nicknames so you can't even accrue status and reputation and this is where this kind of ethic first formed but I actually think it's manifestations more interesting in the activist nodes because you had to actively fight for it because it wasn't a technical default you had to actively fight for it because it wasn't a technical default. You had to push against the fact that people were gaining status and reputation both internally and some people were actually trying to convert their internal status into external status either through very famous pseudonames and nicknames and characters like Sabu or other people who actually were not even anonymous.

A number of individuals in Biela's story end up paying a price for fame whoring, like Barrett Brown, the activist who never even tried to be anonymous. Even though he made many important contributions to the cause, many Anons found his press releases, the ones with his name on them, intolerable. It is so frowned upon to seek fame and recognition for your actions. And I would also say that the ethic against fame-seeking was and is inseparable from the drive to support political causes in Anonymous. It's a way to kind of deflect attention from the messenger to the message.

And it really does then place a focus on the political operation. And the character that comes into being is this character called Anonymous, which is quite wonderful. And some people might be skeptical, like, well, aren't they just breaking the law so they need to deflect attention off the messenger? Well, many people are not breaking the law.

The great majority are not. The ones who are law-breaking anonymous participants are a much smaller percentage, and everyone else are propaganda makers, supporters, organizers. They could easily be public as to who they are. But that is unacceptable within the kind of moral economy of Anonymous. Okay, there are some things you can do that are worse than breaking the fame taboo. When it came out that Hector Monsinger, or Sabu, was not only informing on his fellow anti-sec members and trapping them even at the government's behest,

Anonymous lost its shit. Sabu was New York-based, so Biela had met him a few times. When the news broke, she was actually on the phone with him. The very day that Sabu Hector Mgir was revealed as an informant, which was March 6, 2012, he had been basically pestering me, I don't mean that in a bad way, on Twitter through direct messaging to contact him. And it had been a while since we had talked.

I had left New York City. We had met a number of times. And it seemed so urgent that I was like, OK, I'm just going to call from my home phone, which I've never done. And I knew news was coming. What news? I wasn't entirely sure. And I actually, I mean, this is the closest I've ever come to kind of having, like, I

blanked out at some level. I was so angry. I was dizzy. And I barely kind of remember the conversation aside from the fact that he said, it's not what it seems. I remember kind of some phrases, but as he was talking, the news article comes up, which clearly reveals what was going on. And a lot of kind of thoughts rushed through my mind where I was thinking about all the chats we had from July, which is when I first started to really talk to him. He was already informant to the present moment. And it was just incredibly disorienting

just to think about the fact that you were maybe this entree way to other people. In one of the most chilling moments in her book, Biella goes through her records and realizes that Sabu had actually made a number of attempts to get her to put him in touch with her friend Jacob Applebaum, a noted tour developer and freedom and privacy advocate. It's just not an accident that the day after we meet, he asks about Jacob and basically offers.

He says something like, you know, let him know that we're here for him. And that's just very disconcerting in a lot of ways, especially because Jacob was not involved in Anonymous. I mean, this isn't a case of Sabu interacting with other hackers he's working with who are clearly breaking the law in front of his eyes, right? This is phishing, a phishing expedition. The Sabu affair put a number of Anons in prison, but it also taught the group a number

of important lessons. Most hacks are simply now credited to Anonymous, and sometimes nobody claims credit, as in the case of the high-profile hack of FinFisher, a powerful spying tool used by many governments. So it's certainly the case that after Sabu was revealed to be an informant and a lot of people were arrested, there was quite a bit of discussion about how it was a terrible idea for the hackers to be so public about what they did as kind of individuals and as a group. And by the group, I mean anti-sec. Anti-sec rose in the ashes of WellSec, and it was a militant hacker group that was quite active from the summer of 2011 until

basically one of its main participants, Jeremy Hammond, was arrested. And so there was a lot of discussion about how they kind of had failed in truly following through that ethic. And so instead of this kind of totally united front where the actors are just anonymous, you don't know who that is, we knew that it was Antisec doing the hacks. We knew that it was Sabu, and I have that in quotes because, in fact, at a certain point, he stopped doing any technical hacks and it was really some other people behind the scenes doing them.

But it really showed that, you know, not only is this ethic interesting because it goes against the grain of dominant notions of you know individuality and celebrity at a pragmatic level it's also just a really good idea not to kind of put forward individuals even if they're pseudonames you know there's a real kind of strategic element to a blanket term anonymous to a blanket term, anonymous. Every day, the corporations who are dismantling the free and open web replace another piece of infrastructure

with a component from their own social platforms. But the battle isn't over yet. There remains one form of dissent that has yet to be commodified. And according to Gabriella Coleman, this dislikability, readily on display for the world to see, just might turn out to be what enables Anonymous to win. There's actually very precise reasons why they have not been commodified. Because if corporate types are like, oh my god, we can't stand Anonymous, well, they're not going to commodify them either. Sometimes people who say, well, Anonymous isn't politically significant,

I'm like, well, you know, if corporations can't stand them, there's something important going on. The 2006 Hollywood blockbuster V for Vendetta features an anonymous masked man named V. He wears a cape and a black-and-white guy fox mask, and using his superpowers, explosives, and computers, he takes down a totalitarian government. The film ends with a mass uprising. The citizenry, all now wearing capes and masks, confronts the army. And as the dying V blows up parliament, the film climaxes with shots of people ripping off their masks, revealing a rich diversity of age, gender, and race. The movie is based on a graphic novel by the British writer Alan Moore, but his name does not appear in the credits.

Alan Moore refused to have anything to do with the film. He refused to even watch it. I first read the 10-issue V for Vendetta monthly comic book series when I was in high school. I remember the issues were always late. There were many occasions when I would leave the comic book store disappointed and empty-handed. But one Saturday, I was hurrying home clutching issue number five when a car pulled up. There were two girls inside. They offered me a ride. I declined because I wanted to go home and read my comic book. These girls still haunt me. What the hell was I thinking? In solidarity with Alan Moore, I too refused to see the movie. Until last week, when my friend Biela told me

that if I truly hoped to understand the meaning of anonymous, then I had to see it. So I downloaded V for Vendetta and watched it on my laptop. There was a part of me that thought this movie might help me with my dislike club. Like I said, I'm having a really hard time getting this Dislike Club thing off the ground. I bought the URL, dislike.club, but I can't seem to get the site up. In fact, I'm hoping this admission that I imagine this terrible movie, V for Vendetta, might offer me some sort of inspiration proves to you just how lost I am. Will you help me?

Seriously, I can't totalitarian fascist system. It's not an issue of bad actors. The whole system is corrupt and rotten. And when V dies at the end of the book, Evie, his protege, takes up the mask, because now that the old system has been torn down, a new one is needed. In Alan Moore's story, the mask conceals two faces, the face of the anonymous destroyer and the face of the anonymous builder.

In the movie, V kills every single bad actor, so there is no need for Evie, played by Natalie Portman, to take up the mask. In the movie, there's no problem with the system. In the movie, the system is fundamentally sound. There are reports that Warner Bros Brothers has made millions from the sales of these official V for Vendetta special edition masks. But while Alan Moore still hasn't seen the movie, he has said that he gets a warm glow whenever he sees Anonymous I don't think anonymous is a good model to follow for building a democratic institution. But when you're trying to engage in direct action and protest politics, it's fantastic.

And that's because the state can't fully understand what's going on because the structure is so difficult to map and there's so much secrecy and there's cabals within cabals you have this geography of obscurity and that just makes it harder to break up so from a purely kind of tactical perspective when you're engaging in again protest politics not necessarily other forms of activism where I necessarily other forms of activism, where I think other forms of activism, you need more accountability. But when you're trying to engage in direct action and hacking and protest politics, having a geography of obscurity and secrecy, where outsiders find it impossible to understand, I actually think strategically is a

very handy thing in this day and age, where everything can be tracked, surveilled, data mined and analyzed. If you like apps, then you will like personal brands. If you like shopping, then you will like native advertising. If you like dystopian nightmares, then you will like bros. If you like nightmares, then you will like bros. If you like Grindr, you will like cyber bros. If you like Gorilla Glass, you will like baby wipes. If you like the sharing economy, you will like lulz. If you like disruption, you will like innovation.

If you like disruptive innovation, you will like DDoSing your bro's startup with a weaponized botnet. If you like innovative disruption, then you will like being the ce bro of your own personal brand. If you like misery, you will like IRL. It does feel pretty hopeless in a lot of ways. And I think that it's pretty great that certain people taking the mask are not simply falling to the forces of apathy and resignation, but pushing hard against it, you know, in all sorts of different ways. And that's incredibly important.

And that's why I kind of find it a hopeful story. I actually think the impulse to not accept the order of things is particularly important in this current juncture where apathy and cynicism tend to reign pretty hard. If you like, like, then you will like, like. If you like, like, then you will like, like. If you like, like, then you will like. Like. If you like. Like. Then you will like. Like. You have been listening to Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything.

This installment is called If You Dislike Like, Then You Will... This is part three of a special Theory of Everything miniseries called The Dislike Club. It's a story in progress that will play out on the podcast over the next few weeks and then culminate December 21st on Radio Tonic from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's RN's Creative Audio Unit. This installment featured Gabriela Coleman. The program was produced by myself, Benjamin Walker, with sound design from Bill Bowen,

and special thanks to Matilde Biot. The Theory of Everything is a proud founding member of Radiotopia, the world's greatest podcast network. Check out all the other shows in our tribe. Everything you need to know is at radiotopia.fm. Radiotopia from PRX