What Is Anonymous?

The difficulty people have with boiling down simply and easily the nature of Anonymous is writ large throughout much of the media coverage available. It is too often described as a "leaderless group of hackers," which is an understandable assumption. One only need look at the history of, and I shudder to use the phrase, the Anonymous brand to see where this analysis comes from. Its early days on the 2chan boards, its often politically unsound obssessions and illegal activities, and its nebulous form makes the "leaderless group of hackers" label the nearest and easiest thing to plump for, especially when trying to give as concise a description as your editor needs so he can run the pictures of the guys in masks that he wants for page 6.
But can one be trapped by one's origins to such a degree? Are we, for all our millions of years of evolution, still just amoeba? Clearly not.
Two things seem to have occured with regards Anonymous over the past few months. Firstly, following the initial wave of illegal or otherwise dubious activities against the Church of Scientology, Mark Bunker instilled in the collective a firm moral position that has shaped future demonstrations and actions. Secondly, despite Anonymous originating on the Japanese 2chan, and developing on the English 4chan, they had already begun recruiting from non-chan sources. This continued as they made their stand against the Church of Scientology, with many people choosing Anonymous as a means to voice their concerns about the organisation's behaviour. This means that the Anonymous that now exists holds only a slight resemblance to its former self. It is true that the channers are still out there. It is true that some of them aren't best pleased with what has happened to Anonymous. Both of these things are more or less irrelevant though.
I liken the new Anonymous to being a brand identity for anonymity itself. Anonymous, as has been said elsewhere, is an adjective, and in that respect it is not a group or a collective at all. The trouble is, most who encounter it, and some who even support it, consider it to be a noun, and try and deal with it or describe it as such. As an adjective it is far too nebulous an entity to be so tied down to a description. The closest it gets to being a noun is through its emergent qualities; the successful memes that bubble to the surface; the establishment of a (never black and white) stance or viewpoint based on the data that is collected and shared between its members; the self-organised demonstrations, arrived at by additive contribution in much the same way that Wikipedia is.
Such ad hoc groups have been created before. They are dependent on new technologies that allow for social networking with minimal "transactional cost"; they have huge reach for negligible expenditure in money, time or effort. There are sites out there devoted to creating such groups - there are, it is true, individuals who set up those sites, but they do not fill them, they do not choose the path that those sites follow - the owner of the sandpit does not control the castles built therein. What makes Anonymous stand apart from these, and it is only slight, is the centralisation of that anonymity, to make sure that it is core to whatever grows around it.
The other thing that makes Anonymous so powerful is the ability for people to make use of it; the brand identity of Anonymous becomes a recognisable tool that can be put to all sorts of purposes, both good and bad. I note here that in some circles this has led to an adoption of the same kind of escape clause that most religions use - that the good part is for the religion, and the bad part is aberration. Within Anonymous it is Anonymous that has the epic win, and individual participants that fail. I make no judgement of that arrangement, despite making those judgements when writing about religion, because Anonymous is a tool, and tools can be used for good or for bad. Religion, and for that matter Scientology, claims to be more than a tool. Often its crimes are directly related to its own beliefs and policies. Anonymous has no belief or policy, no more than a hammer has belief or policy, no more than "quick" has belief or policy.
My Guy Fawkes mask hangs on a hook just inside my front door. I first wore it at a demo in March. I put it on; I take it off. That is all Anonymous is.

What's the Matter wit' you, Mask?

Let's be frank. There is something distinctly unsettling about seeing several hundred people wearing the same mask. More unsettling still when they have all come together to protest against something that is seen as a sacred cow - that private, personal frontier of religious belief. It is far too easy to see, in the often bizarre placard waving masses of Anonymous, the shadow of the Ku Klux Klan. This becomes an easier parallel still when the origin of Anonymous is examined, the often tasteless, often (seemingly) bigoted outpourings of /b/ chan. It is too easy; it is also a mistake, a wholly unjust leap of logic to make.
Although the masks in a sense predate the demonstrations (the "group", after all, predate the removal from YouTube of that video) their need exists primarily because of the Church's Fair Game policy. CoS has a long history of harrassing critics, both legally and illegally in line with a supposedly withdrawn policy from L Ron Hubbard; that enemies of the church be cheated, lied to and destroyed. Contemporary critics of Anonymous might like to make the simple assumption that the mask is akin to the KKK wimple - that it is there to protect the identity of the wearer as a means to avoid prosecution, but no. The masks are worn to protect against the actions, legal or otherwise, of the Church.
I have been blogging about CoS since the summer of 2007. I forget exactly why I began; in part for personal reasons, in part because of the Panorama documentary, in part because of the inspiration that the old guard critics, Bunker, Christman, Heldal Lund. Aware of the defamation that has been repeatedly attempted against these and other critics I posted anonymously, and continue to post anonymously. But this was never exclusively to protect myself from Fair Game. The other, and in the greater scheme of things more important, reason is that Scientology sets up, in the mind of the believer, the notion that no critic of Scientology is free of crime. Hubbard promoted the ad hominem attack. Never defend, he said, always go after the critic; discover his crimes, fabricate them if necessary.
Again, this sounds like I mask my online self for defense, but, like so much of Scientology, the "what are your crimes" tactic has a manifold purpose. What does it mean to "never defend"? If someone is never invited to defend her belief, then she will never be forced to think critically about her beliefs. Hubbard, by commanding his followers to attack critics rather than enter into dialogues with them, was letting those followers off the hook of critical thought, even of accountability. Although by writing critically about the Church I will automatically be taken for an SP (such is their irrationality) I hope that, devoid of any attachment to a flesh-and-blood person of doubtless criminal past (like LRH himself, who died a fugitive) Scientologist readers will find it marginally more difficult to dismiss my writing without thinking about it first.
CoS should not and are not surprised by the monthly worldwide gathering of masked protestors. Tory Christman said, commenting chiefly on the way in which Anonymous rallied around the Old Guard following the Church's pulling of the Cruise video, that the Church makes its critics. Where it harrasses someone, it recruits as critics anyone who witnesses that harrassment. But CoS not only makes its critics, it shapes them too. It is Church policy that has led not only to the number of people turning up on a monthly basis to demonstrate against them, but led to those people wearing masks. Whereas it may at one point have found credibility in the claim that these masked fellows were wronguns, as soon as the Church began attacking people who participated in the demonstrations (or even were just in the area at the time) it did more to legitimise the use of the masks than anything the anonymous crowds could have come up with. Well done.