Adrien Chen offers a counterfactual history of Anonymous at The Nation, and twitted about it the day the group hacked the twitter account of the Ku Klux Klan, outing members in typical Anonymous fashion. Chen’s point is that Anonymous may be today’s heroes, but that ignores its history.
To a large extent, Chen critiques a new book by McGill professor, and Anonymous supporter, Gabriella Coleman:
Her new book, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous, is an artful advertisement for Anonymous, bolstered by endless spools of chat logs collected over six years embedded with Anonymous, during which she became essentially an honorary member.
As a narrow oral history, the book offers interesting anecdotes and insider information about a little-understood topic. But in arguing that Anonymous is an exciting new model of political action, Coleman exaggerates Anonymous’s achievements, downplays crucial failures, and is blind to the ways this supposedly novel way of organizing protest rests on bad old myths. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy helps us understand how well-meaning and intelligent people can fall for the Anonymous mystique, and exactly why that’s a bad thing.
It’s not that Chen so loves the government or order that the chaos of Anonymous, or its offshoot, LulzSec, or beginning as 4chan trolls so much offends him, as its birth as a bunch of technically adept but socially sophomoric boys produced a group that was mean, hurtful, offensive and, in particular, sexist.
In its decade of existence, Coleman claims, Anonymous has evolved from profane pranksters into “one of the most politically active, morally fascinating, and subversively salient activist groups operating today,” as well as a “force for good in the world.”
Chen disagrees. Strongly.
As with any revolutionary technological phenomenon, buying into Anonymous’s liberating power requires swallowing a self-aggrandizing buzzword, in this case “lulz.” Lulz is a major aspect of Anonymous’s subversive political potential, as Coleman tells it.
But like a Silicon Valley buzzword, “lulz” obscures more than it reveals, glossing troubling details with a rebel-chic sheen. The lulz originally did not speak to the pleasure of some abstract transgression, but the specific, cruel pleasure of a bully tormenting a helpless victim.
Eventually, Chen winds out to why he cannot forgive and forget Anonymous’ lulzy beginnings. In a blind leap of logic, he attacks.
Considering its past, it is worth wondering how much sadism drives Anonymous today. Coleman admits that Anonymous is still overwhelmingly and aggressively male. Any female-identified person who seriously engages the group, positively or negatively (but especially negatively), can expect to receive a torrent of sexist remarks, unsolicited flirting and leering requests for “Tits or GTFO [Get The Fuck Out],” a beloved Anonymous catchphrase.
And then comes the coup de grace.
A new book by law professor Danielle Citron, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, vividly makes the case that online harassment is a serious civil-rights issue, comparing the trivialization of widespread Internet harassment of women to the “boys will be boys” justification of workplace sexual harassment in the 1970s and ’80s. Today, if you’re a woman, you are significantly more likely to experience harassment online. The legacy of the lulz has fostered an insidious logic of victim-blaming that is still used today to excuse cyberharassment and stalking that disproportionately affect women and minorities: if someone tweets rape threats at you, they are “just trolling.” They are just trying to provoke a reaction, “doing it for the lulz.” If you react by, say, speaking out, you have, in the smug refrain of message-board creeps, “fed the trolls” and you’re getting what you deserve. The geek romanticizing of lulz as a symbol of the Internet’s unfettered nature is a large part of why it has yet to live up to its reputation as an egalitarian space.
It occurred to me as I read Chen’s strained connections what the problem was, and it took the bizarre mechanics of connecting Anonymous to the neo-feminist Cyber Civil Rights contention to appreciate it. The childish males of Anonymous managed to pull off their lulz, and the females who arrived late to the party were left out.
I’m not a fan of much of the lulz, the trolling, the meanness for the sake of a laugh, but then, I’m neither a geek nor a young man. What the males who created and became Anonymous are is the opposite side of the females, the neo-feminists, who hate them. Anonymous has a history of being flagrantly sexist, as do feminists.
What’s glaringly missing from Chen’s attack is an answer to the obvious question: Where were all the young women when Anonymous formed? Why weren’t they online too? If the lulzy little boys of 4chan wouldn’t accept them, why didn’t they have their own place?
Anonymous beat them to the punch. While young men were busy at 4chan honing their lulz, the mass of women capable and willing to stake their claim on the internet were nowhere to be found. And so, it became a little boys club, replete with the sexist things that little boys do. The neo-feminists, and allies like Chen, expressly ridicule the “boys will be boys” explanation, but where were the girls?
Having lost out by being AWOL, the neo-feminists are playing catch-up by demanding new laws to protect their feelings, their treatment at the hands of the early adopters, their revenge for being left out. But it’s unclear that they were left out. They just weren’t there.
Coleman argues again and again that we should take Anonymous seriously as a political actor. Yet over and over, she emphasizes its technological means rather than its political ends.
Nothing stops a counter-organization, a better, more empathetic, less vicious, more egalitarian, group from utilizing these technological means to accomplish its political ends. It just hasn’t happened. So better to try to tear down Anonymous than admit that, bad as it may be in some respects for its motivation for lulz, it managed to do what no amount of hang-wringing and whining will ever accomplish.
By fetishizing the “weapons of the geek,” Coleman belies her radically techno-utopian belief—which colors the entire book but is never stated outright—that geeks offer the way to a better world through technological mastery.
And if Chen and the feminists disagree, a position to which they’re entitled and may, to an extent, be right, let them out Anonymous Anonymous. The “weapons of the geek” can be wielded by anyone, regardless of gender, race, religion or national origin. If you don’t like the geeks vision of “a better world through technological mastery,” then offer your own.
So the internet was all male in the beginning, and left to their own devices, the geeks turned it into a mean third-grader’s vision of the Playboy mansion. Instead of silencing the children, do better. It’s all there for the taking, and if you can’t pull it off like they did, then you have your answer.
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“why it has yet to live up to its reputation as an egalitarian space.”
I don’t think that word means what he thinks it means. My dog is perfectly happy with the internet, even if he did out himself once and does have to fend off the occasional mass cat attack. And he just told me that he thinks it’s really creepy how this guy Chen wants to protect all the delicate women from all the words written by all the other guys.
Well said. Egalitarian doesn’t mean “happy safe place where anyone can say anything without fear of dispute, challenge or criticism.” It means every one of us has a keyboard and an opportunity to post any damn thing we please, and every other one of us has an opportunity to give a tummy rub or call bullshit.
Yay, I get to disagree with you!
I didn’t read Chen’s article as a puff piece for Citron & co. at all. I think he cites Citron’s book not to whine about laws to protect cyberfeelings, but to try to show the impact of what he says is Anonymous’ sexism, wrapped in flimsy philosophy.
Yes, the paragraph containing the reference to Citron is chock full of dogwhistle language that’ll play well in Citron’s camp, and yes, one gets the impression he’d want to play for her team in a game of dodgeball, but at no point does he address the question of how to counter Internet sexism, because that’s not the point.
He doesn’t advocate criminalizing hurt feelings; he doesn’t speak out against it; all he wants to do is support his proposition that what Anonymous does in practice runs counter to their “techno-utopian” ideals, by trying to show their sexism to be a real thing with real consequences.
(Poor choice of source material. to be sure.)
Is it possible that Anonymous can retain the remnants of its lulz sexist origins, and still have matured into a beneficial force? Is so, then what’s Chen’s point? If not, then is it not Chen’s contention that no matter what good Anonymous does, it will never be good enough to ignore its overarching evil of sexism?
Either Anonymous’ lulz sexist history is so much more critical than anything else it has, is or will do, no matter what that may be, or Chen is shooting blanks.
I imagine Chen would say, if asked, that Anonymous can do no good until it’s no longer sexist. But that isn’t what he contends in the article. He’s using the claim that Anonymous is sexist to demonstrate Anonymous’ hypocrisy. The proposition that it’s sexist, for the purposes of the article, is valuable only insofar as it can be used to contrast with the techno-utopian philosophy Anonymous claims as its own. And for that proposition to hold up to scrutiny, he needs to make a case that their sexism is real, and ideally that it’s bad for the people who’re exposed to it. He uses Citron’s book to make that case, which is a bad idea at best. but doesn’t mean he’s pimping for her notion of a solution to sexism.
Chen does the same thing later in the article, when he cites a book by Fred Turner to try and cast doubt on the purity of Anonymous’ worldview by highlighting its intellectual forebears. Whether or not it’s bad that Anonymous is sexist or obtuse or poorly grounded in reality, asked out of context, is of little interest to Chen here. The sin he wants to prove is Anonymous’ internal inconsistency.
Anonymous’ internal inconsistency? By whose measure? When did Anonymous disclaim its sexist roots or ask for anyone’s love or admiration for the good it does? It is what it is, and doesn’t exist to meet Chen’s or feminists’ approval. That Chen is of the view that its sexist roots should matter to Anonymous or anyone else, because they matter to him, is nothing more than his political myopia coupled with slackoisie narcissism.
What Chen fails to realize is that Anonymous can only be viewed as hypocritical if its sexist side is offsets, or is in conflict with, its positive contributions. To Chen it is, and to Chen, that negates any good it does because it was, and remains, sexist.
Or, to put this in a slightly different context, let’s say some really smart scientist-type guy comes up with a way to land a robot on a comet, but shows up for his big-time worldwide interview wearing an incredibly tacky shirt with images of half-naked women in controversial poses on it. Does the shirt mean his comet landing is bad, inconsequential, secondary to his fashion sense?
I agree. In fact (INCOMING TUMMY RUB) something I quite like about this blog is that it likes to talk about that kind of reflexive, narcissistic outlook. I also think Chen’s article is repeatedly intellectually dishonest, like when he tries to shoehorn his evidence that Anonymous is derivative into his claim that it’s doing unwitting shill work for Silicon Valley’s PR machine.
But whether or not Anonymous is hypocritical is a question that can be answered independently of whether it’s good or bad. A better analogy might be if the scientist showed up and espoused his sincere belief that comets and robots suck. That wouldn’t (or shouldn’t) reflect on the merit of what he’s done, but it would pose the question of whether his beliefs and his actions are in alignment.
I thought about it some more and I don’t see any reason to assume Chen doesn’t know what he’s doing, so I’m going to conclude that when he uses dogwhistle language in the style of Citron, it’s deliberate. That’s some nasty frosting for an already unpalatable cake, but it still doesn’t mean denouncing Anonymous for sexism is his primary goal. Rather, the whole thing seems intended to show where Anonymous’ actions run contrary to its stated goals. It’s incessant – sexism vs. utopianism, opposition to Scientology vs. Operation Slickpubes, Anonymous-as-revolutionaries vs. acid-tripping hippies, and on and on.
I think it’s pretty effective rhetoric, and it’s wrong-headed, but one thing it isn’t is a complaint about society’s lack of hurt-feelings laws. It’s aimed squarely at discrediting Anonymous, and if he needs to dogwhistle to rally feminists to his side, well, that makes sense too.
Glad we got beyond the Anonymous is hypocritical thing.
“I imagine Chen would say, if asked, that Anonymous can do no good until it’s no longer sexist.”
If it redeems itself, will past useful acts be considered with favor, or only good acts going forward? How long is the probation period until it has paid back its deficit?
There is no expiration date on sexism.
‘There are no girls on the internet’
What most people think when they hear this is one form of sexism, when it’s another. It’s not that there are no women on the internet, or that women on the internet are really another guy pretending to be women. Rather, for the boys club that is anon, your gender doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter that you’re a woman. So if you’re trying to get attention for being a woman, either get naked or get out. Otherwise your gender is irrelevant.
But like all things anon, some people take it seriously, while others don’t. Mostly its a result of a good chunk of the core of anon being 14 year old boys who find shock funny, and to them its a boys club where individual identity is suppressed.
In the early days of SJ, I had some incoming traffic from 4chan, so I went to take a look. It was all “faggot” and “mangina.” I took it to be a bunch of virginal little boys behaving poorly without parental supervision. I shrugged. They’ll grow up someday.
That’s a pretty good summary. The wider Anon group includes older folks who aren’t like that. But the hivemind is defined by that mentality.
I would point out that there are girls on the tumblr and they are batshit scary when they start trolling. They are quick to become angry and it seriously sux to be their target. They have also male followers.
Anyway, I would agree that a lot of what goes on 4chan and 8chan are equal opportunity offense generators. I looked only for short, but it is not like there would be anyone left unoffended.
Rarely is there any discussion of female conduct, when they are just as harmful as the males they accuse. Remember, the suicide of Megan Meier was at the hand of Lori Drew, not some trolling lulz mob of 4chan boys.