technical images and linear text

What you think of as offensive is hilariously tame by the standards of the Internet. Your standards of decency are positively Victorian to the new generation of people who have grown up with and on the Internet.

What am I talking about?

If you’re like most average folks, you’ll say ‘fuck’ and ’shit’ from time to time. Perhaps if you’re in a real mood you’ll say ‘cunt’ or ‘motherfucker.’ Maybe you are open to watching a bit of pornography, and certainly you’ll joke about sex. You’re not racist, but you might laugh at racial humour – especially if you’ve had a few drinks and the person offering said humour is of the race being mocked, or otherwise distances themselves from the old-fashioned, scary kind of racism.

What this means is that you are fucking tame. By this I mean that there is a whole world behind the scenes online with a communal ethos that is positively disturbing, even if you consider yourself not-easily-offended. This world goes by many names – 4chan, ‘/b/tards,’ ‘Anonymous’ … the list goes on, and of course the polymorphous core of anonymous wackos that populate these sites has its tendrils spread out all the way across the Internet. Wherever you see a commenter on a website expressing bizarre, apparently contradictory opinions, denouncing ‘fags’ and ‘jews,’ or talking about ‘drama’ and ‘lulz,’ you have likely encountered one of these peculiar individuals. These are ‘trolls,’ of course, that subspecies of Internet denizen who lives off daily infusions of schadenfreude, taking the utmost pleasure in the irritation and anguish of others; but Anonymous takes this pursuit of ‘lulz’ to a whole new level.

The image macros that originated on this site have popped up all over the Internet since it (ie, the site) started up. But the communities themselves have popped into public awareness in a bigger way over the past few years –  starting perhaps in 2006 with Jason Fortuny’s posting of some 100+ men’s contact information and photographs obtained from Craigslist to Encyclopedia Dramatica. This led to a lengthy hand-wringing article in the New York Times about ‘trolling,’ where mega-douche Fortuny tries to justify his actions, and thereby proves himself to be a key part of the cancer; this article also detailed some of the movement’s defining moments, such as the drama they provoked by mocking a child who killed himself (allegedly after losing his iPod), first on his MySpace page, and then in an escalating series of confrontation with his family. The movement got still more press from its Guy-Fawkes-mask-wearing protests of Scientology in 2008, when it first took up the mantle of ‘Anonymous.’ Then it showed up again when someone claiming affiliation with Anonymous hacked Sarah Palin’s email and posted some of its contents online; since then it’s been associated with ‘raids’ in Second Life and other virtual communities, the apprehension of alleged pedophiles, and any number of other bizarre scenarios. Of course, just as there’s no way to tell on 4chan between the ‘real’ possessor of a given nickname and impostors, there’s no real way to tell which of these claimants are ‘actually’ part of Anonymous, or which are part of a given subset of this group (ie, boards on 4chan, other -chan sites, ED, etc.). The whole movement is decentralized and deindividualized to the point that the question stops making sense. Sort of like the Bittorrent of social movements, I suppose.

Apart from the sheer fascination of paging through a site like Encyclopedia Dramatica, mouth agape at the depths of offensiveness plumbed therein – from ‘an hero‘ to ‘furfags‘  - Anonymous offers quite a bit of material for those interested in new technologies and their unpredictable effects. All of the most distinctive attributes of online culture collide here: the tendency of anonymity to induce extreme brands of antisocial speech; the capacity of bulletin-board sites to function as an ‘echo chamber,’ amplifying and retransmitting memes; and the fostering of idiosyncratic, unorthodox modes of linguistic and visual expression. Let’s go through these point by point:

1) It’s felicitous that they chose the name they did, because in the first place, Anonymous is a movement predicated upon anonymity. It started out on sites like 4chan, which simply offer no way to preserve a dedicated username and link it to one individual: all postings on this site are effectively anonymous, and those who aim to construct a distinctive persona for themselves can readily have it hijacked and taken for a joyride in pursuit of lulz. Lulz is the raison d’etre of the Anonymous community, and for the uninitiated, Schadenfreude works about as well. Lulz (a corrupted pluralization of LOL – see point #3) is the kind of laughter that overtakes you and you stifle immediately; Lulz – to cite a prime example I’ve already mentioned twice – is when you can’t help but laugh at the idea of a teenager killing themselves over a lost iPod. Except where you or I would snicker a bit and then feel bad, Anonymous would post 1500 messages to the dead teenager’s Myspace, and then start trying to find his parents’ phone number so they could torment them. This is the kind of behaviour that is typical of the community, and it’s inconceivable without the cloak of anonymity granted by the Internet.  And anonymity is also what makes Anonymous so polymorphous and contradictory: to ask who is really a member of Anon. and who isn’t, is fundamentally to miss the point. When considering anonymous texts from the nineteenth century, for instance, as I’ve been doing lately, it makes sense to think of their authors in terms of ’shallow’ and ‘deep’ anonymity. Some authors published anonymously, but those ‘in the know,’ who travelled in the right circles, all knew who they were; others were wholly anonymous, and took every precaution to ensure that only their closest friends and family could find out their identities. But in both cases, one was confronted with a text that could be ascribed to a single author, with – one could presume – a roughly consistent outlook. This certainly isn’t true of contemporary anonymity. Anonymous represents a new kind of anonymity: Anon. is legion. To some, the individuals who make up the community are well-known; to others, the identities of individuals are totally unknown, or so fluid as to be impenetrable. Thus Anon. is a many-in-one, a non-hierarchical unity in which any individual can presumably speak for the entire movement, and which in no way demands any kind of internal cohesion or external appearance of consistency. Essentially the only means by which Anon. polices its boundaries are its ridiculous, over-the-top offensiveness and its bizarre jargon. The offensiveness is simply a means to an end, like that of the 1970s Punk movement: the Sex Pistols didn’t wear swastikas because they were fascists, and Anon. doesn’t riff on ‘faggotry,’ ‘Nigras,’ or Zionist conspiracies because as a movement it is homophobic or racist (though its very nature means it can’t preclude those sorts of individuals from joining in). Like the vicious, disgusting pornography that is scattered around 4chan and ED, the antisocial speech is just a way of excluding all those who don’t ‘get the joke.’ If you’re the easily offended type, you click away to another page, clucking your tongue. That’s how Anon. wants it; that’s why their hangouts look the way they do. If, instead, you rise to the bait, then you quickly become a target. While Anon. is by no means a group of ‘hackers’ – as some mainstream media have absurdly described them, even though they often use publicly available information and tools – they will readily make use of technology to strip away the anonymity of their enemies, and to unleash all manner of communally-delivered hell upon them. So anonymity here is fundamentally asymmetrical.

2) The memetic amplification effect is responsible for the bizarre, spiralling character of sites like ED; ED and 4chan, in turn, are responsible for many of the memes which have since entered the Internet mainstream – Rickrolling and LOLCATs are only the most recent and well-known examples. This seems to be a way to build on the internal cohesion of the group (everybody loves sharing an in-joke!), and while the offensive character of its discussions seems to aim more at policing the entry of external elements, all three of these factors can probably be interpreted as strengthening the group in both directions, contributing both to internal cohesiveness and to the exclusion of external influences. The denigration of mainstream incarnations of these memes only serves to further strengthen the communal bond, and to preclude any kind of co-option. (Much could be said here about the economics behind this community’s preferred online hangouts, and how this has led them in large part to maintain a distributed web presence and co-opt other sites

3) As a constructed ‘minor language’ of sorts, the jargon the community fosters likewise works in both directions. For those ‘in the know,’ it’s both a creative outlet and a source of lulz – most all of us have experienced at one time or another the formation of a quasi-private language between oneself and a friend or group of friends – while for those on the outside it is a considerable impediment to participation in the community. To ask what someone means when they’re using one of these expressions is to invite mockery, or worse. (As in the paradigmatic ‘HAHAHA DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS‘). And rest assured that with phenomena like LOLcats and other image macros, they are indeed creating a new dialect and a new grammar of words and images, both of which will slowly but surely filter into the English language as spoken and written in more respectable quarters. Just as assuredly, though, the folks who originated these memes will claim total disgust for their more mainstream incarnations.

Those three factors seem to have contributed to the construction of a strangely enduring and influential, though fluid and inconsistent, online social formation. I don’t point out its existence purely out of a juvenile fascination, though I can’t entirely disavow a certain puerile element as part of my own interest in the group. I also don’t necessarily agree with their language, their viewpoint or their methods, though in general I appreciate the strategy of extreme offensiveness as a means of maintaining a ‘counterculture;’ but it’s silly to think of this group as having one unified ideology or methodology. Instead I just wanted to sketch out a few general ideas about this phenomenon and perhaps bring it to the attention of a wider and more detached audience, since I think it’s by far the most distinctive and interesting of the many social groupings fostered by the Internet.