What Is Anonymous Up To?
by Douglas Lucas
/ Nov. 4, 2017 9am EST
Every year, November 5 brings the Internet’s Anonymous movement into the
streets worldwide for the Million Mask March. After all, the date marks
Guy Fawkes Day, named for a would-be assassin who tried to blow up the
British Parliament in the early 17th century. 2017 promises another
round of celebration and disobedience—an opportunity to consider what
the “information wants to be free” hacktivists and their allies have
been up to lately and where they might head next.
The first march, in 2013, saw crowds of white-masked Anons energized by
their headline-making cooperation with Occupy Wall Street, WikiLeaks,
and other rebels—but in the following years, enthusiasm, at least in the
United States, chilled somewhat. Likely the government crackdown bears a
portion of the responsibility: grueling legal battles for indicted Anons
(such as Jeremy Hammond and Matt DeHart) sent several participants to
prison and reminded the rest of that grim destination. Familiar with
this wintry climate, Barrett Brown, a journalist in Dallas who
infamously worked with the hackers, said last month, Anonymous is
“barely a thing now.”
But dormancy may precede growth, and plenty of seeds require attention.
In February 2016, Anonymous leaked a database from the French Ministry
of Defense to protest the weapons trade. The next month, Anónymous
México knocked the website of that country’s tax bureau offline
temporarily for the sake of the disappeared Ayotzinapa students. Most
shockingly, shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Anonymous’
#OpDeathEaters campaign released a compilation of public data tying the
president to Russia’s regime and child traffickers. Any of these
examples could be cultivated into further resistance should individuals
take initiative—and new tools might better equip them to do so.
To invigorate activism, two long-time friends of Anonymous, Barrett
Brown and writer/programmer Heather Marsh, recently founded ambitious
software projects, each aimed at reshaping online interactions. Their
logic, formulated independently, starts simple: since the Internet gave
the movement its strength, upgrading the Internet (or how we use it)
should upgrade activism.
Global collaboration is key
What makes restructuring communication so powerful?
The concept isn’t new—even prior to computers, world-changers recognized
the significance of global conversation. In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich
Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto:
Now and then the workers are victorious [against the bourgeois], but
only for a time. The real fruit of their battles lies, not in the
immediate result, but in the ever expanding union of the workers. This
union is helped on by the improved means of communication that are
created by modern industry, and that place the workers of different
localities in contact with one another. It was just this contact that
was needed to centralise the numerous local struggles, all of the same
character, into one national struggle between classes. But every class
struggle is a political struggle. And that union, to attain which the
burghers of the Middle Ages, with their miserable highways, required
centuries, the modern proletarian, thanks to railways, achieve in a few
years.
In short, Marx and Engels said new technology linked, and thereby
strengthened, previously isolated proletarians in their fight against
capitalists. By uniting, striking, and rebelling internationally, paid
workers (the communists championed them at the expense of the unemployed
and unemployable) could advance their shared interests against
transnational opponents more effectively than if they cooperated with
only those in their immediate vicinity. Today, when the messages,
transactions, and externalities of so many cross borders daily, limiting
focus to just what affects one’s own region counterproductively complies
with the leaders who impose the invisible boundaries that divide
humanity in the first place. As state and non-state actors alike sway
populations around the planet, activists who can’t manage the same trick
are too often left merely handing out pamphlets on streetcorners or
their virtual equivalents.
For years, Brown made the point that powers competing to dominate
information flow matters tremendously because knowledge underpins
change. In his 2014 book with the sarcastic title Keep Rootin’ for
Putin: Establishment Pundits and the Twilight of American Competence, he
writes:
The most important fact of the 21st century is that any individual on
the planet can now communicate with any other individual on the planet.
The great preponderance of human activity is the result of communication
between two or more individuals. A great amount of human activity, both
devastating and wondrous, has already occurred in a past defined by
great limitations on communication between individuals. The Internet
came to public availability in the mid-’90s and has improved drastically
as a means of communication in only 15 years’ time. Some people will
find these facts to be of crucial importance and will act on them. This
is an important thing to keep in mind.
Though Brown’s “most important fact” is premature—half of Earth’s humans
remain offline—his suggestion that the Internet presently forms the
pivotal arena continues to ring true. In 2011, reports emerged showing
the Pentagon was developing fake cyberspace personas to spread pro-US
propaganda; currently, perhaps partly thanks to Brown’s prescient work,
frustration with astroturfing, automated social media accounts, and the
like drowning out authentic digital discourse is exiting the realm of
“conspiracy theory” and entering the mainstream. But since the
authorities’ resources vastly outstrip those of activists, the playing
field stays tilted: Is amplifying celebrities’ status quo opinions the
sole, impotent option when vying with the powerful for hearts and minds?
It’s not enough to simply win a platform for activist perspectives; the
information provided must be trusted and worthy of trust.
Writer/programmer Heather Marsh—the former WikiLeaks Central editor who
created Anonymous campaigns such as #OpCanary and #OpDeathEaters—argues
certain collaboration redesigns would empower diverse and expert
knowledge to make a difference at a time when an uninformed public is in
thrall to demagogues. Informed analysis of the world would allow
activists to create more effective responses to injustice. Some
mind-bending changes that might result from revamped communication are
suggested in her 2013 book Binding Chaos: Systems of Mass Collaboration:
The accelerated pace and power of global communication strains and
bursts the old systems of control. People can walk en masse across
borders, shun the current financial system, establish our own trade,
create transparency and provide emergency assistance to each other. This
power to dismantle the structures we have relied on is terrifying to
many because there is no clear path ahead, and few structures have yet
formed to replace the ones that are crumbling. The growth of extreme
nationalists and traditionalists worldwide, the buildup of militaries
and intelligence monitoring are indicative of this fear of our unknown
future. Old authoritarian systems can no longer bind the natural chaos
of a free society, but we can show the power of chaotic order, the
beauty and creativity of collaborative freedom, if we build the right
structures now.
With the heady objectives in mind, consider the specifics of Brown and
Marsh’s separate proposals.
Pursuance Project
Despite the buzz of a recent Brown manifesto, the few details so far
available articulating the workings of his Pursuance Project software
describe fairly mundane project management technology. Users create
“pursuances”—a neologism he defines as “a process-based civic entity
consisting of a series of agreed-upon relationships.” These will be
customizable electronic organizations, wherein users experiment with
different flowcharts for sharing documents and assigning tasks. Meet the
new boss, same as the old boss.
The Pursuance Project offers all the right things to seize spotlight in
the hacktivism/transparency milieu—pledges to supply gee-whiz
encryption, famous faces bedecking the board of directors, a November 4
hackathon appearance by Brown, et cetera—but one wonders who will
actually complete the tasks of these glorified to-do lists and why. 200
people and groups chosen for a “track record of advancing individual
rights, state accountability, and robust journalism and information
dissemination” plus agreement with Brown, in broad terms, to “oppose the
drug war, police state, and national security state” are to populate the
ecosystem of pursuances first. The 200 seeds would then invite others in
as varied alliances and flowcharts are tested and copied. Creators of
pursuances command control over them from the beginning, and might share
degrees of power, but might also sit back while others dispatch tasks
boosting the task-definers.
If this sounds like another day at the office, readers may be right.
Although one reason for online activism flagging has probably been the
incarcerations of capable Anons, another culprit may well be the base’s
exhaustion with hierarchy: since Occupy and WikiLeaks, the rank and file
have possibly grown tired of contributing to the careers of luminaries
rather than to sizable change (the two are unfortunately conflated), and
for little to no return on their efforts.
Getgee
Hierarchy pressures people to aid those who outrank them in hopes of
climbing the ladder, but what if the direction could be reversed—what if
helping oneself and those below were society’s goal? Explaining her
universal database project Getgee at the Free Software conference in
Cuba last year, Marsh said:
[W]e are governed by ponzi schemes of celebrity, wealth and power
and in order to benefit from these ponzi schemes, we need to enable and
support them. No one has ever become wealthy by being of assistance to
someone trying to survive in the streets. No one has ever become a
millionaire by raising a baby. If you want to acquire wealth, you need
to be of service to the wealthy so they can distribute that wealth down
to you. And in order to gain influence, you need to promote and agree
with and amplify those with greater influence so they can raise you up.
And just as crypto-currencies did nothing to change this algorithm
online, social media did nothing to change the ponzi scheme of
celebrity. All either of them did is reproduce the same algorithm with
all of the physical barriers lifted, so we have the same ponzi schemes
but now the results are instant […] We need algorithms which reward us
for being of service to those who need it most and we have algorithms
that reward us for being of service to those who need it least.
To help those in need, online collaboration must be redesigned, Marsh
argues. Currently, cooperation happens on untrustworthy and unreliable
corporate platforms—for example, activists create Facebook event
pages—ensuring Silicon Valley benefits from data-mining user behavior,
something people enable because they don’t want to lose the content and
relationships they’ve generated. Marsh argues a global data commons must
be established to decouple the raw material of collaboration from
particular software. While Pursuance Project users would have to both
agree with Brown and depend on his software, Marsh envisions the
fundamental units of digital collaboration (nodes for person,
organization, event, thing, and idea) belonging to everyone like the
ocean or ozone layer and compatible with any software that wants to add
functionality. Users could accept or reject any particular software
application without losing access to their work or the information
commons. With the atoms of knowledge free for everyone to build with,
people can reward whatever work they prefer, rather than the owners of
knowledge resources dictating the carrots and sticks.
When thousands of Anons hit the streets November 5, which ideas will
drive them? Speaking in Madrid last year Marsh called Anonymous a method
of collaboration that follows information. For this information-led
collaboration to continue and expand, information must remain under
participants’ control. With corporate platforms like Facebook demanding
pay-to-play for information producers and new initiatives like Pursuance
Project retaining old hierarchical methods, the best ideas might get
lost instead of being discovered and vetted by activists themselves.
They need to think carefully about which global collaboration approaches
deserve support.
