Tech: Unmasked
Originally published in The Walrus. Read the full text here.
An anthropologist hacks her way into Anonymous
On July 3, 2011, police officers in San Francisco, working for the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, shot and killed a homeless man. The local activist community responded by organizing an anti-brutality demonstration outside the Civic Center bart station, where the incident had occurred. On the day of the protest, transit authorities shut off cellphone access in four stations. This caught the attention of Anonymous, the hactivist collective that avenges institutional affronts to democratic expression, free speech, and Internet connectivity. Anons retaliated by planning more street protests, hacking bart computers, and releasing the private data of 2,500 patrons. One Anon dug into bart spokesperson Linton Johnson’s personal website and found a picture of him pulling down his Adidas jogging shorts to expose his penis. The Anon published it on a new site, Bartlulz, along with a cheeky banner: “If you are going to be a dick to the public, then Im sure you dont mind showing your dick to the public.”
The stunt was classic Anonymous: politically engaged, ethically complicated, and either prurient or funny, depending on your tastes. Gabriella Coleman, a media studies professor at McGill University with a cross-appointment at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, would go with funny. In the exhilarating, gruelling six years she’s spent embedded in the online community, that kind of irreverence has been a welcome source of comic relief.
I met Coleman in a Montreal coffee shop last January. She has the post-punk look (vintage French glasses, black cropped hair) of a young professor who’s more than comfortable outside of the lecture halls and committee meetings of academia. “You have to be silly and informal to study Anonymous,” she says, laughing. So while she describes the collective as “a populist movement with vanguardist technical elements and Nietzschean overtones,” she also likes it for being “badass.”
As a journalist who sometimes writes about hactivism, I was familiar with Coleman’s work and could see how her politics dovetail with those of the community she studies: she’s left leaning and pro–civil liberties, and she is alarmed by the rise of digital surveillance. I was curious, however, to find out how she deals with the more unseemly side of the culture: How, for instance, does a queer-positive feminist respond to rape jokes or to Anonymous’s fetish for the word fag?
Coleman is part of the post-1980s generation of anthropologists who have made careers out of studying Western subcultures. Her intellectual heroes include Tanya Luhrmann, who has written about modern-day witches in the United Kingdom; Michael Fischer, who studies such scientific communities as the Human Genome Organisation; and Christopher Kelty, a theorist of digital technology and its enthusiasts. Even so, conservative faculty members at the University of Chicago warned Coleman that studying hackers might jeopardize her job prospects. Today, she’s one of the most sought-after academics in her field.
Her work on Anonymous began as a side project, but quickly morphed into a massive, career-defining undertaking. The result is her excellent new book, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy, which offers a play-by-play of the collective’s best-known operations and charts the movement’s transition from prankster subculture to something more ambitious and politically engaged.
Her book grapples with one of the most basic but difficult questions that comes up every time the collective strikes: Are the actions of its members ethical? Coleman admires the moral sensibilities of many Anons, but argues that the movement belongs to something more ancient and mythical than ideas of good versus evil. Anons, for Coleman, are twenty-first-century tricksters, incarnations of Loki, Eshu, and Puck. They experiment, sabotage, and offend. They upend the social order, and, in the process, they teach us something about it.
This is an excerpt. Read the full text here.