Anonymous

A bit ago, I was talking with a friend, and brought up a flyer that I had seen circulating the interwebz "from" anonymous. It was called Operation Skankbag and I thought it sounded pretty cool. The basic story is an artist put an image of a starving African child carrying a handbag and a chihuahua on a shirt and started selling it to raise awareness about Darfur with a statement about the materialism of pop culture. Louis Vuitton thought the handbag looked a little too much like theirs and sued the artist. "Anon" posted a flyer saying lets take down Louis Vuitton's site.
So, I agree that taking down the site isn't gonna do anything really, and everyone's time would be better spend doing something about Darfur, donating to charity, etc. But this kind of vigilante-ism against a huge company who are being bitches to a woman who is only expressing herself is still cool because it gets across the message that big companies being asshats for no reason is only going to get them negative press.
Anyways, my friend said that he really didn't like the group anonymous, and I told him he misunderstood. Anon isn't a group, it's everyone, it is the internet. The media has started to portray it as some highly organized terrorist cell, but anyone with a brain knows it's more likely 15 yr old kids sitting in their mom's basements "hacking" because they have a lot of time on their hands. Either way, the idea of anon as a group misses the point that anon is anonymous and therefore can't be defined by group ideology.
My friend argued that once the media, or some mass of people defines something as a group, that something becomes a group. For instance, there are 15 yr old kids who identify with anonymous and say they are part of the group. They release flyers with the logo, and write "For we are anonymous. We do not forgive, we do not forget. Expect us." This implies that the people who wrote the flyer identify with a group named anonymous. So, since there are people who write under the banner of anonymous, and it has been defined as a group, and people identify as members, anonymous is a group. Maybe it wasn't, it wasn't meant to be, but it is now; even though it is loosely defined and unorganized.


So, for a person to agree with the ideology of the group anonymous, one must agree with all of the operations that the group takes part it. Everything released under the banner anonymous is, for better or worse, a project of the group, according to the new definition of anonymous as a group. So, when anonymous decides to ruin a girls life for being too cocky on youtube, even though she is only eleven, that is just as much anonymous as the group that decides to take down Louis Vuitton for being skankbags.
Therefore, I reevaluated the way I look at Anonymous. I don't like the idea of anonymous as a group because it is a lot of different people with different morals, ideologies and goals. Being part of a group implies a singular ideology, and this can't happen with the group anonymous, so they contradict each other all the time. I agree with some of the things the group decides to do, but I think that anonymous in its new formation as a defined group instead of an abstract entity containing no morality and no ideology, is not something I can stand behind. I'm all for anonymous people hacking or DDoSing people or companies that are being dicks, but I think that people should stop identifying with the group "anonymous", and start actually acting anonymously again. Everyone should act as an individual and participate in whatever they agree with, but acting as Anonymous is stupid, contradictory, not anonymous, and may be dangerous with all the press it is getting.