Anonymous is anyone who knows the rules

[Ichingcarpenter]

This collective identity belongs to no one in particular, but is at the disposal of anyone who knows its rules and knows how to apply them. Anonymous, the collective identity, is older than Anonymous, the hacktvist group – more to the point, I propose that the hacktivist group can be understood as an application of Anonymous, the collective identity.


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Anonymous isFertile ground for collaboration

While users could not inscribe their individual identities, 4chan provided a fertile ground for a collaborative play with this collective identity, generating the rules for its rhetoric and its visual appearance. During Project Chanology, these rules and generated cultural meanings could first be witnessed in action by larger media audiences – eg, in the video Message to Scientology, which popularised Anonymous's biblical claim: "We are Legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us."


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Understanding the collective

If one understands Anonymous, the group, as a contemporary, post-adolescent mask society and Anonymous, the collective identity, as its mask, activities such as Operation Payback appear in a new light: they, too, can be read as an attempt to exert social control, in this case over the companies that dropped Wikileaks as a client, through punishing them with DDoS attacks.

To understand Anonymous as a collective identity, the crucial question to be asked is not who the individuals are that use the mask, but what it is that this mask allows them to do.

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/may/11/anonymous-behind-the-mask

Are members of the 'hacktivist group' Anonymous defenders of truth and seekers of knowledge, or simply a bunch of cyber terrorists? Jana Herwig investigates

[ZombieHorde]

1. "defenders of truth and seekers of knowledge, or simply a bunch of cyber terrorists"

They're neither. They just shut down websites for a while when they're unhappy.

Is The Church of Scientology really worse off now than before Anon's "attack?"

We should call them temporary web site disruptors. They annoy some, and humor others.