Often referred to as a group of hackers, the phenomena known as Anonymous is rarely understood by the people it comes in conflict with, or the general media that report its exploits. Anonymous first gained notoriety outside of internet when it decided to go after the Church of Scientology. Learning from its early success, the phenomena became a regular subject of media attention for its actions in the Wikileaks scandal. These actions include:
- Publicly humiliating the HB Gary company because of their attempt to "infiltrate" Anonymous.
- Attacking the websites of MasterCard and Visa after they closed Wikileak's accounts.
- Planning to publicly reveal personal information of individuals in the military in protest of the treatment of Bradley Manning.
Anonymous is not a person, nor is it a group, movement or cause: Anonymous is a collective of people with too much time on their hands, a commune of human thought and useless imagery. A gathering of sheep and fools, assholesand trolls, and normal everyday netizens. An anonymous collective, left to its own devices, quickly builds its own society out ofrage and hate. Anonymous can be anyone from well-meaning college kids with highly idiosyncratic senses of humor trying to save people from Scientology, to devious nihilist hackers, to clever nerds... http://encyclopediadramatica.com/Anonymous
In short, Anonymous is an emergent sentience.
To explain the phenomena in psychological terms: Anonymous was born out of an internet based social affinity group, but is separate from the people that constitute it. Improvisation rules guide people under the influence of deindividuation and the online disinhibition effect allowing them to perform action which, taken collectively from an external perspective, constitutes a wholly separate entity. This entity has its own distinct personality, interests, and history separate from its constituents.
Explaining what this means will be the subject of the net few blog articles
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