Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy

by Gabriella Coleman

  InterBody—Artistic Statement

  Internet—where one may access the proposal + pertinent materials

  Our bodies are the borders of our understanding. The universes are the body. The Internet is the skin. This is my Inter Body. I am Soft Wear.

  When I am alone, I want you to enter inside me, I wish to wear you.

  Dissolved and integrated, we are exploded into a nomadic, unstable topology of ceramic ribbons and microfluidic channels,

  of myriad phosphorescent gleams of the unassailable transpositions

  of the visible signs of the invisible and mysterious encounters in divisible dreams.

  Upon reading this, you might like find yourself, as I did, digging her imaginative, Deleuzian sensibilities—unless you were on one of the mailing lists she demolished. Her character disrupted so frequently, with such adroitness, and on so many disparate lists and news groups, that different list administrators banded together on a dedicated list of their own, with the sole purpose of dealing with the trail of destruction she left behind. At my own current home university, McGill, she participated in a mailing list about Max, a visual programming language for music, audio, and media, but was booted in 2001 after threatening to sue particular list members. Here is a portion of the rationale for banning her:

  Second, after “she” was thrown off the McGill list, “she” intiated [sic] what could best be described as a terror campaign that included spam to anyone who posted to the Max list, denial of service attacks, and threatening and slanderous email sent to random individuals at McGill. I didn’t see any point to subjecting myself and my co-workers to this type of harrassment [sic]. However, it turns out that many of these acts are felonies. If this behavior recommences, the victims of the behavior can pursue legal remedies, and I would strongly suggest they do so.

  In reaction, someone on the list cried foul: “So, censorship once more.”18

  In the 1990s, Usenet and many other booming mailing lists encouraged unrestrained free speech—and were celebrated for it. But trolls like Netochka forced a debate, still with us today, about the limits of such speech: should mailing lists and webpage moderators curb offensive speech for the sake of civility, seen by some as necessary for a healthy community? Or should lists avoid censoring speech, no matter how objectionable, so that the Internet might be a place where free speech reigns unconditionally?

  Of particular note—as we trace our trolling lineage through time—is the development of 4chan, an imageboard modeled on a popular Japanese imageboard called Futaba Channel, also known as 2chan (“chan” is short for “channel”). It is here, perhaps more than anywhere else, where the populist type of trolling that is well known today first emerged. 4chan is unique for its culture of extreme permissibility—making questions of free speech largely irrelevant—fostered by a culture of anonymity embraced by its users. Naturally, it was on this board where the collective idea and identity of Anonymous emerged. Unlike Usenet, no one on 4chan is in the least bit disturbed by the uncivil speech that ricochets across the board every second of the day. In many respects, the board is explicitly conceived of as a say-anything zone: the grosser and more offensive, damn it, the better.

  Since it launched in 2003, 4chan has become an immensely popular, iconic, and opprobrious imageboard. Composed of over sixty (at the time if this writing) topic-based forums ranging from anime to health and fitness, it is both the source of many of the Internet’s most beloved cultural artifacts (such as Lolcats memes), and one of its most wretched hives of scum and villainy. The “Random” forum, also called “/b/,” teems with pornography, racial slurs, and a distinctive brand of humor derived from defilement. It is where trolling once flourished. One “/b/tard” (as the forum’s denizens are called) explained to my class that “everyone should have a good sense that /b/ is an almost completely unfiltered clusterfuck of everything you could imagine, and lots of stuff you couldn’t imagine or wouldn’t want to.” A post might include a naked woman with the demand: “rate my wife.” The next post might feature a particularly hard-to-stomach image of a severely mutilated body, but might then be followed by a nugget of light humor:

  File : 1291872411.jpg-(10 KB 292x219, sodium-bicarbonate.jpg)

  Anonymous 12/09/10(Thu)00:26:51 No.293326XXX

  Just ate half a teaspoon of sodium bicarbonate wat do?

  Anonymous 12/09/10(Thu)00:28:24 No.293326XXX

  bump

  Anonymous 12/09/10(Thu)00:29:12 No.283326XXX

  >>293326451

  that’s not very much. I suggest water.

  then burping.

  Anonymous 12/09/10(Thu)00:33:06 No.293327XXX FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF EAT MORE AND THEN CHUG RED FOOD DIE AND VINEGAR AND WAIT FOR THE REACTION AND RUN INTO THE NEAREST ROOM FULL OF PEOPLE AND YELL, “I AM THE GOD OF VOLCANOES, TOAN GLADIUS! BLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBLBL!”

  Generally speaking, though, much of the material is designed to be shocking to outsiders, a discursively constructed border fence meant to keep the uninitiated—aka “n00bs” or “newfags”—far, far away. (Nearly every category of person, from old-timers to new-timers, is labelled a “fag.” On 4chan, it is both an insult and term of endearment. We will see the suffix many times in this book.) For insiders, it is the normal state of affairs, and one of the board’s defining and appealing qualities.

  On 4chan, participants are strongly discouraged from identifying themselves, and most post under the default name “Anonymous,” as in the example above. Technically, 4chan keeps logs of IP addresses and doesn’t do anything to keep visitors from being identified. Unless users cloak their IP addresses before connecting, the site’s founder, owner, and system administrator—Chris Poole, aka “moot”—has full access to them. He has even given them over to law enforcement to comply with legitimate investigations. (This policy is widely known among users.) But, in at least a practical sense (and at least between its users as peers), the board functions anonymously; except for rare exceptions, and the occasional instance where a subject of discussion must be identified using a photograph with a time stamp, users interact with no consistent nicknames or usernames. Posts are pushed off the front page very quickly—to be deleted from the server when they reach page 14—only surviving as long as users remain interested in the subject. It “lowers personal responsibility and encourages experimentation,” as media scholar Lee Knuttila put it.19 Experimentation includes generating memes (these are modifications of humorous images, videos, or catch-phrases, some of which attain legendary status), fierce trolling campaigns masterminded by Anonymous (though this has been less common in recent years), and incessant taunting and vitriol of other users (such as egging on individuals with suicidal ideation to “just do it” and become “an hero”). It must be noted, however, that there is also an outpouring of compassionate and empathetic advice, especially for those looking for relationship help, or when someone discovers a video of a cat being tortured. But this aspect is rarely featured in the news.

  All this occurs with the knowledge of impermanence. In contrast to mailing lists or many other kinds of online boards, there is no official archive. If a thread is not “bumped” back to the top by a time reply, it dies and evaporates. On an active channel, like /b/, this entire life cycle occurs in just minutes.

  In this environment, it is difficult for a person to accrue status or reputation—much less fame. Against this backdrop of cacophonous experimentation and ephemera, a robust collective memory and identity has nevertheless formed around legendary trolling campaigns, all sorts of insider jokes, and artifacts like image macros. Aesthetically, the more extreme a piece of content is, the better, for it ensures the interest of participants, and motivates replies to threads (keeping them alive). In particularly novel cases, an extreme piece of content can even circulate beyond the board—to distant lands like the message board community, reddit, or bodybuilding.com, and, eventually, mass cultural awareness. Remember, lolcats got their start on 4chan. Trolls, in particular, focus on the c
ollective pursuit of epic wins—just one form of content among many. (To be clear, 4chan houses many trolls, but many participants steer clear of trolling activity. Still others avoid activity altogether—they are there as spectators or lurkers.)

  It is almost impossible to pinpoint a day or event when trolling on 4chan was born. But by 2006, the name Anonymous was being used by participants to engage in trolling raids. These invasions would continue for many years, even after Anonymous was routinely deployed for activist purposes. For instance, in 2010 Anonymous sought to “ruin” a preteen girl named Jessi Slaughter after her homemade video monologues, which had gained some notoriety on tween gossip site StickyDrama, were posted on 4chan. Anonymous was stirred to action by Slaughter’s brazen boasts—she claimed in one video that she would “pop a glock in your mouth and make a brain slushie”—and published her phone number, address, and Twitter username, inundating her with hateful emails and threatening prank calls, circulating photoshopped images of her and satiric remixes of her videos. When her father recorded his own rant, claiming to have “backtraced” her tormenters and reported them to the “cyber police,” he also became an object of ridicule. Slaughter, described by /b/ tards as a “lulzcow … whore,” is now memorialized on Urban Dictionary as “The epitome of an eleven year old slut/poser/ internet reject/scenecore wannabe.”

  On the one hand, outlandish trolling raids and denigrating statements like “lulzcow … whore” (or “due to fail and AIDS” from the Habbo Hotel raids) function for 4chan users like a repellent meant to keep naive users far away from their Internet playground. On the other, when compared to most other arenas where trolls are bred—like weev’s GNAA—4chan is a mecca of populist trolling. By populist, I simply mean that 4chan membership is available to anyone willing to cross these boundaries, put in the time to learn the argot, and (of course) stomach the gore. The etiquette and techniques that 4chan users employ are only superficially elitist. A former student of mine offered me the following insight. Exceptionally smart, he was also a troll—or a “goon” to be more precise, since that’s what they call themselves on Something Awful, his website of choice at the time:

  Something Awful is like the exclusive country club of the Internet, with a one-time $10 fee, a laundry list of rules very particular to SA, moderators who ban and probate, and community enforcement of “Good Posts” through ridicule. 4chan on the other hand is an organic free-for-all that doesn’t enforce so much as engages an amorphous membership in a mega-death battle for the top humor spot. Anyone can participate in 4chan, and Internet fame isn’t possible in the same way it is on SA because everyone is literally anonymous.

  Whatever unfolds on the board—a joke, a long conversation, or a three-day trolling campaign—anonymity is essential to 4chan; one might call anonymity both its ground rule and its dominant cultural aspect—a core principle inherited by Anonymous, even in its pseudonymous, material extension as hordes of Guy Fawkes–mask wearers. On 4chan, there is an interplay between the function of anonymity (enabling pure competition without the interference of reputation or social capital) and the effects of anonymity (the memes, hacks, and acts of trolling that emerge and have real impact on the world). In contrast to weev’s egoistic acts of trolling, 4chan’s Anonymous “Internet Hate Machine” collective action absolves individuals of responsibility in the conventional sense, but not in a collective sense.20 That is, Anonymous is open to anyone willing to subsume him- or herself into a collective capable of gaining fame through events like the Habbo Hotel raids. Absent of any individual recognition, each activity is ascribed to a collective nom de plume, a reincarnation of Netochka Nezvanova. On 4chan, participants will also shame those seeking fame and attention, calling them “namefags.”

  As a trolling outfit, Anonymous achieved considerable media notoriety, just like weev. The entity became, in certain respects, famous. However, while the trolling exploits of, on the one hand, Anonymous and 4chan users, and on the other hand, weev, are connected by their tactical approaches, they are also foils of each other. Regardless of how far and wide the fame of Anonymous spreads, personal identity and the individual remain subordinate to a focus on the epic win—and, especially, the lulz.21

  This subsumption of individual identity into collective identity is unusual in Western culture. Understanding its uptake is crucial to our knowledge of how Anonymous, as an activist group, came to be. It is very possible that the unsavory nature of Anonymous’s early trolling activities motivated collectivity as a security feature; participants probably had a desire to participate, to receive payment in lulz, without the risk of being identified and socially stigmatized. To understand these motivations, and the powerful significance of an individual’s willingness to subsume his or her identity, we will briefly ruminate on the culture of fame-seeking—of individualistic celebrity—itself.

  Anonymous’s Trickster’s Trick: Defying Individual

  Celebrity through Collective Celebrity

  Fame-seeking pervades practically every sphere of American life today, from the mass media, which hires Hollywood celebrities as news anchors, to the micro-media platforms that afford endless opportunities for narcissism and self-inflation; from the halls of academia, where superstar professors command high salaries, to sports arenas, where players rake in obscene salaries. Fame-seeking behavior reinforces what anthropologist David Graeber, building on the seminal work of C. B. Macpherson, identifies as “possessive individualism,” defined as “those deeply internalized habits of thinking and feeling” whereby we view “everything around [us] primarily as actual or potential commercial property.”22

  How did 4chan—one of the seediest zones of the Internet—hatch one of the most robust instantiations of a collectivist, anti-celebrity ethic, without its members even intending to? This ethic thrived organically on 4chan because it could be executed in such an unadulterated form. During a lecture for my class, a former Anonymous troll and current activist explained the crucial role of 4chan in cementing what he designates as “the primary ideal of Anonymous”:

  The posts on 4chan have no names or any identifiable markers attached to them. The only thing you are able to judge a post by is its content and nothing else. This elimination of the persona, and by extension everything associated with it, such as leadership, representation, and status, is the primary ideal of Anonymous. (emphasis added)

  This Anon, who was lecturing anonymously on Skype to my ten enraptured students, immediately offered a series of astute qualifications about this primary ideal: the self-effacement of the individual. When Anonymous left 4chan in pursuit of activist goals in 2008, he explained, this ideal failed, often spectacularly; once individuals interacted pseudonymously or met in person, status-seeking behaviors reasserted themselves. Individuals jockeyed and jostled for power.

  Nevertheless, the taboo against fame-seeking was so well entrenched on 4chan, and was so valued for its success, that it largely prevented, with only a few exceptions, these internal struggles for status from spilling over into public quests for personal fame. (Later, we will see its greatest failure in the micro-ecologies of hacker teams like AntiSec and LulzSec, analogous to rock stars in their ability to amass fame and recognition, and—not surprisingly—to spark the ire of some Anons, even while being admired for their lulzy and political antics.)

  Once Anonymous left 4chan to engage in activism, the anti-celebrity-seeking ideal became “more nuanced … incarnating into the desire for leaderlessness and high democracy,” as this Anon put it. Attempts to put these principles into practice also resulted in missteps, particularly in the emergence of small teams with concentrations of power.

  But despite the fragmentation into teams and cabals, the overarching ideals remained in play. Adherence meant “that anybody [could] call themselves Anonymous and rightfully claim the name,” as the lecturer explained. This freedom to take the name and experiment with it is precisely what enabled Anonymous to become the wily hydra it is today.

  But if we peek
behind the ideal—the notion that Anonymous is everyone’s property, an identity commons, so to speak—we see a much more complicated reality. And it was here, on this nuanced point, that this Anon ended his micro-lecture. I believe my students were both mesmerized and shocked that someone from Anonymous could be so smart and eloquent; I explained to them that Anonymous can be understood as what anthropologist Chris Kelty has jokingly called, contra the subaltern, the “superaltern”: those highly educated geeks who not only speak for themselves but talk back loudly and critically to those who purport to speak for them.23 The Anonymous guest lecturer continued:

  Most of us are humor-driven. So it should be no surprise that we often contend with other Anon-claiming groups we find out of favor, such as … the new activist-only Occupy Wall Street anons, or the conspiracy theorists and other overly serious entities claiming the name. It’s true. We cannot deny them the name. But the important thing to take away from this talk is that nowhere in the Anonymous ideal was it ever stipulated that Anonymous must stand together with or even like other Anonymous. In fact, animosity and downright wars between Anonymous-claiming entities is right in line with the original internet-based projects carried out by cultural Anons.

  It is here that we might comprehend the complexity of Anonymous. There is a singular subject and idea animating its spirit, and participants attempt to present this in a united front. For the media, it is tempting to buy into this branding wholesale—to present Anonymous as its values and its packaging. But the reality of the group’s composition, in all its varied hues and tones, is impossible to present in any single sketch, even if Anonymous uses a single name. Its membership comprises too many different networks and working groups, each of which is at varying odds with one another in varying moments. The very nature of this collective of collectives means that the accumulation of too much power and prestige—especially at a single point in (virtual) space—is not only taboo but also functionally difficult.