Anonymous – political, institutional, cultural and memitc organization without identity

Session Topic: Anonymous

Tuesday 2I

Convener: Kevin Marks

Notes-taker(s): Tom Brown

We assume we need identity for things to happen

But we're finding out this is not true

A growing culture of constructing meaning, ideas, culture and politics without identity

Examples: Anonymous, 4Chan

The only thing that persists from 4Chan is the ideas

Rise of leaderless orgs (Occupy, Arab Spring)

Now Arab Spring has structural problems with elections since there are no leaders

What does anonymity imply or enforce to the nature of the organization?

Scalability problems?

Anyone can claim to be part of Anonymous

It is not pseudonym because there is no correlation across time among posts

You're only as anonymous as there are other humans you can be confused with

A very messy consensus forming

Capital A anonymous refers to the emergent behavior

With instantaneous communication, some of this emergent behavior is now viable where it wasn't before

reference to recent Clay Shirky article: we can see waves of consensus emerging

As a channel becomes more mainstream, it becomes easier to hide.

Maybe on reason we're not using signing technology adopted is we want a degree of deniability