

Anonymous in The Economist - mcantelon
http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/12/more_wikileaks

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electromagnetic
I like the symbolism that Anon has become. Simply put Anon is the anger and
frustration of millions (acted on by the few hundred) and is having real
effects.

If Anon is taking down Mastercard and Visa, then perhaps our governments will
start obeying their own laws instead of trying to manipulate companies into
compliance. Or at the very least, our companies might actually question
whether obeying the government is in their best interests.

~~~
kmfrk
Anon is (a) digitized mob mentality. No reason to commend it.

~~~
jbooth
Even if the mob is right to be pissed?

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SpikeGronim
"right to be pissed" and "right to attack 3rd parties illegally" are two very
different things.

~~~
mcantelon
Paypal, Mastercard, and Visa chose to, in effect, attack Wikileaks by suddenly
suspending their accounts. If they want to collaborate on an economic attack
against an entity that hasn't broken any laws it's isn't surprising that they
find themselves also attacked.

~~~
potatolicious
So let me get this right: if you're not with us you're against us, if you're
not supporting them you're attacking them, "collaborators" the bunch of them.

Where have we heard all of these before?

Empty, vacuous rhetoric, that's all this situation has come down to. I'm tired
of hearing about WikiLeaks because it's polarized and made everyone rhetoric-
spewing, logic-hating extremists. Everyone involved, and sadly to say,
_particularly_ the pro-WikiLeaks crowd, has been making grandiose, pompous
speeches as if it's their last day on Earth and they're the President from the
movie Independence Day.

Stop. Just stop. Julian Assange is not the messiah and you are not delivering
the the gospel truth of life, the universe, and everything. There is _zero_
need for the amount of hyperbole, rhetoric, self-aggrandization, and more
weasel words than I can shake a stick at.

Is this an important issue? No doubt, but polarizing speeches like yours
aren't helping anyone. When you start using loaded words like "attack" and
"collaborator" you've lost any semblance of credibility with moderates, and
just come off as an extremist instead.

~~~
bluedanieru
Anybody who can remain moderate in the current climate basically isn't worth
having on your side anyway.

~~~
bruceboughton
Au contraire, moderates are far more valuable to an extremist than extremists.
As an extremist, your job is to convince the moderates. You will not do this
if you appear to extreme.

~~~
bluedanieru
We're talking about 80% of the population here at least. It's pretty diverse.
Perhaps some "moderates" may be folks who simply haven't heard the right
argument. Yet we saturate the airwaves and internets with arguments every day,
so while historically such people may have been more significant in number, I
suspect their numbers have been steadily decreasing for some time. Most
moderates are moderate for basically the same reason, that being that unless
you are literally burning down their homes and starving their friends and
families, they don't want to get involved. They might vote if they remember
that day, although you can't count on them to figure out for whom, and they
certainly have opinions, but they have better things to do than reason about
them or articulate them to more than a superficial degree. They may
occasionally get passionate about something but then they lose interest. In
short, they have to be given a concrete, not an abstract, reason to care about
_anything_.

Most people don't fly, so they don't care about the TSA.

Most people aren't Iraqis, so they don't care about Iraqi war dead.

Most people aren't Paypal, so they don't care about Anonymous.

Most people don't have much to say, so they don't care about the First
Amendment. And they don't expect that anyone wants to search their home, so
they don't pay too much attention to the Fourth, either.

And they're not rich, so they don't see how tax cuts for the rich are any of
their concern.

I mean, we supposedly had this great national progressive moment in America
not two years ago. Well, what happened? Would you say that the so-called
leader of that progressive movement, Barack Obama, has spent too much time
appeasing his base, and not enough time convincing moderates? (I'm not even
sure what his base is anymore but let's pretend it's the left for the sake of
argument.) His entire Presidency so far has been about trying to hog the
center, while the Republicans spent the last two years nurturing the fears and
hatreds of their most extreme and vocal supporters, while ceding as little
ground as possible to the victors of 2008. So, who won?

So no, au contraire, I don't agree that the job of the extremist is to
convince the moderates. His job is to basically leave them the hell alone, and
outflank his opposition so as to relieve them of their hold on the status quo.
Then, replace it with one of his own. The moderates will go along because they
don't give a shit either way. In this case a good start would have been to get
the Fairness Doctrine reinstated in the FCC by revoking the executive order of
1987, and hit the Right where it hurts. But now we're talking tactics.

~~~
bruceboughton
Actually, I think a lot of people take a moderate view on things because they
recognise that the world is rarely black or white, but rather a full spectrum
of shades of grey.

Of course, in saying this, I have to acknowledge that some people hold
moderate views out of laziness (it's not black and white). Of course, there is
probably an equal proportion of lazy extremists.

------
mcantelon
Twitter just suspended @anon_operations. Expect involutary Twitter fast. ;)

~~~
DanielRibeiro
They are up again:

<http://twitter.com/AnonOpsNet>

<http://twitter.com/anonops>

<http://twitter.com/AnonOperation> (not official, but seems to be working
along: <http://twitter.com/AnonOperation/status/12652603078877184>)

This tweet (<http://twitter.com/#!/anonops/status/12651605946015744> ) is a
wary thought on how things can scalate, and how badly: _if we can't have
twitter account, nobody can_

I just wonder if any of this will come on the panel with Tim Bray later
tonight: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1981547>

~~~
mcantelon
@Anon_Operationn too. Maybe the plan is to have multiple redundant ones then
post to them via a script?

~~~
mcantelon
@anon_operations is back up! Twitter said it was an accident. Hrm.

------
JSig
Interesting magazine to be writing about Anonymous. I sometimes feel that the
magazine itself is a LOIC for the global banking system. It's possibly one of
many publications (nodes) that publishes (DDOS) anonymous writings that seem
to usually endorse the position that the world needs more debt.

~~~
jonshea
Very interesting. I’m glad that you pointed out that the Economist is
“anonymous”. (If you haven’t noticed, almost all Economist articles are
published without a byline). It’s a quirk I’ve never been convinced that they
adequately justify. One of my favorite gags is to claim that I write for the
Economist? Don’t believe me? I challenge you to prove that I don’t.

~~~
bertil
It has little to do with anonymity (although it's close to ‘Anonymous‘
approach): they do it to force journalists of the “factual” part of the
magazine to accept that they are part of a redaction; see:
<http://www.economist.com/about/about_economist.cfm> That “lack of by-line”
allows them to have a tone and yet, not be the Opinion pages; it seems to
work.

They have a public list of their journalists (or at least, their work):
<http://www.economist.com/mediadirectory/books.cfm> and staff can publicly say
they work there.

A friend of mine works there (or interns, not sure); she post on Facebook and
twitter the papers that she wrote, or the video that she shot, but she also
includes other papers that she really liked. I'm assuming the official policy
is stricter, but what she does is rather implicit, that only a handful of
people notice (and presumably mostly other journalists that help with her
‘beat‘). So far, she has defended, sincerely, every paper that I criticized (I
go after The Economist _a lot_ ) — most of them quite far from her beat (I'm
closer to the Economist's line when it comes to the topics that she covers).

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DanielRibeiro
The corresponding twitter account has more info. Had actually. They got
suspended, but google made us the favor of caching it:
[http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_OP3u3L...](http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_OP3u3LKyIIJ:twitter.com/anon_operation+Anon_Operation&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk)

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alanh
Not positive, but I think this is “only” a blog, and not part of the print
distribution.

~~~
icegreentea
It's 'only' a blog. The economist goes to print Thursday nights, so we might
still see an Anon article in the next edition.

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orblivion
I'm surprised. I thought they organize mostly on 4chan, and then go down to
IRC channels spontaneously and temporarily, and keep their identities only
temporarily. Am I to understand that there are actually people who have a
persistent identity? Who are "in charge"?

~~~
count
No. Just moot, but he's got nothing to do with it.

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URSpider94
There was an article on New York Times online today as well. It's pretty funny
to read how mainstream reporters try to explain Anonymous to their readers
whose experience of the Internet begins and ends with email and Facebook.
There was no mention of 4chan anywhere in the NYT article (probably for the
best).

------
known
"There are only two ways of telling the complete truth--anonymously and
posthumously." -- Thomas Sowell

