The angry mob analogy seems most appropriate to me:
- you have people who feel invincible because they are part of a crowd, so they strike out harder than they might if they were personally 100% accountable for what they did
- you have positive feedback loops where the crowd builds its momentum up in a way that would not happen with a small group
A similar trend is definitely taking place in file sharing. Mob action gives people permission (or at least a feeling of power), surveillance is deemed necessary by the aggrieved parties (and their government allies), and then eventually there's a "shock and awe" action to make an example of a big target, such as the takedown of Megaupload. (The distinction here is that unauthorized copying of movies or music is arguably less destructive than 4chan's focused viciousness.)
Hadn't thought about the similarity to file sharing, but it makes sense. Sort of a chaotic neutral in contrast to mass retaliations. Early on with file sharing, I thought that a system might arise where people would voluntarily pay into legal defense or settlement funds for the people randomly targeted by enforcement agencies. A kind of insurance system against the possibility that you might be next. It didn't turn out that way, and in retrospect I think it would mostly have encouraged the RIAA etc to keep pursuing random sharers instead of trying to go after the center of bigger hubs such as megaupload.
Back to the point at hand, once again we have a division of culpability, but a little more deliberate in the case of modern filesharing services like megaupload. The systems are legally and technically engineered so that the responsibility for "unauthorized" actions rests as much as possible with the distributed mass of uploaders and downloaders, per the provisions of the DMCA (in jurisdictions where it applies). And within that mob the accountability for the sum total of infringement is spread thin. It's an unpalatable choice for the enforcers, I think, with the current tools available to them. Or maybe not, and they just go where the money is.
I'm one of those who thinks a good portion of the spectrum of copyright infringement is overblown and outdated. I'm much more concerned about the feedback loop of bad behavior on /b/. But I wouldn't at all want to see Christopher Poole pursued like Kim Dotcom, either.
That's the conundrum for me. I'd rather come up with ways to combat the feedback loop during destructive mob events. I think the level of feedback is a function of both moral-alignment and attention-alignment in the mob. I put forward another wordy hypothesis about it elsewhere in the comments here. Attention alignment is somewhat novel because in a physical mob people can't jump out of the situation as easily switching to a different browser tab.
I'm sure there are more dimensions to it, but these two seem like possible attack vectors if you want to dissolve an angry distributed mob. But you have to do it in an appropriate and ethical way. The shock-and-awe of the megaupload case is, I think, clearly based on fear, but also an attack against the moral cohesion of the file-sharing mob. They're sort of pushing the guy into the role of criminal, extremist, profiteer.. any of which might resonate with any of us and knock people out of moral alignment with each other. If you make enough peers associate file-sharing with criminality or profiteering, you can shrink the mob.
- you have people who feel invincible because they are part of a crowd, so they strike out harder than they might if they were personally 100% accountable for what they did
- you have positive feedback loops where the crowd builds its momentum up in a way that would not happen with a small group
A similar trend is definitely taking place in file sharing. Mob action gives people permission (or at least a feeling of power), surveillance is deemed necessary by the aggrieved parties (and their government allies), and then eventually there's a "shock and awe" action to make an example of a big target, such as the takedown of Megaupload. (The distinction here is that unauthorized copying of movies or music is arguably less destructive than 4chan's focused viciousness.)