From LULS to Politics
No matter the level of consciousness, hacking is implicitly political in one way, shape or form. Among other things, hackers exploit faults in digital security systems to access information that has been deemed private. If someone has convictions strong enough to warrant breaking into someone else’s computer to retrieve information or with more malicious intent, certainly some strong feelings must be being felt on one issue or another. The hacker group ‘Anonymous’ has been very busy, but their MO is all over the charts. How did this internet activist entity cultivate out of a group of people just in it for the lulz? The whole movement started as a big joke, but it soon became apparent that in numbers they could accomplish something truly disruptive interesting and revolutionary. The true power of Anonymous is that it can be anything and everything, simultaneously. Anonymous is comprised of people from across the globe, every walk of life, those who share common ideals and those who vehemently oppose those same ideals, and despite the group’s diversity, it functions at a fairly high level of proficiency, digression and success.
Anonymous is everything and anything. It is comprised of those with a low tolerance for lies, what he or she perceives as evil, and those who have a special place in their hearts for overbearing manipulative power structures and institutions. Threads are the breeding ground of internet culture – they are the arbiters of what is funny, relevant and inevitably what sticks around. Real democracy… what people want, they get, what they don’t want, they don’t get. On forum thread-based sites like 4chan, humans are able to explore and express their innermost beliefs and desires anonymously, in theory without fear of discrimination for voicing their views and opinions. In a culture of unadulterated information freedom, Anon members share information as opposed to hoarding it. They spread the tools and techniques necessary for their enjoyment and for the betterment of the community as a whole, internet or otherwise.