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Comment by drekipus | Hacker News Reader

We r legion xDDDD.

I have always felt that "the power of anonymous" is precisely the power that we claim it has. (As someone who was involved in 4chan from 2009 until 2015)

"Anonymous" is just the default username for someone on 4chan.

Asking "What does anonymous thinks" is a roundabout way of asking "what do <random people> think?" - but with the latter, you have to face reality that people think this. If we use the former, we can group everything together as a big scary "alt-right 'anonymous group' (tm)" and not have to face the fact that real people have opinions.

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> "Anonymous" is just the default username for someone on 4chan.

Not only is this the case, it's stringently enforced on a grassroots level. People are allowed to select usernames on 4chan, but people who do are considered less trustworthy and less savvy, and are generally disregarded by most anons.

> Asking "What does anonymous thinks" is a roundabout way of asking "what do <random people> think?"

Right, but with the caveat that they're not at all random. The average anon is like the opposite of the average redditor: High in disagreeableness, a born contrarian, and fond of saying provocative things to elicit a response. ("Give me (you)s now.") So asking "what does anonymous think?" is like asking what random people with those traits think.

Yes this is exactly what I wanted to say. I've been at 4chan since 2004, until I got banned several times in a row and just gave up going back around 2010.

Anonymous being blown up in the media was the funniest shit ever because we all knew what Anonymous was. It's more like a sub-culture than a hacker group.

Sure several hacker groups have existed under the anonymous umbrella but they were all 4channers, or b-tards. They were all under the same sub-cultural umbrella and could just as well been single actors acting under the anonymous brand.

So that's why anonymous will never go away, because it's essentially just people in some way influenced by the 4chan sub-culture, acting in the name of anonymous.

Anonymous is the internet of the 90s and early 00s, before it got commercialized into the cable TV package that it is today.

Anonymous is very probably (edit: at this point) just a cover for some totally centralized, authoritarian actions. At best, they are useful idiots for centralized powers.[0]

0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot

At this point, absolutely. At a guess I'd say that most of the real grassroots use of that nom de guerre faded out by 2010-2015.

A few groups can still be found around the globe.

The Feds took care of anyone else that mattered many years ago... Even one started a podcast about it with an FBI Agent.

Oh absolutely. I'm glad that we are openly at that point of the discussion.

I was contending the (perhaps old) notion that "anonymous" was some gang of outlaws that have a secret hideout where they plot the next parliamentary blow-up guy fawks style

The anarchist deep state[0] strikes again!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tyranny_of_Structurelessne...

It's normal playbook to have embedded agents as close to the centre or top of an organisation as possible. I would expect states to be involved although not directly in control initially.

These groups tend to trust each other. What they should do is suspect themselves and especially those who seem better (resources, intelligence, charisma etc) than they are. The clueless newbie who is under suspicion is often the innocent one and the one giving the answers the state agent.

> just a cover for some totally centralized, authoritarian actions

Acceptance of that ascription is admittance of not having understood Anonymous at all.

Anonymous isn't a cover because Anonymous isn't anything. If someone says Anonymous did XYZ, or Anonymous is XYZ, and you accept it, you've failed to do your homework in verifying your sources. (Because there is no source for a statement like that that could be verified.)

The crux of Anonymous is that it is by its own nature undelineated and conceptually undefined. At best, it is a label for a rough set of ideas, in continuous flux, but even that is questionable. Anything that calls itself Anonymous might as well be Anonymous. Since the label has no meaning, adopting it (or ascribing it) has none either.

Does that mean there are no authoritarian actors on 4chan? No. Does that mean there are no "Anonymous" actions that are authoritarian in setup? No. But does it follow that anyone has any kind of control over "Anonymous": No. There is nothing to control. You can't control a label.

If you genuinely want to understand the phenomenon of Anonymous, you need to study semiotics (and the somewhat ill-reputed field of memetics.) I can't quite recommend any authors anymore, it's been a long time since I spent any academic thought on it. Maybe look for generic introductions into these fields.

What you are describing is not the current incarnation of Anonymous, but rather its celebrated heritage.

As of 2024, any sponsored social media campaign by corporate actors, for example, can don the Guy Fawkes mask and claim popular support.

I see this on a daily basis on social media. Quite often the group calling itself "Anonymous Collective" or somesuch appears to be big oil, spouting anti-government rhetoric. The real Anonymous would point out corporate levers behind governmental acts, etc.

well haha you got rickrolled by the mask.

we are the people. we do not forgive and we do not forget. we are anonymous, and we have no structure or controls.

fear us. because you cannot control us at all.

also there's no "us".

Yes, claiming "Anonymous" can form the same lie as any other lie towards the end of public support. But it kinda also means that the concept of "Anonymous", the 'amorphous mass', still exists to be lied with. And in a way, it can't be killed (or usurped) since nothing¹ can prevent new amorphous blobs of people to congeal elsewhere, becoming a new "Anonymous".

¹ well, except maybe mind control, or a truly orwellian control of language to eradicate ideas.

I organized a collection of various sign systems and semiotic studies here. GIT includes a script to perform multi modal semiotic analysis.

https://github.com/space-bacon/SignSystems/blob/main/Codex-o...

Here's a starting point [0]

When I dipped into this it was through film music - an art that's full of tricks, devices, motifs and symbols to tell a story.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/genres/semiotics

Studying semiotics of film is a great start to deconstruct reality (films are smaller universes to analyze than our own).

Check out my sign system categorization project to dive deeper.

https://github.com/space-bacon/SignSystems/blob/main/README....

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