wow
So... last night I joined in a ‘Raid.’ Technically, I guess I was one of anonymous for 25 minutes. Not the anti-scientology anonymous, but the anonymous population that reside where the antiscientology anonymous came from. While there, a post came up listing a website I recognized; it was the uk division of the Habbo Hotel. The kids avatar online game that was mentioned in some of my readings. The place with “Aids in the Water.” I kept the post up and opened a new tab and continued browsing on the /b/ board forum at 4chan.org. After bookmarking a few threads, I flipped back to the thread with the Haboo url and refreshed the page to find that the thread had been deleted for breaking the ‘no invasions’ rule. I opened another tab and entered the Haboo url, created an avatar (black w/ a lrg afro and armani suit) and then was there at the poolside with about fifty other black avatars in a mob shouting at the inhabitants of the resort. We began holding up signs meant for casting votes for the high divers as females walked by, pretending to ‘rate that booty’. All my compatriots were called anon plus a string of numbers. We began blocking the pool shouting about aids being a scam to keep people ignorant and argue that the gov’ment placed aids in the pool water. A chant of ‘moar, moar’ erupted, as we called for people to go back to 4chan and get more people, or ‘/b/lackup’. More came and we blocked all the exits to the area and began to claim the revolution was a success and called all the unwitting inhabitants trapped there ‘comrade.’
It was fun, funny, and completely immature. This is hooligan behavior and completely changed my understanding of anonymous. It is mob behavior, digital flash mobbing. Hactivism is something else. Some people utilize these hooligans to carry out attacks for their own political reasons, but the actors, anonymous, carry out the attacks for their own, nebulous and likely ignoble reasons.
I believe there is a story here, just not the story I expected to find. This is digital ‘wilding.’
The voice recognition reads were great. I especially enjoy the simulated conversational systems that could imitate paranoia. Thats good irony and possibly telling about logic and brain chemistry. The theoretical models are interesting in the problems in interpreting they attempt to illustrate. It all reminds me of Derrida and his notion of play and the necessary negation of all other concepts in a single concept’s definition. The researchers have the advantage of being able to control the law.