Nervous People ...
Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous by Gabriella Coleman
Every now and then modern societies erupt in what Noam Chomsky once called “outbreaks of democracy.” These can take many forms, from political evolution to resistance; and various art movements can be viewed as versions of such outbreaks. Most civilizations have had countercultures that meant to perpetuate such an outbreak.* Eventually, all outbreaks are suppressed, die down through entropy, or are recuperated (sucked back into) the mainstream. Beatniks and hippies were absorbed into the all-encompassing menu of lifestyles available in the mass- consumption sphere. Rebellious rock & roll is now a major industry dealing in stars, brands, and products. In the arts, what was uniquely original and disruptive for one generation becomes just another option for the next.
Once-transgressive modernist art movements—from Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism to Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptualism—have played roles in shaping and enabling this cultural re-formation. [A fundamental question for art might be whether that was because or in spite of the fact that representation -- the relation of images to their originating context -- is itself ambiguous. The commodity, or often just its image, slips into the place of our deep human need for communication and connection. Detached from context, everything becomes equivalent and infinitely re-combinable. The medium is indeed the message and that message is supremely malleable in the hands of the almighty Market.
In the middle of the 20th century, a motley group of European intellectuals, highly influenced by the avant-garde cinema and visual- poetry movement called Letterism, self-identified as the Situationist International (SI). Situationism articulated the plight in which we find ourselves. They called it The Society of the Spectacle, “a social relation among people that is mediated by images.” Their analysis was based on a deep historical perspective provided by rarified educations. (And such a perspective and such an education are scarce luxuries today.)
They were talking about advertising of the time — in print media, television, and public space — but their alarm seems only more relevant now as the internet increasingly becomes the sole source of information and the primary avenue for our communications, entertainment, banking, and shopping, medical care and many others facets of life. Over fifty years ago, Situationism (as well as American writer Philip K. Dick) lucidly and precisely saw us as we are now: surrounded and overwhelmed by media and the devices that at first facilitate and then dominate our lives. One of the cores of the SI critique was that actual lived experience had changed from being, to having, to appearing. When social life is dominated by consumer goods, the role of Citizen is smoothly replaced by that of Consumer. Images constructed and chosen by others become the principal connection to the world we formerly experienced for ourselves. The Situationists were precursors to the particularly mercurial world of loosely affiliated hackers known as Anonymous—a global iteration of one of these outbreaks.
A few years ago Gabriella Coleman, a cultural anthropologist based in Montreal whose previous work was on hacking and open source platforms visited Santa Fe to talk about her 2014 book Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. The name immediately conjures for most people a certain mask, probably familiar via the movie V for Vendetta; but that mask has been an icon for much longer. Icons function as simplifications of persons or things and make concepts immediately available. (And current usage of the word “iconic” has rendered it almost entirely meaningless.) When the context for an icon becomes mutable, its meaning can be reapplied in new scenarios. A red circle with a bar across it can be combined with practically anything to signify NO! —no smoking, no dogs, no pooping, no cell phones. Some instantly recognizable paintings—Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci and Marcel Duchamp’s mustachioed 1919 trickster version “L.H.O.O.Q.”—when detached from their originating histories have become icons that have been used to express a wide array of meanings.
The history of the Guy Fawkes mask is a complex case in point. Fawkes was part of a plot -- over 400 years ago! — in 1605 to blow up the English Parliament and overthrow the king. The insurrection was defeated and Fawkes and his co-conspirators were executed. But subsequently a mustachioed caricature of his visage (the name Guy derives from was Guido, and it may reflect a northern European prejudice against Mediterraneans). The caricature soon became associated with Guy Fawkes Night, an evening of merry-making around large outdoor bonfires in Britain. Santa Fe’s annual Autumn festival of the burning of the Zozobra statue is local iteration of this tradition.
Guy Fawkes Night swiftly rotated away from a commemoration of the execution of a traitor toward a widely known meme we could call sympathy for the outlaw, and thus an icon of the face of dissent (which is precisely what V for Vendetta was drawing upon). A genre of mass-market movies (Ready Player One, Pacific Rim, Uprising, A Wrinkle in Time) rests on an identification with those (underdogs, the oppressed, the young) who, like The Hunger Games’s Katniss Everdeen, fight Evil Power by resisting or outsmarting the ruling order.
Russian literary theorist and philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin, connected this with the tradition of the “Carnival” (going back to Rabelais) —the temporary suspension of fixed societal rules in order to let off steam. Historically such festivals are widely distributed from Asia to Latin America to Europe, the Balkans (the “day the women rule”) and the Mediterranean, and of course Fat Tuesday, which as Mardi Gras festivities in New Orleans and Rio de Janeiro is a popular embodiment of the throwing off of inhibitions. The brilliant Bakhtin lived from 1895 to 1975 (at one point being exiled to Kazakhastan by Stalin.) His wide-ranging thinking, especially about the dialogic aspect of all culture, can be understood also as an elaborately disguised way of talking back against totalitarianism.
Coleman relates aspects of Anonymous that map directly onto the trope of the Trickster, who steals something valuable from the gods and give it to humanity. One thinks of Prometheus in Indo-European culture who steals fire, and Raven in New World indigenous cultures who steals the Sun itself.
A certain degree of flirtation with non-conformism is part of the fabric of modern Western civilization; most young people in Western societies go through a phase of it in some form. But in the arts it is often a stronger identification that is retained into later periods of life. It grew partially out of the Romantic era vision of the Artist-as-Hero. This association, along with the vision of the Scientist and even the Engineer as heroic supermen (and yes, it was quite specifically male-only), migrated into the tech world of the past three decades where “thinking outside of box,” disrupting things, being “transgressive” are seen as positive qualities, especially after a few people became billionaires at it.
In anthropological theory our species, homo sapiens, is further posited (in light of our use of tools allowing us to advance beyond other primate societies) as homo faber, “maker.” This is sometimes juxtaposed with homo ludens or “player,” concerned with amusements, humor, and leisure. In 1938, as the clouds of Nazi aggression were gathering over Europe, Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga wrote his book, Homo Ludens, emphasizing the importance of play as a sphere of freedom, fundamental, and necessary for the generation of culture. A primary motivation for various actions of Anonymous actors is a form of play they call lulz—done mainly for a sort of detached amusement. This is akin to the Italian Renaissance idea of being nonchalantly exquisite called sprezzatura. This “because it’s there” approach to monkey-wrenching the internet consisted at first of fairly juvenile exercises in transgression by Anonymous participants. But it had a built-in global audience for sophisticated digital tinkering. Anonymous happened to evolve from a sub-culture of hacking to something with far-reaching impact; it morphed in a fundamentally unplanned series of steps into what became, in effect, political actions. Three examples are: their videos and demonstrations against the draconian methods of the Church of Scientology; their enabling the protests in Tunisia that kicked off the Arab Spring; and their crowd-enabled online attacks on financial institutions in support of early Wikileaks. Equally important was the lack of authorship: anonymity insured authenticity. Being done for their own sake rather than for fame and recognition, let alone money, imparted to the hacks and hi-jinks a transcendent quality.
Coleman’s work provides revealing reports from her years of “observing” Anonymous. There has always been a fine, sometimes blurred line between participation and observation in cultural anthropology. Even more so in today’s world, where the objects of your study are not an isolated pre-industrial tribe but a globally distributed network of people who may at times be breaking the law. What struck me in her detailed descriptions of Anonymous’s actions was the intensity and commitment to risk, combined with an attitude of irony and detachment. That combination is a recognizable hallmark of many previous such moments in history: Socrates, Taoism, Sufism, Transcendentalism, and bohemianisms of many stripes.
“Most laughter is by nature irreverent, and irreverence is by definition subversive,” writes Hugh McLean in his introduction to the works of Mikhail Zoshchenko, titled “Nervous People”. For twenty-five years, Zoshchenko wrote satirically about people in Stalinist Soviet society; not surprisingly, he was eventually ritually sacrificed and forced to write drivel.
Today I think we can agree that we are all “nervous people.” Extremist right-wing politics is literally borrowing techniques from the political left, tricks that originated in avant-garde artistic movements. As artists, critics, curators, and audiences, we owe it to ourselves to reaffirm a commitment to progressive values—and by that I mean, at minimum, representative democracy, equality under the law, the fundamental dignity of every human being, and a deep commitment to being stewards rather than rampant exploiters of the natural world. Part of this entails recognizing and honoring past traditions of resistance to unbridled power and supporting outbreaks such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo! In a political environment in the USA where simply expressing concern for two million people who have had their houses bombed, or for 10,000 children who have died in those same bombing raids, can lead to being censured, losing one’s job, or receiving death threats, we need to stop shooting the messenger and get serious about free speech.
* A good survey history of the topic is Counterculture Through the Ages: from Abraham to Acid Rock by Dan Joy and R.U. Sirius).
This piece first appeared in the May or June 2018 issue of THE, a Magazine of the Arts, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The illustration shown at the end here was done for the article by Mariah Romero.