Doutor

Anonymous 101: Introduction to the Lulz * * *

Anonymous has kept up its monthly protest, including this one from October 13, 2011, outside the Church of Scientology headquarters in downtown San Francisco.
(Editor’s Note: Any decent coverage of Anonymous is going to verge on some NSFW material at points. There will be questionable language and strange imagery.)
Last week the net and the media were ablaze with the news that Anonymous might be taking on the Zeta drug cartel in Mexico, a story that has morphed into a wider drug corruption story, and led to one American law enforcement official in North Carolina being named as a gang conspirator.
Also this year, Anons released documents on, or d0xed, several police organizations and one prominent police vendor in retaliation for heavy-handed law enforcement reaction to occupations associated with the Occupy Wall Street movement. They’ve fought with child pornographers, hacked Sony repeatedly, and even tried to release compromising pictures to blackmail Bay Area Rapid Transit spokesman Linton Johnson into resigning. (Johnson claimed to have authored and then defended BART’s controversial decision to shut off mobile phone service in BART stations to pre-empt an anti-police brutality protest.)
They’ve created law enforcement excitement that’s verged on panic, given net and media pundits hyperbolic logorrhea about “cyber terrorism” and “cyber freedom”, and happily skipped between damn funny, deeply disturbing, and self-aggrandizing, depending on the mood of the hive mind at the moment.
But what is Anonymous?

In this in-depth series “Anonymous: Beyond the Mask,” we’re going to do our best to answer that.
NYU Professor and Anonymous researcher Biella Coleman compares Anonymous to the trickster god archetype.
“The trickster does exist across America, across Europe, really across the world and it is not in myth but in embodied in group and living practice: in that of the prankster, hacker, the