The coming of age of Anonymous

Re: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/12/more_wikileaks

Anonymous has steadily gained recognition in the internet community for its mischief.  Now anonymous is extending its voice into the mainstream media and, as per its nature, might just consume the new audience into its ranks.  For anonymous, recognition is power – its very substance is recognition; its appendages are mere digital acknowledgments – mouse clicks of frothy contractual agreement.  Thousands of individuals are seduced  by the promise of creating societal volume, and all they have to do is plugin their computer.

An internet hive mind?  Distributed rogue democracy?  Intention, motivation, and moral/political cause?  Or merely a net of hyper-connected minds, seduced by voice and power?  But isn’t that what society is after all?  Is anonymous best understood as a cult?  Who is driving it, the leaders or the followers, and if the answer is both, then isn’t it best understood as its own driver which seduces them all?  In other words, is it a bootstrapped self-fulfilling existential promise?

Is it a new kind of embodied self-propagating meme that does not merely emit a voice in our minds but also acts in the world?  Or is it the same as it ever was – a societal pattern of a few who coerce and are coerced by power and a many that (willingly or not) serve as an enabling societal medium.  In a system that is hyper-connected, a We emerges and a We thinks.  If We thinks loud enough, We hears an echo of itself and We becomes the echo.  While today the scope of this pattern might be faster and broader, isn’t it the same promise that You tell your Self when you get out of bed in the morning.  Isn’t it the same grand promise that has been hardwired by evolution into the human brain?  To what extent did consciousness evolve to fit the human individual or to fit the primordial human society?

Does humanity fundamentally depend on each of us, its namesake cousins, to survive, or does humanity find in the anonymous Us a perfectly palatable vessel to chronicle and extend human history.  Every era, society grapples with its generational inheritance from the old to the new.  But this is something different.  We are understandably befuddled by this change and we news ourselves through nervous laughs about busty nurses and swedish sex scandals, but the important story is not Asange, its the coming of age of anonymous.