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But like a Silicon Valley buzzword, “lulz” obscures more than it
reveals, glossing troubling details with a rebel-chic sheen. The lulz
originally did not speak to the pleasure of some abstract transgression,
but the specific, cruel pleasure of a bully tormenting a helpless
victim. Whitney Phillips, another scholar of Internet trolls, spent
thousands of hours observing 4chan trolls and found that their victims
had something in common. She found that “the vast majority of lulz are
derived from targeting people of color (especially African-American),
women, gay men and lesbians.” Many early Anonymous “raids” were nothing
more than the distributed cyberstalking of young women until they fled
the Internet. The trolls, meanwhile, were overwhelmingly white and male,
between the ages of 18 and 30, according to Phillips. Consider also that
the height of Anonymous’s trolling days was the height of the Web 2.0
boom, when the first blogging platforms and early social networks
ushered in a flood of less-savvy Internet users who were less likely to
be white male geeks. In its early days, Anonymous was a gang of white
men who systematically terrorized minorities and women, with the often
explicitly stated goal of driving them from an Internet the men had once
totally dominated.
http://www.thenation.com/article/190369/truth-about-anonymouss-activism#
---
Weev was a member of Goatse Security (GoatSec), a small band of hackers
that was part of the constellation of groups that were either part of
Anonymous or “fellow travelers”. Considering the fact that Anonymous was
not a membership organization as such, it is hard to pinpoint the
various convergences between people like Weev and the network. His
biggest hack was uncovering a flaw in AT&T security that made the e-mail
addresses of iPad users easily accessible.
As a kind of black Kryptonite evil version of Abby Hoffman, Weev fancied
himself as a joker, assuming the guise of Internet troll. When you come
across the term in the film, it is important to note that this is not
the same thing as, for example, a libertarian making himself a nuisance
on Marxmail until he gets the boot. For Weev, trolling means harassing
people mercilessly.
A lot of Weev’s shtick is badmouthing “Kikes”, “fags” and “niggers”,
behavior that the film puts the best positive spin on, as a form of
ironic social commentary on hypocrisy. But there’s probably an aspect of
this that the film neglected, no doubt a function of its general
affinity for hactivism.
While the film was obviously made some time ago, I wonder how director
Weisman would have responded to Weev’s article this month on the
neo-Nazi website “The Daily Stormer” titled “What I learned from my time
in prison”.
"I’ve been a long-time critic of Judaism, black culture, immigration to
Western nations, and the media’s constant stream of anti-white
propaganda. Judge Wigenton was as black as they come. The prosecutor,
Zach Intrater, was a Brooklyn Jew from an old money New York family. The
trial was a sham…The whole time a yarmulke-covered audience of Jewry
stared at me from the pews of the courtroom. My prosecutor invited his
whole synagogue to spectate."
Maybe there’s a joke there but I don’t get it.
full: http://louisproyect.org/2014/10/20/the-hacker-wars/
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