Hi Florian, I'm defying normal mailing list protocol by replying to your post late but was unable to follow the list last month due to a combination of travel and conferences. A couple of people forwarded your message to me, including last night, which reminded me, I should reply. My responses have an * in front of them.
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: <nettime> Phillips/Beyer/Coleman: "false assumption that alt-right 'trolling' Date: 2017-03-22 23:18 From: Florian Cramer <[email protected]> To: [email protected] > This collectively authored piece by Whitney Phillips, Jessica Beyer and Gabriella Coleman is worth reading and, perhaps, debating: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/trolling-scholars-debunk-the-idea-that-the-alt-rights-trolls-have-magic-powers The authors make important points concerning the use of the word "trolling" to trivialize racist and sexist campaigns and providing (just as, btw., the word "lulz") "bigots [with] an easy way to deflect personal responsibility for hateful action". The section that begins with the headline "Communities Change", however, strikes me as much less differentiated. In it, Phillips, Beyer and Coleman argue against "the false assumption that alt-right 'trolling' is equally interchangeable with 4chan and Anonymous, an assumption that posits static, ahistorical framings of both. Making this claim, eith explicitly or implicitly, obscures the one basic, unifying fact of 4chan and Anonymous: that they _change_, both in terms of demographics and ideologically." This argument is, first of all, a red herring. Taking to its logical consequence, it would mean that no community could be critically analyzed in a historical frame. ** Why? We were precisely insisting on being historical, which for me, means both tracing lines of continuity and discontinuity. So while subcultural traits/memes act as strong vectors of continuity, which we state in the piece, we must also mindful of historical events, which also change the course and imprint of these phenomena. There are too many historical events to list here but a small sampling might be useful to remember: like the protests against Scientology that spurred an explicit protest group, Chanology, to form (and much to the chagrin of the Anonymous band of trolls who at the time were *so upset* at the earnest protests, they staged one of the worst raids to date, attacking an epilepsy forum in the hopes they could irreparably sully the name Anonymous; and frankly am surprised they did not succeed). Or later when Anonymous got involved in the 2011 social movements, some old-time activists from Indymedia or other progressive hacktivist circles showed up. Their presence too changed the political valence and texture of Anonymous operations. Or for instance, when #GamgerGate took off, many of the trolls/actors involved, still disgusted at the politicization of Anonymous, insisted on avoiding the use of a collective-use name, especially Anonymous, as it could be co-opted for good. As an anthropologist I am obviously quite keen to trace the persistence and power of cultural norms but taken alone without addressing these sorts of details and events, strikes as the a-historical move. As per our ability to be deep and nuanced in a Motherboard article, I'll just say quite obviously: it's a Motherboard article. We tried our best to be nuanced but as we all know, journalistic genres are constrained. It felt like a minor miracle when the editor gave us room to write more than 1000 words and allowed us to forward more than a single point and cite other work (and am grateful he did so). And for some context in case it was not obvious, one of our prime targets was this piece (https://medium.com/@DaleBeran/4chan-the-skeleton-key-to-the-rise-of-trump-624e7cb798cb). It emphasized, we felt, in too extreme ways, the continuities, so we emphasized the discontinuities. > The question is ultimately not one of 'either/or' - respectively radical identity versus radical non-identity of 4chan in whatever historical phase -, but rather: How could it happen that a community transformed this particular way? Which factors preexisted that enabled this transformation. The same question have been routinely asked, for example, by historians researching the transformation of 1920s Weimar Republic Germany into the 1930s Third Reich. Discrediting such a perspective with the argument that "communities [or individuals] change" would be absurd. ** Not sure how I/we've avoided this question: "How could it happen that a community transformed this particular way?" as the whole point of the piece was to take serious the question of historical transformations. Time and again I've said the rise and split of Anonymous from its original 4chan base into progressive arenas could be seen as something of an historical accident precisely due to its trolling roots (but my thesis could also be complicated by some of the early Anonymous trolling raids like the one against Hal Turner that exhibited proto-political characters and was anti-racist in its tenor). But no, it was not surprising to me when GG/Alt-right stumbled straight out of the chans, as I've alway treated Anonymous as a bit of a historical aberration, a puzzle to be historically explained, which is why I wrote my book chronologically. And key here is that large sectors of Anonymous did eventually and substantially garner a life away from its chan base. At a certain historical juncture (between 2011 and 12) Anonymous was no longer co-terminus with the chans, and in fact many participants even ceased to recruit there. By then, many of the largest English Twitter accounts were and are still run by left-anarchists. 2011 was the high watermark of its progressive era with many participants having intervened in every single one of the revolutions of the year. In fact, maybe Anonymous' separation from the boards around this time can help explain why its force has dwindled over the years (along with the arrests of the hackers). If we turn to regional nodes the story becomes even more complicated and in some of these understudied cases, chan-troll culture may be even less vital. This once again presents the issue in an over-simplistic way; as if the lines between "progressive activism" and "alt-right 'trolling'" could be clearly drawn. For example, the Anonymous movement always involved vigilante rhetoric and a visual aesthetic that even sympathizers - such as my fellow panellists at the Networked Disruption conference at Aksioma, Ljubljana in 2015 - characterized as "fascist". Conversely, memes such as the pejorative "SJW" (for "social justice warrior") pre-existed the present-day "Alt-Right" for years and have been equally popular in parts of hacker culture that identify as left-wing. * I'll grant that the aesthetic could be read that way. And that's an interesting discussion to be had about Guy Fawkes and the cultural place of V for Vendetta. I can't deny the existence of a few outright fascist Anonymous groups. I believe there is a sizable one in Germany, which other German Anonymous groups tried to stamp out of existence but failed but this seems to again be an issue that can be explained as much by paying attention to regional differences (re: Germany) and histories as much as it is about "chan culture." But just to jog our memory, between 2011-2013 there was a fairly large, popular, and wildly prolific Anonymous node by the name of AnonOps and affiliated hacker groups (Lulzsec/Antisec). Their politics and members were anything but fascist. I don't see how hacking security corporations, lending your support to Occupy, and assisting Black Lives Masters is fascist. Does this mean every last intervention under the name Anonymous was in this guise? No. But AnonOps was a dominant node for a long period of time and vital to showcase, especially if someone else denies its existence as happened with the Medium piece cited above. I've certainly found that anonymous organizing makes some quarters of the left deeply uncomfortable (for lack of transparency) but the charge that AnonOps was fascist strikes as plain off the mark, especially when judged in terms of their actual political operations between 2011-2014, many of which were fully hinged to social justice issues with some key players now languishing in jail because of it. As per SJW and hackers/hacker culture as you posit above: There are likely some SJW-hackers but if we are going to be specific about it, gamers not hackers are far more present among this contingent (hence the name gamergate). Note that many of the participants on 4chan also self-identify as NEETS (not in education, employment and training): not exactly the profile of the savvy-tech type worker either. Accounting for the differences in time and types of people, say, between gamers (many whose technical skills amount to being able to log into a game and withstand 18 hours of gaming), and hackers, seems to best serve a historical framing, even if there are some areas of overlap between these two. And there are moments to emphasize similarities between hackers and gamers but I still question whether the bulk of the Alt-right are hackers per se (maybe there are but this is where on the ground ethnographic research can really come in aid to help us answer this). At this point, given the prevalence of gamers/self-identified neets, and geeks among the alt-right, it seems premature and simplistic to blame hackers or hacker culture for the alt-right (and in spite of weev who is to be sure a hacker). >> The authors of the article actually have the best examples of blurry lines and transititions between the two seeming polar opposites of "Anonymous" and "Alt-Right". A key figure and source in Gabriella Coleman's 2014 book "Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous" is the troll/hacker Andrew Auernheimer/weev. In 2015/2016, he was a key figure in the openly Neonazi part of the "Alt-Right", being involved - among others - in the blog The Daily Stormer and several other related sites and meme campaigns. His name is absent from the article. Wouldn't Coleman's book, too, benefit from a critical postscript? * In my book Weev was presented as the antithesis of Anonymous in two regards: first he was not anonymous and flaunted personal celebrity (and Weev rather disliked Anonymous) and second was also meant to capture the fearsome, politically terrifying side of trolling. I was using him as foil (I believe I even used that word) to show how weird, historically weird that is, it was for Anonymous to edge away from trolling into activist territory precisely because some aspects of trolling were so terrifying. (As a side note I did write a postscript, which addressed, among other topics, the discomfort with anonymity in leftist circles and the uptake of the public disclosure hack by other hacktivists like Phineas Phisher.). In any case, I hope that here on this list and in related discourses, we're beyond a discursive mode where "net culture", "hacker culture" and "communities" are seen as something in need of fundamental defenses against fundamental attacks, as if this was a binary issue. * I'm not advocating to defend every last quarter of "hacker culture" nor do I think the moniker hacker culture is all that useful. Some quarters in hackerdom *are* frighteningly regressive: hello Silicon Valley hackers and technologists like Mencius Moldbug who, with the help of one of our own (as in an academic) Nick Land, have whipped into being an increasingly influential and frightening philosophical vision of the Dark Enlightenment. So if we want to talk about actual hackers/technologists (with loads of money, power and influence) and actual fascism this seems like a great place to start. And we should turn to geeky quarters of the conservative Internet composed of gamers, geeks, meme-makers, neets, trolls, and some hackers, who are successfully and adeptly advancing a right agenda. But to simply use "chan culture" or "hacker culture" to explain both Anonymous and the Alt-Right without paying attention to events that led to the rise of distinctly configured phenomena strikes me as skating on thin historical ice. Biella <...> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: [email protected] # @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
