Is anything on the Internet more misunderstood than Anonymous?
Call them a “group” or “hackers,” or “cyber-activists,” or “cyber-terrorists,” and you’ll be mostly wrong and totally reductive. They’ve been more accurately described as a “culture,” an “idea,” or a “phenomenon,” but those all seem kind of flaky and much too flattering. Anonymous defies description and classification by design, tying those of us who aim to understand them into knots. Good for them!
For real insight into Anonymous, I turn to Gabriella Coleman, a McGill professor who approaches them as the subject of anthropological study. Writing this week for Al Jazeera, Coleman aims to clear up some sloppy thinking about Anonymous, while putting forward a reasoned defence of their value. Her piece is combatively titled “Everything you know about Anonymous is wrong.”
Coleman respectfully rejects gloomy think-tanker Evgeny Morozov‘s argument that all Anonymous provides is cheap spectacle and an excuse for governments to ramp up online censorship and surveillance. Authorities would be doing this anyhow, and spectacle needn’t be cheap. Anonymous’ mastery of memes, jokes, melodrama and digital theatrics are perhaps its strongest weapons. They’re why we can’t stop talking about them.
But to what end? While Anonymous’ raids and operations have targeted many an individual and institution, it has no consistent ideology or goal, save perhaps anonymity itself. These days, that’s enough. Here’s Coleman:
“In an era when most of our personal data is archived online – in a time when states and corporations collect, market, and monetise our plans and preferences – there is indeed something hopeful, one might even say necessary, in Anonymous’ effacement of the self, in the cloaking of their identities, in striking at legislation seen to threaten privacy, and seeking to expose the depth and extent of privatised government contractors that have rapidly emerged as a security apparatus parallel to that of the national government.”
The damage caused by Anonymous is overhyped, both by the media and by Anonymous itself, which has a tendency to borrow corny dialogue from comic book villains. But the value of Anonymous is commonly overlooked.
It has become a built-in control against those who would curtail the wonderful chaos of the digital commons.
Original Article
Source: maclean's
Author: Jesse Brown
We end the week with part two of our interview with renowned Mexican
poet Javier Sicilia. Last year Sicilia’s 24-year-old son, Juan
Francisco, was murdered by drug traffickers in Cuernavaca, Mexico. In
his son’s memory, Sicilia created the Movement for Peace with Justice
and Dignity to urge an end to the drug war. Sicilia is now in the United
States to launch a month-long peace caravan this August after leading a
similar caravan across Mexico last year. "We are outraged because the
war has done nothing for us — it has not solved the problem," Sicilia
says. "We need to create awareness and consciousness so American people
know that behind every drug consumer and behind every use of guns, we
pay with dead people." Click here to watch part 1 of this interview
Hundreds of indigenous leaders and activists from all across the world
are gathering in New York City this week for the 11th Session of the
United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. We speak with Dalee
Sambo-Dorough, an Inuit from Alaska who teaches political science at
the University of Alaska, Anchorage and serves as vice chair of the
Permanent Forum. Sambo-Dorough discusses the range of hardships faced by
indigenous peoples in Alaska today, from environmental devastation and
threatened land ownership in the Arctic, to rampant sexual violence. "In
various political and economic agendas, indigenous peoples in the
United States are at the bottom of the bottom — they always have been,"
Sambo-Dorough says. "The issues facing Alaskan Native communities,
indigenous communities across the United States never appear on the
radar screen as a priority issue."
James Anaya, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous
Peoples, has conducted the United Nations’ first-ever investigation into
the plight of Native Americans living in the United States. Anaya’s
recommendations include advising the U.S. to return some land to Native
American tribes, including South Dakota’s Black Hills, home to the
famous Mt. Rushmore monument. Anaya says such a move would be a step
toward addressing systemic discrimination against Native Americans that
continues to this day. James Anaya, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the
Rights of Indigenous Peoples, has conducted the United Nations’
first-ever investigation into the plight of Native Americans living in
the United States. Anaya’s recommendations include advising the U.S. to
return some land to Native American tribes, including South Dakota’s
Black Hills, home to the famous Mt. Rushmore monument. Anaya says such a
move would be a step toward addressing systemic discrimination against
Native Americans that continues to this day. "The indigenous peoples of
this country...suffer from poverty, poor health conditions, lack of
attainment of formal education [and] social ills at rates that far
exceed those of other segments of the American population," Anaya says.
"These conditions are related to a history of wrongs that they’ve
suffered."
The Justice Department has sued Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his
deputies in Maricopa County for racially profiling Latino residents in
the Phoenix area. The DOJ contends that Arpaio
and his deputies aggressively targeted Latinos, regardless of their
immigration status, and retaliated against anyone who got in their way.
We go to Phoenix to speak with Randy Parraz, president of Citizens for a
Better Arizona. "We believe, finally, we’re going to have an airing of
what’s taken place," Parraz says. "We applaud the federal government and
the Department of Justice for coming in and holding Sheriff Arpaio
accountable, because local law enforcement officials here ... are
unwilling to do that work."
