It's hard to report on Anonymous.
It's a non-organization of pranksters-turned-activists-turned-hackers-turned-hot-mess-of-law-enforcement-drama – a story that is hard to get, and hard to write.
To work with a secretive and hunted group requires making many non-obvious choices. One of the unnamed but extensively quoted hackers in Forbes London bureau chief Parmy Olson's new book on the group, titled We Are Anonymous, told me once that anons were "by nature deceptive" – and they are. (How do I know it's the same person? I recognized their way of talking. Then I asked.)
Anons lie when they have no reason to lie. They weave vast fabrications as a form of performance. Then they tell the truth at unexpected and unfortunate times, sometimes destroying themselves in the process. They are unpredictable. The nihilistic fury that Olson describes in the lifestyle of young anons goes in every direction, including inward, and it often spills over onto people like Olson and me for no obvious reason.
You can't follow the money in Anonymous, or look at the power structures, or hunt for a greater rationale in a collective that on most days doesn't have one. But we still have to make the choice about what we believe, why, and how it fits into a larger picture. We use circumstances, gut instincts, and plenty of what hackers call social engineering to tease out the evidence we need to write about the collective, to fulfill our role in the story.
Make no mistake, we have a role. You just can't not join. It's impossible to not be part of the thing, when the thing uses the media to talk to itself.
So what makes Parmy Olson's We Are Anonymous so frustrating is that it plays the narrative straight, as if these issues don't exist at all.
>The only voices in Olson's book are those of the small groups of hackers who stole the limelight from a legion, defied their values, and crashed violently into the law.
But Olson and I, like professor Biella Coleman and former CNN correspondent Amber Lyon, documentary filmmaker Brian Knappenberger, and even Gawker's Adrian Chen, cannot avoid shaping the thing and having it shape us. We are the medium the collective uses to define itself, and we end up owning some of what it becomes. We are, no matter what rules we've set up to avoid it, an organ of the Hive Mind. It is Schrödinger's media landscape, and our observations always affect the outcome.
For this reason it's vital that we expose our methods and internal rules. Who do we name, and more importantly, who do we not? I avoided this particular ethical issue by publicly refusing to name anyone who is not, as they say in Anonymous, namefagged already. Olson plunges through hundreds of pages without even a nod in the issue's direction.
How has Olson chosen who she trusts and when? Her methods are hidden, her notes not referenced in the text, and she appears nowhere in her book. While that's a traditional choice for journalism, in this strange case it harms Olson's credibility. In an environment where all your sources lie to you, you must tell the world how you came to believe the story you're telling.
The social systems of the internet, of which Anonymous is a highly evolved example, disrupt the established pathways of consequence. Instead of looking for the expert or person in charge for quotes, the heart of the story may be almost anywhere. Searching for the right source in Anonymous is often more like investigating a murder than crawling up the chain of command looking for an interview.
Anonymous made us, its mediafags, masters of hedging language. The bombastic claims and hyperbolic declarations must be reported from their mouths, not from our publications. And yet still we make mistakes and publish lies and assumptions that slip through. There is some of this in all of journalism, but in a world where nothing is true and everything is permitted, it's a constant existential slog. It's why there's not many of us on this beat.
Journalism is part of a world of institutions, hierarchies, and social traditions codified by nation states and organizations. We create laws and rules to control who gets to do things that matter, so we can concentrate power where we want it. It's meant to create a predictable world we can inhabit within Nature's capricious grasp. The tools of journalism were built for this world, it's what shaped our rhetoric and narrative. It's partly why we're always so keen on printing people's titles, or age, or race, placing them within a hierarchy, telling you how important they are. The techniques of contemporary journalism are the Big Man theory of history, writ small and fast.
Anonymous breaks all that, and it's a huge headache. But for reporters who had to file stories on the group, the rise of Lulzsec, an exclusive club of hacker elites that acted just like the normal world from within the larger collective, was a godsend. It finally provided a fast way to tell an outrageous and popular story, and we responded with predictable enthusiasm.
And that's how Parmy Olson gets around the problems of writing about Anonymous – by not actually writing much about Anonymous. Her real topic is Lulzsec. In the 414 pages of Olson book, she only explores the worldwide collective where it's relevant to the formation of the small spinoff group of six that burned intensely for a few weeks in the summer of 2011, drawing media attention like no hacker group before.
But the book doesn't suffer from lack of research about Lulzsec. Olson must have spent weeks going through old logs, though she doesn't always make it clear where the logs were from, or how (or if) she tried to verify them. Tech journalists all find themselves relying at some point on dodgy logs, IM conversations, and forwarded emails. Like fornication and usury, it's a sin we all tacitly agree to not to spend too much time considering. But Olson gives herself that pass more times than she should, uncritically using sources like Chanarchive, a site built by some of 4chan's own /b/tards to archive particularly good threads.
Olson hits her stride describing the detailed history of Lulzsec, delivering one fact after another on the secretive group. Here she drops the pretense of analysis and reports events – her strong suit.
Primarily it's a conversation with Jake Davis – known as Topiary, Lulzsec's talented rhetorician and spokesman. This middle part of the book improves dramatically, and is what the whole book should have been: a report from someone who gained very good access to Lulzsec.
But even this suffers from being an unconsidered biography of the young Jake Davis. She seems to relate each anecdote he told her, regardless of whether it contributes to a larger understanding of the group and its significance. They are side roads that go nowhere and end suddenly. In the midst of this is a vast trust exercise in Davis. He indicts himself of one crime after another for dozens of pages of rambling dialog, but Olson never tells us why he's telling her this. He admits repeatedly to lying to the press, but Olson never asks (in front of us at least) the obvious question: Is Davis lying to her?
That's part of why We Are Anonymous feels rushed, despite being something of a tome. Events are not related in chronological order, but it's not clear what order they are in and if you're not already intimately familiar with the events it relates, it's hard to tell when they happened. With a month more of editing and perhaps 150 fewer pages, it would have been a much better book.
For instance, the book is full of strange repeats of technical points and anecdotes. In one case we are told more than once that a DoS attack is like a DDoS attack but without the extra (leading) D for distributed. This is not only uninformative, it's also wrong. DoS is indeed DDoS without the extra D, but the techniques are very different and require different resources.
Olson's technical explanations are stilted, forced, and repetitive. Written in the kludgy language of a non-native speaker who is not particularly interested in the language she's speaking, they are her weakest point in laying out the landscape of Anonymous (or even Lulzsec). A DDoS attack is flooding a target with junk traffic, 15 men trying to get through a revolving door at the same time, and a flood of visitors – all in the space of a single paragraph in chapter 5.
This kind of journalism is fundamentally disrespectful of technical culture. Like British pop stars singing about being African children, it appropriates and discards the culture as if it were an object. It's where the idea that all hackers are teenage basement dwellers comes from and it's a frustrating disservice to an increasingly diverse community that often faces not just social alienation, but prosecution from the US government, and sometimes much worse elsewhere.
Take the sequence of events in the Lulzsec hack of the FBI associated Infraguard in chapter 21, where Olson describes Sabu wiping a server clean:
"[A]nd, on a seeming whim, typed rm -rf /*. It was a short, simple-looking piece of code with a notorious reputation: anyone who typed it into his computer's back end could effectively delete everything on the system. There was no window popping up to ask Are you sure? It just happened. Web trolls famously got their victims to type it in or to delete the crucial system 32 file in Windows."
If you're not technically inclined, this seems like gibberish. If you are, you know it's gibberish. A UNIX command (rm) is not code, it's for the command line interface, (hence no window popping up). It has nothing to do with Windows, and system32 is a directory, not a file. This example is particularly bad, but not isolated.
Is it too much to ask that journalism's experts on Anonymous be clear on the difference between UNIX and Windows? Or be able to explain what an IP address is? The tech media in large part has spent the last 15 years answering yes, in this and every other technology coverage area. It's too much to require journalists understand the technology they're writing about. But as the world of geeks just becomes the world, ignorance becomes less excusable.
We're all on deadlines, and dealing with tighter budgets and more demands in journalism, but after a point, negligence slips over the line into exploitation. We're getting it wrong and not caring as long as it draws in readers.
There's no sign to me that this is what Olson thinks, but it is what she embodies in her reporting. Lulzsec/Antisec brought in readers, no subtlety or analysis needed. They attracted - one might even argue demanded – reporting marked by speed and sensationalism, which is the oldest path to lazy writing.
This cliched language of fast blog posts reacting to Twitter announcements finds its way into We Are Anonymous. All support comes from groundswells, commands are issued at a rapid fire pace, and the people of and around Anonymous must be terribly bruised, for they always seem to be kicking themselves.
Such literary sins are generally overlooked in the age of modern narrative non-fiction, for better or worse.
What makes them stand out here is the contrast to the vibrant language of the anons she covers. Anonymous language is improper, but it's deliberately so. Its metaphors are vivid, creative and effective, because anons are always trying to break conventional language and thought. They've learned to work at it. Their images, when twisted, are twisted to a purpose. When @AnonymousIRC describes itself as "Headless rider on an Ascii horse with a Nyan Cat as halo, sword made of Lulz and scabbard made of tolerance," the image is meant to fuck with your head, and does so gorgeously – but most importantly, you see it. Anonymous writing does George Orwell's classic Politics and the English Language proud, not by obeying his rules, but by knowing why and when it chooses to break them. It is Olson's misfortune to find her prose next to theirs.
***
Antisec, and Lulzsec before it, enjoyed huge media attention from people like Olson and myself, to the point where they marginalized more effective anon ops around the Arab Spring and political resistance to anti-internet laws like ACTA – even when sometimes these ops were done by the same people. Olson and I both covered this the wrong way. We should have seen Antisec as one phenomenon among many, not as a group we could finally treat like rock stars, a group that made our job easy.
Many anons with more creative vision, whose work made progress toward real goals (not always laudable goals but goals nonetheless) have been drowned out by the nihilistic shouting of Antisec and our constant coverage of it. But at this point, we hardly even care about Antisec. The June 3 announcement by the tattered remains of the exclusive hacker group that it had 3 terabytes of government data, including FBI and State department material, was greeted with a collective yawn. It's more data than anyone could read, much less understand, and useless when regular news is already terrible and shameless. In an environment where the president openly has a kill list complete with playing cards that includes American citizens, it's hard to imagine this d0x drop contains anything that could make a difference. After millions of leaked logins and mails and database dumps, we are fatigued with data.
From within Anonymous's sea of voices, all experimenting with new ways of being in the world, the only voices in Olson's book are those of the small groups of hackers who stole the limelight from a legion, defied their values, and crashed violently into the law. It was a mediagenic story to be sure, but in the end, it turns out to be not the real story of Anonymous, and not a story with any real meaning.
