An Unlikely Defense of Anonymous

Many years ago, I was picketing Jessica McClintock’s boutique on Union Square in San Francisco with about 25 other people.  McClintock makes these prom/bridesmaid dresses that look like they belong in Gone With the Wind, and she had contracted with a local sweatshop to manufacture them.  The contractor had gone out of business and disappeared without paying the workers, who were all Asian immigrant women.  A group called Asian Immigrant Women’s Advocates, AIWA, helped the workers organize to convince McClintock to pay the back wages and accept responsibility for the conditions of the women sewing her clothes.  Several years after this particular picket, the workers finally won their demands.

AIWA had a lot of funny chants for these actions.  In addition to the old standby, “Jessie, Jessie, you’re no good, pay your workers like you should,” my personal favorite was “Greedy, tacky and unfair, I wouldn’t buy her underwear.”  Another one, adapted from what I believe was a then-popular football cheer, went “U-G-L-Y Jesse has no alibi, she’s ugly! She’s ugly!”  (According to Yahoo Answers, the cheer originated with a movie called “Wildcats” in which Goldie Hawn plays a football coach.  Never heard of it but think I’ll rent it soon.)  Now I was never a big fan of that one but in the mouths of Asian women workers, it was pretty clear that UGLY referred to not paying your workers, and maybe a little dig at the clothes, which are unquestionably hideous (see photographic evidence above).  But some men on the picket line decided to amplify the message, yelling, “Yeah, she’s downright homely.  I wouldn’t touch her with a ten-foot pole.”  These men, I might mention, would not have been mistaken for Robert Redford on the street.

My friend and I told them to stop, that the chant was not an excuse for misogyny.  I don’t remember if they did or didn’t.

I do remember what happened when we tried to talk to some straight men at an antiwar march in 1991.  This was during the first US invasion of Iraq and they were carrying a big cartoon cutout depicting George HW Bush f**king Saddam Hussein in the ass (raping? sodomizing? hard to know what to call it, but we did not want to look at it).  We told them it was homophobic and offensive.  They’re response was something very pithy like, “Get lost, bitches.”

My friends and I used to get in knock-down-drag-out fights with members of the so-called “Revolutionary Communist Party” back in the eighties and nineties when their official position was that gay people were a product of bourgeois decadence and would go to reeducation camps after the revolution.  During one of those arguments, the poor guy who had made the mistake of trying to sell us his newspaper told my friend Daniel to “stop thinking with his genitals.”

I could go on and on but you get the point.  I’ve never been part of, nor heard of, a social movement that didn’t have to struggle with misogyny, homophobia, ableism (oh, sorry, we can’t hold our meetings in an accessible space), racism, classism, fat oppression.  There are two simple reasons for that: the movements take place in our society, which is rife with all those ways of hurting one another; and they are made up of human beings, who are (mis)educated and affected by our society.

These moments reeled through my head as I read the hit piece on Anonymous in the current issue of The Nation, which was one of the more widely shared links in my activist circles at the end of last week.  Like many of my friends, I was initially gratified to read all the dirt Adrian Chen dishes about the hacker group.  I’ve never loved technofixes for social problems.  I’ve written before about the problems I have with hacking as a major form of activism:  it’s solitary, covert and expert-driven.  The very Anonymous nature of Anonymous and its ilk make it virtually impossible for them to spark a movement, because where would you find them? For those of us who are not supergeeks, there’s no way to join.  And yes, the people who are supergeeks are most likely to be young, white men who play the kinds of video games that produced GamerGate.

I don’t like Guy Fawkes masks; I think they’re creepy and I don’t want to be in street actions with people who don’t trust me enough to let me see their faces.  I also don’t like people who claim to “be” the movement or its leaders, as I have heard Anonymous people do – or more accurately, people who claim to be Anonymous, because of course we cannot know who really is Anonymous.

So it was very tempting to join the chorus of, “Look, see, they really are Nazis and misogynist trolls,” let’s disavow them.

And yet, in a cooler moment, I feel Chen goes too far.  His piece is called, “The truth about Anonymous’s Activism,” but it should be called “Some (more) truths about Anonymous’s activism.”  It’s interesting and important to know that one of the first Anonymous groups “invaded the online teens’ game Habbo Hotel and formed their matching avatars into a giant swastika while spewing racial epithets.”

Anonymous, by its name and its principles, is a loose network with no gatekeepers and no accountability.  That’s a good enough reason for me not to work with them, and to discourage anyone who listens to me from doing it.  But as the examples I started this piece with attest, Anonymous doesn’t have a monopoly on people sincere activists shouldn’t be associated with.  People were raped at Occupy camps.  One of the founders of Common Ground became (or turned out to be) a government agent.  Moreover, many respected activists have dubious pasts.  Dan Ellsberg worked at the Pentagon.  Ed Snowden donated to Ron Paul’s campaign.  Diane Ravitch promoted charter schools.  The question can’t be who they were, it’s got to be who they are now.

Hacking is well-known as a male-dominated and white-dominated culture and much of Anonymous seems to fit right in.  But hackers are also doing some of the most innovative and accessible community-building projects around, in the form of “hackerspaces” where they share skills, equipment and space, often free or very cheap.  Noisebridge in San Francisco has an anti-harassment policy on the website for its 5200-square foot space which “contains an electronics lab, machine shop, sewing/crafting supplies, two classrooms, conference area, library, darkroom, and kitchen.”  Oakland’s “inclusive hacker space”, SudoRoom, is part of a new “collective of collectives” that just got a glowingwriteup in the East Bay Express.  I’m eager to check it out although the one time I was there for a meeting, when I think they’d just moved in, I found it about the moldiest place I’ve ever been. 

Anonymous has done some messed up things and they’ve done some very good things (like exposing evidence of the Steubenville rape and taking down the sites of credit card companies that refused to process donations to Wikileaks).  I think denouncing Anonymous at a time when the FBI is using it to stir up fear and justify bringing more “intelligence specialists” to Ferguson is a mistake. Call them out on their shit, yes, but don’t hit them when they’re down.  But we outside agitators need to stick together.

It Isn't Nice to Block the Buses

Last Friday, the litigation group at the law firm I work for held its annual bash at a restaurant in the Marina.  It’s a very fun event where the associates present skits and videos making fun of the partners, made funnier by a fair amount of alcohol consumption.  Since the restaurant was several miles from the office, they chartered a bus for staff – attorneys had to get there on their own.

This was my first time on one of the huge white buses everyone calls “Google buses,” although in fact, lots of companies use them to transport their employees to and from work.  The wi-fi equipped buses (no one said anything to us about wi-fi, incidentally) have become one of the most visible symbols of the rapid gentrification that is destroying the cultural and economic diversity of San Francisco.  I told one of my coworkers that getting on it reminded me eerily of riding settler buses in Palestine, which I tried not to do, but occasionally it was the only affordable way to get from Tel Aviv or Petakh Tikvah to the village where I lived in the West Bank.

This morning, a bunch of people I know were involved in blocking a Google bus at 24^th and Valencia, in the heart of the Mission District.  The Mission has been one of the areas hardest hit by recent gentrification.  Once predominantly Latino/a, the Mission has experienced waves of gentrification beginning with artists and queers in the seventies, drawn by the cheap rents and eclectic culture, and vastly accelerated during the first tech boom in the nineties.  According to the Cesar Chavez Institute at San Francisco State, “On Valencia Street, 50 percent of the businesses that existed in 1990, mostly local operations that catered to the low-income Latino community were gone by 1998. Rental evictions tripled, and owner move-in evictions quadrupled in just two years.”  Today, the Mission teems with white hipsters.  Every time I go to Valencia Street, I see a couple new upscale restaurants, many replacing bookstores and bodegas that have been there for decades.  Every long-term business I know of on that strip has been threatened by skyrocketing rents.

The blockade of the Google bus highlighted a few issues.  One, the displacement being fueled by the influx of techies with lots of money to throw around, driving up rents and housing prices by offering cash up front over the asking price, motivating developers to use whatever dirty tricks they can to get rid of long-term tenants or owners.  And two, and more directly, the fact that the companies which attract skilled workers partly based on their proximity to chic and lively San Francisco choose to invest in private transportation for their employees, rather than contributing to better public services for everyone.  At the same time, their buses hog city bus stops and tear up the roads.  Trust me, during the two strikes by Bay Area Rapid Transit, I considered jumping on one of the buses I saw picking up workers downtown – only problem was, I didn’t know where they were going.

The highly organized protesters surrounded the bus carrying signs proclaiming, “Warning:  Illegal Use of Public Infrastructure,” “Two Tier System” and “San Francisco, not for sale”.  It attracted a ton of coverage not only from local media but also from national and even international outfits including a pretty good piece from Reuters, and coverage in Slate, Salon, Huffington Post and even China Daily.  Yahoo and Bing had it up top, but I didn’t see it on Google.

Someone got off the bus and yelled at the protesters that “This is a city for the right people who can afford it. You can’t afford it? You can leave. I’m sorry, get a better job.” The video of that confrontation went viral and probably helped to generate some of the media frenzy, before someone at the Bay Guardian realized that the “Google employee” in the video was actually well-known labor organizer Max Alper.   

This led to another frenzy of coverage, some negative, calling the theater piece a “hoax” and some surprisingly positive, like the Wall Street Journal’s observation that, “However false, Alper’s stagecraft touched a nerve in San Francisco, where some longtime residents say wealth from technology companies is pushing up housing costs and altering neighborhoods.”

On Facebook, the discussions were heated, thoughtful and mixed.  Many people felt that the controversy over the staged video distracted from the issue of gentrification, while others felt it enhanced it.  Some people said the performance was too understated and should have been readily identifiable as theater.  Several activists I respect a lot thought it unnecessarily alienated the Google workers, who are not the source of the problem and might have been sympathetic, by painting them all as hostile and clueless.  Others said they immediately knew it was fake because no Google employee would be that polite.

In later media coverage, Max said that he had just been there to support the action and decided to stage the confrontation on his own.  One of the organizers, Deepa Varma, a lawyer with the group Eviction Free San Francisco, condemned it in the press, saying, “‘We didn’t know that was going to happen and it’s too bad because the point was really to connect the housing crisis to the tech industry.”  

If it’s true that the organizers didn’t know about something that became a focal point for the media, that’s unfortunate, and it’s a learning experience.  My guess is that at least some of the organizers did know – there were a number of groups involved in the action, and it may be that the communication between the groups left something to be desired.  I’ve definitely been part of actions where some of us did things that others weren’t that comfortable with, and it’s generally been a matter of unclear agreements.

As an outsider, I feel like the invisible theater unquestionably strengthened the action.  It exponentially increased the attention to the action, both in social media and mainstream press.  I have been on the receiving end of that kind of upstagemanship and I can empathize with frustration that people may be feeling who did the grunt work to make the action happen – made the signs, fliers, wrote press releases, all that good stuff.  But without them, Max’s theater never would have happened.  In terms of more substantive critiques, no one said that all Google employees feel the way his fictitious one did.  But I can absolutely attest that every single thing he said has been said to me, in all seriousness, and not only by tech workers or people new to San Francisco.  Calling the workers names or yelling at them that they were single-handedly responsible for gentrification would not be useful, but as far as I know, no one did that.

Did any of the Google workers respond to Max’s outburst?  Argue with him, tell him to shut up, get back on the bus and wait?  Did any of them tweet, “Good for the protesters bringing attention to need for public transportation?”  Not that I heard about.  The media mainly quoted someone named Adelle, whose handle is @FashionistaLab, tweeting, “it’s not nice to hijack ppl on their way to work!”  Which makes me want to sing Malvina Reynolds (“It isn’t nice to block the doorway …”)

If any of the workers were sympathetic to the protest, great.  This video is not going to stop them.  Maybe next time they hear someone say those things in earnest, they will call it out.  Maybe they’ll get involved with the Housing Rights Committee or pressure Google to spend money on public transportation for San Francisco instead of free wi-fi in the parks, which is only going to benefit the people with laptops or tablets to use it.

To all the activists, whatever their roles, I say, “Bravo!” (and count me in next time).