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.

The Revolution Will Not Be Hacked

It used to be that every time I went to a meeting to figure out some action we could take to raise awareness about something or other, there would come what I called the “helicopter moment.”  That was the moment when someone said, “It would be really great if we could charter a helicopter and” … parachute onto the field of the Super Bowl – land in front of City Hall during the mayoral inauguration – drop the ashes of people dead from AIDS …. 

It was a flight of fancy, an expression of the wish we all shared that we could somehow break out of the mold of ritualistic protest people have gotten so good at ignoring.  But I would always get irritated because people would spent more than a minute talking as if we could actually get a helicopter, and if we could, that we could actually do what we imagined with it.  I was irritated because it distracted people from the discussion at hand, but also because it pointed up how difficult it is to interrupt the dominant conversation.

I was also irritated because you can get three, maybe four people in a helicopter, and there were generally at least ten of us in the meeting.  The helicopter idea is that a few people with a grand gesture can make change, the modern version of Deus ex Machina, the ancient Greek method of quickly wrapping up a play by having the gods come in and fix everything.  What we needed was not the helicopter ex machina, but the Movement ex machina, and that’s even harder to accomplish.  If we could have gotten everyone on Market Street to form a helicopter with their bodies, that might have been something worth doing.

About fifteen years ago, the helicopter moment morphed into the hacker moment.  Brainstorm long enough, and someone will say, “We should change their [the Corporation, the FBI, the Army, …] website so it says …”  Or we dream of changing those electronic signs that run across the screen in BART stations (oh, how thrilled I am that I’ll be seeing those signs again, now that the BART strike is temporarily over) so the people looking up to see when their train is coming see “Support the Guantanamo Hunger Strikers” or whatever.

I still roll my eyes when those conversations start because one, we don’t know any hackers.  The conversation will go on and on about what we’re going to do with their websites, and ultimately we are going to have to come back to the discussion of what we can really do and it’s not going to look as glamorous. 

And two, if we did know hackers, we would go to them and say, “We want you to do this,” and then what?  It wouldn’t be our action, it would be theirs.  We would be replacing the joy of collective power with the smugness of being in the know.  The goal would obviously not be to get the people who saw the message to join us – how could they? but simply to admire our (or actually our hacker friends’) skill and boldness.  It’s the ultimate transformation of political action into a spectator sport.

That’s why Anonymous, which started out hacking BART’s website to protest a killing by BART police a few years ago, started calling demonstrations.  And in fact, the demonstrations – which were not attended by that many people, actually – had a much bigger impact than the hacks.  BART overreacted by shutting down train service and – gasp – even shut down cell phone access during the protests, which sparked more international outrage than the killing did.

We’re currently in a prolonged national hacker moment.  It started with Wikileaks and Bradley Manning, now it’s Edward Snowden.  These are brave and smart guys, and for sure, they have provoked discussion about issues like secrecy, surveillance and the legitimacy of whistleblowing, maybe even about targeting civilians and mistreatment of prisoners, though I haven’t heard nearly as much of that.  Manning has certainly inspired activism here – the Bradley Manning contingent in the San Francisco LGBT Pride Parade was the biggest queer antimilitarist action we’ve had in decades.  Julian Assange has rallied support in Europe, and no doubt Snowden will too wherever he lands.

The problem is not these guys and what they’ve done but the mythic stature being accorded to people who are in a very rarified position.  The fascination with Edward Snowden’s mad dash across the world is understandable, but ultimately feeds the idea that only a few people with inside information have the ability to change anything, and the role of the rest of us is to cheer for them and wait for their next revelations.  Young men like Snowden and Manning, whose quest for heroism led them to join the military and the security apparatus in the first place, now find heroism in bold acts of martyrdom.  They become celebrities in a society already obsessed with celebrities.

I have been re-reading Emma Goldman's autobiography, Living My Life.  After spending a year in prison for “inciting to riot,” in 1893-94, Goldman found on her release that she had become a celebrity.  She writes, “I knew of the American craze for celebrities, especially the American woman’s hunt for anyone in the limelight, be it prize-fighter, baseball-player, matinee idol, wife-killer, or decrepit European aristocrat….Every day brought stacks of invitations to luncheons and dinners.”

Movements have always used celebrities, but they are not built by celebrities.  What these young people, sadly, are missing is the experience of the movement AS THE CELEBRITY, of seeing that we, who have no unique skills or information, can make a splash simply by combining all of our ordinary talents and information. Look at the Egyptian people, out in the streets again.  Most of us don't know one of their names, but we sure know the name Tahrir Square.

Snowden himself said, “the Obama administration is not afraid of whistleblowers like me, Bradley Manning or Thomas Drake. We are stateless, imprisoned, or powerless. No, the Obama administration is afraid of you. It is afraid of an informed, angry public demanding the constitutional government it was promised — and it should be.”

That’s a lovely sentiment, and it’s probably more or less true.  Yet it casually combines two words that do not, in our era, go together.  An “informed” public is not necessarily an “angry” public.  Today, in fact, the more “informed” people are the more resigned they become.  I've heard outrage in the press over the revelation about "PRISM" and the NSA's commandeering of phone records, but I haven't seen any expressions of public anger.  In the wake of Snowden’s revelations, the pundits pun, the bloggers blog, but where are the activists?

Waiting for the next installment of “Where in the world is Edward Snowden”?