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What the decentralized nature of Anonymous tells us about its power

Like millions of other irreverent young men, I would find my way to 4chan.org, which, like Hegel, was to later give birth to two formidable yet opposing political currents, and which, also like Heg…

As Anonymous proliferated, it became even more difficult to control—for there were always those who sought to guide its path.I’m talking about the guy in your apartment complex who informs you, apropos of nothing, that he’s good at naming new kinds of acid, and tells you of the time when, after a friend of his who had created a batch produced a sheet that was entirely white, this fellow called it, without hesitation, “Black Magic.” The fat girl who reemerged in high school as a Goth, and pretended to conceal books on Wicca during lunch. Indeed, some of its key aspects had already been trimmed back lest they draw heat; 4chan’s founder, a kid who went by the name Moot, had felt the need to ban the “raids” that had built /b/’s reputation and which ranged in nature from generally harmless group forays into various online communities with the intention of causing amusing havoc to more consequential crowd-sourced mobs against individuals who’d somehow gotten their attention. And after Moot banned raids, those with a taste for such things increasingly congregated at 7chan; that site’s /i/nsurgency board became the chief organizing venue for the mass visits to the youth-targeted virtual hangout Habbo Hotel, for instance, where Anons donned avatars of Black men with Afros and three-piece suits and blocked the entrances to the community’s pool, claiming that it was closed due to contamination by AIDS.

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