Home ยป I Am Legion, For We Are Many

with one comment

The whole Anonymous /b/ thing is really interesting. It’s sardonic anarchy with its own Wikipedia. It’s tribal warfare with digital neutron bombs — all the people are gone, it’s just structure. Look at this sentence:

[420chan] is an imageboard mostly filled with a strange combination of completely stoned people, cross dressers, and shota lovers.

(NSFW Link is theirs.)

The sentence is structured to entice you to dig deeper. “Click me”, it says, and once you’re through the looking glass you’re immediately and violently punished. It’s a memetic timebomb that goes off again and again and again.

The /b/ clans are turning communication tools into digital weapons, from griefing virtual worlds and wikis all the way down to DDOSing with bare packets: Technology-as-anarchist-prank. It’s fantastic.

The lovable detritus of the 4chan civil war live in a community immune to its own tactics — because invading /b/ is like pissing into an ocean of piss. And once the community reached a critical mass it exploded into this V-like noumenon Anonymous “who” identifies with the Biblical Legion. Truly Sci-Fi, PKD-style stuff.

Once again I find myself arriving in the future.

Written by Jack

January 7th, 2009 at 10:00 pm

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged with , ,

One Response to 'I Am Legion, For We Are Many'

Subscribe to comments with RSS or TrackBack to 'I Am Legion, For We Are Many'.

  1. [...] forums. At least since lolcats almost all of them have come from 4chan.org. It is an inscrutable place; one cannot go to 4chan to learn about Internet [...]

Leave a Reply

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. You can also subscribe without commenting.