Via some Guardian blog, here’s a polisci analysis on the limits and extent of state power as revealed by the Wikileaks response. Limit: geography-based jurisdiction in a post-geographical world. Extent: control of non-state actors to reach across those geography-based jurisdictions.

[Edit: The most interesting point in this discussion, to me, is that Anonymous DDOSing online payment facilitators like Visa, MasterCard, and PayPal, could have a material economic effect during the Christmas season. Go, chans, go!]

It turns out that Gene Simmons is a dick about file sharing, so Anonymous nuked him. Check out his site — at this writing it’s no longer there.

Via The Pirate Bay: Anonymous Iran — Anonymous’ internet branch office in support of the Iranian people’s uprising against their corrupt theocracy. Here’s a Bloomberg video, including the Ayatollah’s address today:

Here’s the NYT’s liveblog for today’s events there. If the election is nullified and re-done they should push for better oversight.

Nothing disinfects like sunlight.

Here’s a great article on how Anonymous managed to poison Time Inc.’s list of the most influential people of 2009.

Number 1: moot, the father of 4chan.

The first letters of the top 21 spell, “marblecake, also the game”, which is some 4chan inside joke I don’t get (despite some naive Dramatica trawling). I am assured “marblecake” is a sexual term, I assume a disgusting one.

The linked article discusses the various attacks Anonymous used, including beating reCAPTCHA using a Mechanical Turk.

Time doesn’t seem to care that they were pwned, and laughs off the comical failures of their IT department. It makes one wonder how much they care about professional standards in general.

(Via Defamer.)

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.

Anonymous works as one, because none of us is as cruel as all of us.