Group responsible for 2010 Wikileaks Denial of Service attacks against Amazon and Visa splits, reveals power elite, confirms main ideas of Virtual sociability book
The dissenter group claims that those that they “outed” act like a self-anointed elite. The group was founded with the expectation that none of the members would have more power or be of higher status than others.
A self-styled Anonymous “splinter group” that has seized control of two sites used by the ‘hacktivist’ collective to organise Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks and other operations have revealed their intentions in an exclusive interview with thinq_.
‘Ryan’, a former member of network staff on AnonOps.net and AnonOps.ru, says that he and and a number of other disgruntled members seized control of the sites because they believed AnonOps had become too centralised.
Demonstrators who support Anonymous march in Los Angeles wearing the mask of Guy Fawkes. The London XVIIth prototerrorist is celebrated in the movie V, which espouses ideals, such as a radical subversion of corporate world and official establishment, which some Anonymous members embrace. The march above was occasioned by a protest against the Church of Scientology, which Anonymous blames of conspiring to limit freedom of expression online. Image via Wikipedia
They accuse a small elite within the organisation of “behind-the-scenes string-pulling”, abusing their power by setting themselves up in a leadership role.
The group condemns ‘Owen’, a key figure in this leadership cabal, as being “incredibly incompetent”, stating that had been “abusing the fact that people use his platform”.
Owen and others, the group said, had “crossed the barrier, involving themselves in a leadership role,” adding: “That’s not how things were set up.”
This development comes in the wake of a recent investigative reporting post by Gawker, which revealed that Anonymous has a definite hierarchy obsessed with a vainglorious search for power.
They show a collective of ecstatic and arrogant activists driven to a frenzy by a sense of their own power—they congratulated one another when Hosni Mubarak resigned, as though Anonymous was responsible—and contain bald admissions of criminal behavior that could serve as powerful evidence in criminal proceedings if the internet handles are ever linked to actual people.
The event is a wonderful illustration for the theme of a book I coedited with Brian Britt and I launched only last week. Virtual Sociability: From Community to Communitas (which can be downloaded from Smashwords, or bought from Kindle, or as a paperback from Amazon.com) analyzes the recurrent theme of the intrinsic “democratic” and “equalizing” effect of online communities. The papers by a group of scholars and graduate students grouped around the Online Interaction Seminar at Purdue University, which I have been directing since 2003, reveal that online communities are quite well structured and hierarchically organized. In addition, the papers indicate that online groups are
Virtual Sociability: First volume of the collected papers of the Online Interaction Seminar Collected Papers
Robert BrunoRobert N. YalePamela MorrisScott SandersCartea fe?elorHoward Sypher I think I see a connection here… Don’t you think so?