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Abstract
I use Anonymous as an illustrative case for more general reflections on collectivities in the age of computerization that are not based on shared identities. Whereas theories of collective behavior focus on circular reaction within assemblies of bodies, for the phenomena that this article addresses, communication technology plays a constitutive role in the process of connecting people and turning connectivity into collectivity. In order to explore this Internet-based connectivity and its processes of assembling collectivity outside and beyond practices of representation, I approach Anonymous with the notion of Tarde's public and further investigate the dynamics of constituting collectivity with a ‘new materialist’ perspective that asks to what extent Anonymous can be interpreted either as swarm, network, or multitude. A focus on the interplay of Internet infrastructures and affection, which can produce experiences of the common and thus constitute collectivity, challenges the distinction of mediation and emergence.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the editors of Distinktion as well as the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments and support. Further I would like to express my gratitude to the team around Professor Stäheli at the University of Hamburg who worked together on conceptualizing a postgraduate program with a focus on ‘New Collectivities’: Thank you very much for all the inspiring discussions.
Notes on contributor
Carolin Wiedemann is a PhD candidate in sociology at the Department of Sociology, University of Hamburg, Germany. The PhD is on Critical Collectivity Online. She holds a scholarship of Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes and works as a freelance writer with publications in Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung and Spiegel Online. Her research focuses on the dispositives of control societies and on subversive movements.
Notes
1. The term ‘crisis of representation’ refers to a theoretical development in social sciences that demonstrates the impossibility conceived within human language and culture of a correspondence of significations and systems of significations on one side and a world of pre-semantic elements that exist ‘per se’ on the other side, as Reckwitz (Citation2003) concludes.
2. The Guy Fawkes mask is a depiction of the best-known member of the Gunpowder Plot, an attempt to blow up the House of Lords in London in 1605. The portrayal of a face with an over-sized smile and red cheeks, a wide moustache upturned at both ends, and a thin vertical pointed beard came to represent broader protest after it was used as a major plot element in V for Vendetta, published in 1982, and its film adaption in 2006. After appearing in Internet forums, the mask became a well-known symbol for Anonymous, the Occupy movement, and other anti-government and anti-establishment protests around the world (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Fawkes_mask).
3. In April 2012, I conducted interviews with people who had been part of several Anonymous operations. I contacted them in two ways: (1) I could address some of them directly because the FBI had already revealed their identities, (2) I asked in chat rooms used by Anonymous if users would do anonymous interviews via email.
4. See note 2.
5. LOL = ‘laughing out loud’.
6. Users criticized those who posted Lolcats on other days. A trend was born that spread across the Internet (see Wikipedia on Lolcats: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lolcat).
7. Even if Blumer was one of the pioneers studying the effects of media on society, especially of movies and broadcasting, he did not link these approaches to the theories of collective behavior.
8. Walt Whitman's journalistic and poetic work strongly influenced early American sociology. He was especially passionate about the connection of urban infrastructures and masses (see Stäheli Citation2012, 107).
9. For a discussion of the notion of irrationality that Tarde attributes to the crowd by contrasting it to the critical discussions that interaction in publics could take, see Borch (Citation2006, 87).
10. For the distinction of intermediaries and mediators, see Latour (Citation2005, 37–8).
11. This is controversial: Lisa Blackman for example argues that Latour ‘fails to recognize the hierarchical view of humanity that was being proselytized in his (Tarde's) elucidations of the concepts of invention and imitation’ (Citation2008, 40).
12. Thacker shows that even a view of networks that privileges the relations between things, rather than things-in-themselves (edges rather than nodes), ‘also cannot account for the dynamics within networks; dynamics that show us a more complicated view of the separation between nodes and edges’ (Thacker Citation2004a).
13. For example, Anonymous is said to have contributed to the breakdown of websites of the Egyptian government, ministers, and institutions through several distributed denial-of-service attacks in January 2011. A denial-of-service attack (DoS attack) or distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS attack) is an attempt to make a machine or network resource unavailable. It typically consists of the efforts of one or more people to interrupt, temporarily or indefinitely, an Internet service.
14. IRC stands for Internet Relay Chat, which is a text-based chat system. It allows conversations with any number of people in so-called channels. New channels can be opened at any time by any user, and one can also simultaneously participate in as many conversations and channels as one wants (see http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Relay_Chat).
15. If they have agreed to online services that locate the users automatically it is different: then there is traffic on the edges, even if the users do not communicate actively.
16. Operation Payback involved repeated DDoS attacks against financial services, such as Visa, in order to defend Wikileaks in December 2010.
17. There are various norm-based approaches since the 1980s that assume that mass emergency behavior is cognitive, i.e. based on reasonable beliefs rather than non-cognitive emotions or instincts; for an overview see Drury and Stott Citation2011.
19. There is a diversity of concepts of the common: For example, Giorgio Agamben formulates an understanding of the potential, of the common that is oppositional to the concept of the common within the theory of the multitude because it is not related to a creative force (Citation1993, 13). Also, Jean-Luc Nancy's remark that ‘community’ cannot be produced in the context of labor (2001, 2) shows the contrast with a post-operaist theory, which conceptualizes the common as that which has to be produced and is not essentially unifying.
20. See note 11.
21. They thus assume that the networked multitude is non-hierarchical, that it is distributed evenly, providing every node – or singularity – with access to a common, with a link, which in no way suppresses the uniqueness of the nodes it connects, as Linda Brigham (Citation2005) sums up.
22. If Hardt and Negri had applied other crowd theories, an ‘entirely different image would emerge in which the differences of crowds and multitudes were much less significant and clear-cut’ (Borch Citation2012, 291).
23. The reference to the historic emergence of biopolitical productivity (post-Fordism, etc.), on which the concept of the multitude is theoretically based, actually situates its potentiality and presents it not as outside Empire but as immanent to it.
24. As argued by, for example, Borch (Citation2012), Hardt and Negri lose one profound insight of Spinoza's multitude, which is its ambiguity.
25. Unlike, for example, Facebook, this type of board does not earn money from its users, as they do not register there.
26. For an overview of the discussion on the relation of anonymous infrastructures and the notions of accountability and trust, see for example Friedman and Thomas (Citation1999).
27. See for example Alexander Galloway's work on ‘protocol’, on ‘how control exists after decentralization’ (Citation2004) as an analysis of power structures in the age of informatization.
28. See the call for papers of ‘CODE: A Media, Games & Art Conference’, which took place 21–23 November 2012 at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia: http://code2012.wikidot.com/call-for-papers.