[D66] The Philosophy of Anonymous

[Antid Oto]

The Philosophy of Anonymous

Ontological Politics without Identity
RP 176 (Nov/Dec 2012)
Harry Halpin

You cannot arrest an idea.
The last tweet of Topiary, before his arrest

Ranging from WikiLeaks to the global struggle against treaties such as 
ACTA, over the last few years the Web has become a centre of political 
struggle in and of itself rather than a mere adjunct of other struggles. 
At the same time, a new social force has emerged from the Internet: 
Anonymous. It is unclear at this moment even what Anonymous is, much 
less where is it going. Is Anonymous the vanguard defending the 
Internet, the Internet not only in-itself but for-itself, whose 
denial-of-service attacks are ‘Internet street protests’, as Richard 
Stallman put it?1 Is Anonymous the incarnation of the long-awaited 
altruistic invisible army of hackers needed by various social movements, 
as promised by science-fiction writers for the last decade? Or is 
Anonymous a phenomenon more similar to a mass panic, a sort of 
collective behaviour that falls outside of organized politics, an 
‘Internet Hate Machine’ that embodies the libidinal subconscious of the 
lost children of the Web? All of these theories are attempts to grasp 
something that is both radically new and the return of a certain 
long-repressed collective force whose existence pre-dates the 
Enlightenment ideology of the individual. Anonymous, it will be argued 
here, is an ontological shift on the terrain of identity at the very 
moment that identity has become the highest form of selection and 
exploitation in cognitive capitalism, the first glimpse of a form of 
life without identity on the Internet. Heidegger was wrong: the coming 
of the gods after cybernetics is possible: they do not forgive and they 
do not forget.

http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/wp-content/themes/radical-philosophy-v2_1/download.php?file=../../files_mf/rp176_article2_halpin_philosophy_of_anonyous.pdf