# Anonymous

## Introduction

[Anonymous]()

"Digitality and Subjectivity": the subject of this panel is seductive; it seduces to fall into post-modernist traps. Since the 1990s, there has been an elaborate love affair of cultural and media theory with the Internet in which the technology has been mapped onto postmodern notions of subjectivity and vice versa: "fractal" identity and decentered subjectivity, "collective intelligence" (Pierre Levy) or "swarm intelligence", the "multitudes" (Negri/Hardt), "wisdom of the crowds", open source collective authorship etc. Since there continues to be a romanticist legacy in contemporary art and art schools, where the concept of the artist as individual genius is far from extinct, this concept - and the whole complex of Internet culture, net art and media theory - continues to be provocative in the contemporary art context. 

At the same time, these Internet-postmodernist notions of subjectivity constitute a form of romanticism themselves - namely a new version of the 19th century romanticism for folk culture as its own collective intelligence (from which one can draw a straight historical line to the philology of Mikhail Bakhtin and, from Bakhtin, to French poststructuralism and finally the media theory of Pierre Levy and others). 

In reality, Internet identities and identity aesthetics do not exhaust themselves in either individualist or collectivist romanticism, back exist in a precarious relation between collective anonymity and personal identification and tracking. With Edward Snowden's disclosures, awareness of this rift has substantially increased.

The example I would like to present is the Anonymous movement and its link to imageboard meme culture. I assume that Anonymous is widely known, but imageboard meme culture less so, especially outside the USA and in a contemporary art context. Please indicate if I'm too quickly brushing over details or, conversely, just repeat well-known facts.

## What are imageboard memes?

Visual memes might rank among the most popular visual cultural phenomena today (and it often surprises me that many artists and visual designer seem to be entirely unfamiliar with them). Examples:

[lolcats]
[pedo bear]
[Rick Rolling]
[doge] 2013
[Are you frustrated] 2013

In popular culture, "Meme" has become synonymous with a user-made emblem (text + image combination) that is anonymously made from popular cultural imagery, virally spreads in countless visual and text variations. Name derived from Dawkins, Selfish gene: meme as contagious unit of information. Compare to Burroughs, word virus, Electronic Revolution; Korzybski and Occult: Crowley. In the Internet: Japanese popular visual culture, manga and anime. Imageboards: simple anonymous discussion boards for uploading manga images. Translated into English, 4chan. Unlike other Internet social media, no registration required. Everyone is "Anonymouos". Most infamous: random board /b/: Pornographic grotesque. Visual and textual code language of insiders. Complex iconography of inside jokes and pop-cultural + imageboard-specific references.

"Anonymous" originated on this board: It's simply everyone who contributes anonymously to 4chan. Turned into a movement in 2008 when Scientology threatened YouTube and other Internet media to take down a leaked video of Tom Cruise endorsing the Church of Scientology. (Remarkable connection to Burroughs, who was a member of Scientology for some time, and based parts of his word virus theory on Scientology and proto-Scientology para science, such as the General Semantics of Alfred Korzybski which criticized words for taking up a life of their own.) At this point, Anonymous become an identity that, still on 4chan.org, chose the Guy Fawkes mask (explanation? V. for Vendetta comic and film, 16th/17th century catholic revolutionary) as its identity and began street actions against the Church of Scientology world wide. (Seen it myself in Rotterdam and Los Angeles.) 

If there is an equivalent of former youth/pop cultural lifestyle movements such as hippies in the 1960s and punks since the 1970s for the 2000s, it's Anonymous and imageboard culture. Which means that no longer music and fashion define pop culture, but visual culture and networking. Precarity of identification and standing out: While hippies and punks, despite their sharp differences, both sought to mark individualist difference in public, Anonymous already describes the precarity of difference in the 2000s: The desire is not to expose one's identity but wear a mask, standing out by being anonymous; while hippies and punks could be conversely seen as protests against anonymity and social masks (while being trapped in a similar contradiction of following a format; in the case of punk, a fashion designed by Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren with a visual identity designed by Jamie Reid - in the case of Anonymous, the design even comes from Warner Brothers, which earns royalties from every Guy Fawkes mask sold). 

The collectively shared un-identity is, by itself, no product of the Internet age but has precursors in political activism and in art. In the early 19th century, Captain Ludd became the icon of the Luddite movement which sharply contrasts with Anonymous in its rejection of industrial technology, but otherwise had a thoroughly comparable iconography and swarm logic around its mythical folk hero Captain Ludd. In the 1920s, Marcel Duchamp and the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos jointly created the drag identity Rrose Sélavy, and both produced work under its name. In the 1970s, the former art school professor and Mail Artist David Zack invited several people to jointly use the name Monty Cantsin and perform as an "Open Pop Star". This was taken up in the subcultural movement of Neoism (in which I have been involved). Zack later wrote: "The idea that people can share their art power is a very good one I think. My own understanding is that it is about sharing, about bash: cooperation between people, putting egos and tempers aside. Though not always seeming so." (He alluded to the factual ego conflicts among Neoists.) 

Zack had been a core participant of 1970s Mail Art and earliest contributor's to the magazine FILE by the Canadian artist collective General Idea. [pic] FILE anticipated aspects of the Anonymous movement in that it was based on an open exchange network (one could read FILE as a precursor of imageboards) with pseudonymous actors using masquerade in public, and recycling popular cultural and mass media visual culture: FILE itself was a linguistic and visual pun on LIFE magazine. In the 1990s, the Luther Blissett project was founded as another shared identity movement in Italy. Its icon, again a straightforward precursor of anonymous, was a visually morphed portrait of the media phantom Luther Blissett. The name was based on a British football player of Caribbean origins who had played one unsuccessful season in Italy. The founders of the Luther Blissett project were fully aware of the Mail Art and Neoist pretexts, and even referenced them in their manifestos, but the Luther Blissett was not an art but a political activist project. Like Anonymous, it primarily targeted mass media, and like anonymous, it was inclusive for participation and therefore emphasized pop cultural references and visual language. Taking cues from the 1970s Italian left around Radio Alice and Franco Bifo Berardi, the Luther Blissett project promoted itself as "con-dividuality" in which the collective Blissett phantom was a "multiple single". 

If one looks at Rrose Selavy, General Idea, Monty Cantsin, Luther Blissett and Anonymous in a historical sequence, then it is striking that the collective identities progressively detached themselves from contemporary art. In the case of imageboard memes and Anonymous, I would even argue that for the first time, a movement rooted entirely in popular visual culture manifests an activist and aesthetic avant-garde (while the contemporary art world thinks of artists like Liam Gillick as critical).

This history conversely puts Anonymous into perspective: namely not simply as an Internet phenomenon, but as a swarm phenomenon that had immediate non-digital precursors. On the one hand, this helps to debunk simplistic assumptions of digital networks as producers of distributed authorship and "fractal" identity. One the other, it is also likely that without the Internet and electronic networking, such a movement would never have become the global mass phenomenon that Anonymous is today.

Crisis of Anonymous
FAZ
post-digital article
illustrations


Konzepte von kollektiver Identität und kollektiver Autorschaft vor und nach dem Internet

Spekulativer Ausblick: post-digitale Transformation von Anonymous in den klassischen öffentlichen Raum, Verschwinden von Anonymous im Netz als Folge des Post-Snowden-Zeitalters