A face in the crowd
December 17th 2010 07:10
“The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”
-- Arabic proverb
I once told a friend on the eve of his 30th birthday that old isn’t an age, it’s an attitude. If there was any truth to that, Sky News officially qualifies as “old media,” despite the fact that it now mostly exists on the internet and on cable TV channels that invite you to interact in inconvenient ways by pressing obscure buttons on the remote control. I’m talking, of course, about their reports on the cyber-attacks against PayPal and MasterCard in retaliation for the arrest of Julian Assange.
It may surprise them to learn that this is the year 2010, and that the emerging internet culture they were so excited about when it was Facebook has a dark side with its own values, goals, and language. As such, you do not write stories on Anonymous unless you have at least one person on staff who knows what they are. You do not blindly repeat the words of a hacker who says that his particular branch of Anonymous has more than 9,000 members before you look up which meme that refers to. You do not give them screen time as the champions of anti-censorship before you understand that they believe their enemies have no right to privacy, and recalling that they are the ones who once hacked into Sarah Palin’s e-mail, and lately posted the addresses of the women who accused Assange of rape all over Encyclopedia Dramatica.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and even a movement of reflexively left-wing, socially retrogressive hooligans will accidentally do something positive and progressive once in a while. The Wikileaks saga, despite the big issues at stake, is not that one time. The problem with institutions is that their rules and goals can take precedence over what is actually beneficial. Anonymous has become as much an institution as anyone it is now attacking, and deserves to be viewed with the same wariness is asks us to hold for its enemies.
-- Arabic proverb
I once told a friend on the eve of his 30th birthday that old isn’t an age, it’s an attitude. If there was any truth to that, Sky News officially qualifies as “old media,” despite the fact that it now mostly exists on the internet and on cable TV channels that invite you to interact in inconvenient ways by pressing obscure buttons on the remote control. I’m talking, of course, about their reports on the cyber-attacks against PayPal and MasterCard in retaliation for the arrest of Julian Assange.
It may surprise them to learn that this is the year 2010, and that the emerging internet culture they were so excited about when it was Facebook has a dark side with its own values, goals, and language. As such, you do not write stories on Anonymous unless you have at least one person on staff who knows what they are. You do not blindly repeat the words of a hacker who says that his particular branch of Anonymous has more than 9,000 members before you look up which meme that refers to. You do not give them screen time as the champions of anti-censorship before you understand that they believe their enemies have no right to privacy, and recalling that they are the ones who once hacked into Sarah Palin’s e-mail, and lately posted the addresses of the women who accused Assange of rape all over Encyclopedia Dramatica.
Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and even a movement of reflexively left-wing, socially retrogressive hooligans will accidentally do something positive and progressive once in a while. The Wikileaks saga, despite the big issues at stake, is not that one time. The problem with institutions is that their rules and goals can take precedence over what is actually beneficial. Anonymous has become as much an institution as anyone it is now attacking, and deserves to be viewed with the same wariness is asks us to hold for its enemies.
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