Houston Southard

Parmy Olsen - WE Are Anonymous

Before contemporary ransom-ware and classic cyber-warfare, back before blue and red troglodyte extremists kidnapped the philosophy of Guy Fawkes, there was Anonymous.

Anonymous enters the zeitgeist after a 2010 brute force political attack against PayPal because they fucked up by severing donations to Wikileaks. Since then the media has inappropriately labeled these few hacktivists a shadowy horde. "They" begin to make headlines DDoSing [crashing servers at] PayPal, Sony, Fox and the CIA. These headlines fear-monger the public into believing these are coordinated efforts.

This mainstream-fabricated smokescreen of Anonymous grew up in an online culture of bullying cyber bullies. The characters who would offshoot into the criminal crew aka LulzsSec meet on the deep web's 4chan /b/ thread to enact social change via political trolling. Before the internet was very organized 4chan was the breeding ground for all things lewd and the birthing ground of memes.

Unfortunately, 4chan was also how Steve Bannon would years later drum up early trumplican support amongst hateful white male youths, a trick he'd learned as vice chairmen of IGE overseeing World of Warcraft gold farming in Hong Kong. Large dormant cells waiting to be radicalized are apparently easy to come by.

This book reads like mid twentieth century spy fiction. It's all there: disenfranchised populations, international destabilization, FBI informants. At the heart of it is an author neither condemning nor advocating for the actions of LulzSec. Parmy Olsen interviews the eventually-charged players. She waxes poetic on why groups like these arise, what subsequent groups they ultimately beget, and how current polarization makes the cycle a fertile breeding ground for future iGen hacktivism.