The Rules

Internet Hate Machine

In the aftermath of a rather laughable Fox 11 News piece exposing a secretive hacker gang calling themselves “anonymous” last week, a few things have been grating on me a bit. The report itself was horribly flawed, but I’ll focus for the moment on public reaction to it.

A couple of points:

  1. The Internet is not Fight Club. You are neither Brad Pitt, Edward Norton, nor V.
  2. The Internet is not Fight Club. There are no rules 1 or 2. Rule 34 was a stupid, though funny, joke, and the rest of that stuff is backfill.
  3. Nobody speaks for anonymous. Going on Youtube with a silly voice filter to spit out some manifesto is ridiculous.
  4. Most of what I’ve actually seen anonymous do could only be described as “hacking” by the most ignorant of mass media talking heads. Shutting down a poorly-administered web forum with Gigaloader is not hacking. Neither is setting up a wget script through a TOR node. Ordering somebody a pizza online isn’t hacking. It’s pestering.
  5. Anonymous is not invincible. Look at what happened when anonymous went up against a bunch of white nationalists in December and January. Those bigoted fools are still operating just fine. The blowback attacks didn’t cause any real problems either, but that’s the nature of an Internet Fight. Nobody’s going to become An Hero over such shenanigans.
  6. You aren’t really anonymous. It may be difficult to track you down, but TCP leaves a trail. The rest of the world tolerates things like 4chan, 420chan, and such because they are essentially harmless. By this I mean that they are incapable of causing harm at a scale that is worth bothering with. Note that a couple of idiot FBI guys managed to nab that “NFL plot” guy, and that was the result of federal agents that were so incompetent as to think the threat was credible.

All of that being said, the drama that erupted over this report has been hilarious. The “victims” of anonymous in this may be some of the stupidest people I’ve been exposed to lately, and that’s saying a lot. If you want the Internet Bullies to stop, don’t show that it has affected you. Just curl up in a ball and wait for the bad men to stop kicking you. Going on television and making a fuss just makes you entertaining again.