Archive for August, 2011

What are we to make of Anonymous, the collective of technologically savvy individuals whose accelerating campaign of hacktivism has targeted everything from Scientologists to defense contractors?

One of the most common labels for this phenomenon is that of “anarchy” and in a recent article, NYU’s Biella Coleman deftly analyzes the relationship between Anonymous and anarchy along three axes: black bloc protest tactics, the everyday usage of “anarchy” to mean the absence of rules, and what she calls contemporary political anarchism (drawing heavily on David Graeber’s work). For each axis, she finds the fit for Anonymous to be imperfect.

I would like to follow her by putting Anonymous under the lens of another scholar of anarchy: Yale’s James C. Scott. Specifically, Scott’s most recent book, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia, gives insight into the activities of Anonymous.

Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Most people consider the trajectory of history to be from hunter gathering, through rudimentary agriculture, ending at sedentary, sophisticated civilizations. Scott provides a radical reinterpretation of this linear approach where nomads and tribal populations are not premodern remnants, but instead are groups that have consciously chosen to remain outside the control of the state. Because the state is a relatively new phenomenon, existence outside the state is, in fact, the predominant historical form of society, even though today it is relatively rare. As the scope of the state expanded, certain populations sought “anarchy”, meaning the absence of state-rule; these groups are considere uncivilized barbarians, but, in reality, they are only called that because they exist outside the confines of those who write history: the state.

In order to exist, a state must have a population from which it can extract forced labor, conscripts and taxes. His analysis focuses on the hill people of South East Asia who have resisted the practices that make state appropriation possible (such as sedentary agriculture, hierarchical organization, and fixed identities). Scott finds that,

“Virtually everything about [the hill] people’s livelihoods, social organization, ideologies, and (more controversially) even their largely oral cultures, can be read as strategic positionings designed to keep the state at arm’s length. Their physical dispersion in rugged terrain, their mobility, their cropping practices, their kinship structure, their pliable ethnic identities, and their devotion to prophetic, millenarian leaders effectively serve to avoid incorporation into states and to prevent states from springing up among them.”

He provides a convincing theory of anarchy in which the expansion of state power drives some people to adapt their lives to avoid its reach.¹ Historically this has been the case in diverse episodes, such as the Berbers, runaway slaves, and much of the Balkans, but today, Scott believes his “analysis largely ceases to be useful.” This is because “the power of the state to deploy distance-demolishing technologies – railroads, all-weather roads, telephone, telegraph, airpower, helicopters, and now information technology – so changed the strategic balance of power between self-governing peoples and nation-states” that living outside the power of the state is now exceedingly difficult. Because of this, “the future of our freedom lies in the daunting task of taming Leviathan, not evading it.”

It is into this tension – between taming and evading state power – which Anonymous falls and where Scott’s analysis does prove useful.

Anonymous’s Imperfect Anarchy

In his previous book, Seeing Like a State, Scott explains how in order for states to exert their will upon their territory and populace, they must first render them ‘legible’ through rearranging and labeling them in uniform ways. One historical manifestation of  this was through fixing identities, including mandatory secondary names so that people were tied to their father. In the case of Anonymous, their distaste for this means of state appropriation is self-evident. Other tactics – from encryption to one-time use websites for releasing information – can be understood as strategies through which Anonymous has attempted to render themselves and their activities illegible to the state.

Another significant tactic that helps Anonymous exist outside the confines of the state are the relatively egalitarian social structure that they – and other hacker organizations – have. Scott notes that “a highly egalitarian social structure” makes it hard for the state to appropriate groups. This can be accomplished through “open and equal access” to resources such as through “common-property”. It is no coincidence that hackers, and others who believe that “Governments of the Industrial World… have no sovereignty” in cyberspace – have these values at their core.²

So, like the nomadic tribes whose identity evolved to fit their political goals of autonomy in South East Asia, Anonymous has adopted organizational and technological approaches that enhance autonomy. In this way, they can be understood as anarchic in ways that are broadly analogous to the tribes Scott studies. In contrast to the everyday usage of anarchy to mean the absence of rules (which Coleman finds to be misleading), Anonymous is anarchy in that it is designed to exist outside the power of the state.

But, the fit here is imperfect, as well. As Scott warns, the current power of the state is enormous, and the alleged Anonymous members who have been arrested around the globe are learning this painfully. Even as the Anonymous members pursue their autonomy at their computers, we do not have evidence that they rejected fundamental state appropriations such as taxes.

The Paradox of Anonymous’s Imperfect Anarchy

Beyond this imperfect model of anarchy, Anonymous embodies a paradox due to a tension between their ends and means. Although their activity can be roughly understood as analogous to people who have sought to avoid state control throughout history, their ends seem to necessitate the state.

To what end does Anonymous strive? They “can be difficult to ideologically pin down” but one consistent goal seems to be the defense of free speech (“as one Anon had put it, ‘free speech is non-negotiable’”). As Coleman notes, though, this is less of an emphasis in Anarchism than it is in classical liberalism.

One of the reasons Anarchism does not emphasize free speech is because it is a negative liberty, meaning it arises in the absence of constraints. Negative liberties, such as freedom of speech, are “most commonly assumed in liberal defences of the constitutional liberties typical of liberal-democratic societies”  - that is, those operating under the power of the state. A long history of 1^st Amendment jurisprudence in the United States is evidence that the state is needed to protect free speech (albeit, sometimes against itself).

To take a recent example, Anonymous has launched a campaign against San Francisco’s BART for shutting down cell phone coverage, but in order to enable free speech in this scenario, they would realistically need the state to intervene. It is possible that their illegible activities could bring attention to an unknown problem, thus spurring a state response, but thus far that has not been the case. If anything, the tactics of Anonymous have spurred authorities to render the members legible through intense investigations and, ultimately, arrest.³

Anonymous, then, shows that in the modern world, it is difficult (if not impossible) to achieve ends which require the state’s support through means which exist outside the power of the state to understand and act. Taming Leviathan requires confronting, not evading, it.⁴

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1. Scott understands ungoverned populations as “an effect of state-making and state expansion,” not unincorporated residue. In Anonymous, as well as the writings of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, it is clear that their ‘anarchic’ activities are motivated by what they deem to be illegitimate state expansion. On a similar note, it would also be useful to consider how the expansion of the market (as enforced by the state) drives individuals to oppose it. On this avenue, the case of Sealand seems particularly promising. [↩]
2. After all, Yochai Benkler, one of the sharpest theorists of this general area, does follow the tradition of the Pyotr Kropotkin, a philosopher of Anarchism. [↩]
3. Of course, this is not to suggest that anonymity cannot support negative liberties. The case of Watergate and Deepthroat is an obvious example of it doing so, but it took the work of very mainstream, non-anarchic entities (namely the Washington Post) to engender change. [↩]
4. In defending DDoS as a form of political disobedience, Morozov notes that under a Rawlsian reading, activism by Anonymous is only legitimate if they are willing to accept the consequences meted out by the state. Anonymous’s approach seems to suggest otherwise. [↩]