The author's name seemed vaguely familiar. He was involved in the 2011 email leaks from Stratfor and spent time in prison for it. Although the article notes that he "declared political asylum in the United Kingdom in 2021 and currently lives in London", it looks as though his request for asylum was denied earlier this year.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_Brown" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrett_Brown</a>
We r legion xDDDD.<p>I have always felt that "the power of anonymous" is precisely the power that we claim it has. (As someone who was involved in 4chan from 2009 until 2015)<p>"Anonymous" is just the default username for someone on 4chan.<p>Asking "What does anonymous thinks" is a roundabout way of asking "what do <random people> think?" - but with the latter, you have to face reality that people think this. If we use the former, we can group everything together as a big scary "alt-right 'anonymous group' (tm)" and not have to face the fact that real people have opinions.
> “Marie Sue” was a character, generally in fan fiction, that was clearly intended as an unrealistically perfect projection of the author;<p>I'm pretty confident it's specifically spelled "Mary Sue", and probably predates the Internet entirely, though I guess whether it predates the Internet or not doesn't really mean you wouldn't learn about it on the Internet.<p>> For reasons unclear to me, /b/ stood for “random.”<p>This is inherited from the Japanese imageboard that inspired 4chan, Futaba Channel. As I recall, the original /b/ was actually "Anime / Random", but /a/ was already taken for the general "Anime" board, thus it was christened /b/.<p>---<p>I do have some more things I was going to comment on but I'll show some restraint since it's not like anything is really inaccurate, even if the commentary is weird to me in some places. That said, I wasn't really able to ascertain the point of this story. Like, about that headline: What <i>does</i> "the decentralized nature" tell us about "Anonymous's" power? I didn't really get much of an impression from the article.<p>Despite that, it was still an interesting trip through some of the more fascinating things in Internet history, and I found it amusing in that regard.<p>Unrelated tangent: I have a tendency to think of the early 2000s as the "early Internet", as it's used in this article, but it feels a bit silly when you think about it. It's still <i>relatively</i> early, but it's nowhere near the beginning, especially if you consider <i>before</i> the web. But, I guess since many of us were not there for much of the part before that, it's easier to think of the late 90s and early 2000s as being "the beginning".
Anonymous is a bit like Slim Shady back in the day, "I am whatever they say I am" ... but now he announced his own death so I guess the "Shady Sim" is approaching its boring end game ...<p>aw man, I should have been a farmer, after all, with some cows, sheep, chickens, bunches of dogs and cats, dinkel wheat & corn fields, and a botanical garden for exotic stuff; and of course a wife or two and breeding as our main hobby.
Great article!<p>In September 2012, journalist and Anonymous associate Barrett Brown, known for speaking to media on behalf of the group, was arrested hours after posting a video that appeared to threaten FBI agents with physical violence. Brown was subsequently charged with 17 offenses, including publishing personal credit card information from the Stratfor hack.[
There was even a stage play about it - <a href="https://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/teh-internet-serious-business-royal-court-theatre" rel="nofollow">https://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/teh-internet-serious-bus...</a>
First paragraph: clause comma clause comma clause comma clause period. 8 commas to one period.<p>I mean I just can't read this. I'm far from a literary person, but this is awful.