Quinn Norton / Anonymous and other stochastic revolutionary network collectives.

Contemplating Anonymous is a little like navigating the Garden of Live Flowers from Through the Looking Glass. To get to the top of the hill you have to have the faith to walk the other way, while a bunch of weird people are shouting often insulting things at you. 

Over the last year I've watched Anon and other strange new stochastic collectives, growing out of the internet and invariably revolutionary and disruptive in nature. These include Occupy, Telecomix, hackerspaces, and more. They reverse our assumptions on how people act together: they publish, then select. They act with agency at once, and respect comes later. The larger collectives are stable despite being in a constant state of civil war-- indeed, the constant internal conflict seems to make them harder to fight.

Dark and wild places in society have always been the wombs of revolutions, aesthetic, moral, intellectual, and even violent. But in this tamed world, we have few wilds left-- the net is out womb now, the home of discontent. We know people join these networks as a response to disenfranchisement, but perhaps it goes deeper, and this way of being in the world represents a response to isolation and meaninglessness.

In this talk, I will answer a couple questions, and ask far more. With any luck, you'll know so much less when I'm done you'll be amazed there was this much to be ignorant of."