We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

morning of their meeting, William’s train snaked through the countryside, past green and beige fields, dawdling sheep, and brown rivers that
shimmered in the harsh winter sun. He couldn’t help but feel nervous. Jake felt the same. His train was headed south, the electronic tag
snugly reminding him to be home by 10:00 p.m. When Jake’s train arrived at the station, he stepped out, walked over to a wall in the main
concourse, and waited.
Fifteen minutes later William’s train squealed to a stop along the opposite platform. He walked into the station’s entrance, wading through
a large crowd of commuters, then saw Jake standing by a wall in a small stream of sunlight. Jake wore a black coat, had a five o’clock
shadow, and was small. He looked up and smiled. William was expressionless. The two said their hellos and shook hands before quickly
looking away.
Anons almost never met in person since, naturally, it defeated the point of anonymity. So William and Jake’s meeting was awkward at
first. What made it harder was the fact that William was going through a particularly dark phase in his mind, and in recent days he had been
constantly fighting thoughts of suicide. Jake, who wanted to speak to people outside his immediate family, especially those he had something
in common with, was eager to talk.
As the pair sat in a local pizza restaurant for lunch, Jake chatted amiably about his court case and some recent news he had seen about
Anonymous on television. William was quiet and sullen. When Jake told a funny story from his LulzSec days, hoping it might generate a
laugh, William greeted it with stony silence. The meeting was not going well.
Finally, when talk turned to 4chan, William opened up a little. He talked about his frustration with the site he visited so much, and how it
had become a community filled with “newfag cancer,” eager young participants who did not understand the culture or how to cause real
mischief.
Jake, like William, was not a skilled hacker, but he knew a little about programming languages. When William mentioned that he was
interested in developing those skills, Jake pulled out his netbook. The small laptop had been stripped of its wireless card and Ethernet, so that
there was no way it could connect to the Internet. But Jake could still play around with Zalgo script, a type of programmable font that packed
lots of digital bytes into each letter. If you were looking for fun, you could use it to send someone a message over Skype; it might crash his or
her program.
Jake started typing. “If you put that into Skype it’ll reverse your text,” he said.
William looked visibly impressed. “Your memory is amazing,” he said, shaking his head and leaning forward in his seat.
Jake kept going. “Just load up the character map in Windows, dump that anywhere, and it messes it up,” he said, now typing furiously.
“So I could do this on Windows?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of complex.”
“So eight bytes is equal to…one bit,” William said, hesitating.
“Eight bits is equal to one byte.” William was getting a short lesson in programming basics.
“Yeah, yeah,” William said, laughing a little, now more relaxed. “I don’t know any of this.”
“I’m kind of enthusiastic about Unicode,” Jake said, shrugging. Once the netbook had been closed and put away, the two started talking
about Anonymous and how it had changed them.
“It’s made me a more extreme version of myself,” William said. “I used to sleep badly. Now I sleep terribly. I used to be sarcastic; now I
can be an asshole.” He didn’t just “like” tormenting people; he loved it. He didn’t just “like” porn; he looked at it every day. “None of it
bothers me,” he added. “I don’t care about anything.” William had said in the past that he had no moral code; everything was case by case,
his decisions based on a gut reaction. Ernest Hemingway had said it best: “What is moral is what you feel good after, and what is immoral is
what you feel bad after.”
Jake was nodding. “I have to agree with all of that,” he said. “It desensitized me. You can have Japanese dubstep playing to the Twin
Towers falling. It might seem horrific, then it seems like a natural thing you see every day.” That was the culture that so many outside of
Anonymous could not understand. Acting out with crowds of people on the Internet had created a detachment from reality and a sense of
obliviousness to certain consequences. Anonymous did bad things, but its members were not bad people, per se.
As if to illustrate the point, a woman sitting nearby suddenly turned to Jake and William and asked if they knew how to access the
restaurant’s WiFi on a phone. The two looked at each other blankly then quickly explained that neither had a mobile that could go online.
Genuinely apologetic, they tried to help the woman with some advice.
“Maybe you could ask the staff downstairs?” suggested William. “Sorry.”
The woman smiled and turned back to her panini. She would never have guessed this pair of polite young men had been two notorious
members of Anonymous. There was a common misconception about the lack of morals on /b/ and in Anonymous. “It doesn’t mean you do
bad things,” said William. “It just means there’s no rules. We don’t revert to being bastards at every opportunity.”
“It’s also nice to just be nice,” Jake added.
Many of /b/’s most hard-core users, like William, didn’t care about jobs, family, or life’s typical milestone events. Both Jake and William
relished the idea of living a life that had no impact on real people. If William could scrape enough money together from blogging—he had a
clever web script that allowed him to exploit Google Ads without his having to do too much writing—he would fly to mainland Europe later
that month and sleep rough in a major capital. He was tired of being a burden to his father and brother, tired of playing his guitar and
knowing they could hear him.
“To have as little impact on anywhere as possible is a really appealing thought, which is like never being born,” said Jake. No legitimate
home, no name on a piece of government paper, no fingerprints. To be nameless, with no identity, not bogged down by any system but to
“lightly live everywhere” was something they both craved in real life.
Did that craving come from what they’d experienced with Anonymous: vandalizing things often with little consequence?
“It’s Anon and Internet culture,” said Jake. “Online you see everything. Gore, disgusting things, and you realize you don’t care. Let’s stop
fussing over little things. There’s always something bigger or smaller or worse or better. Most of what we do is what people have done
before.”
Nothing that occurred on /b/ was meant to be taken seriously, William added. They were just things that happened. “Nothing matters.”
“Exactly,” said Jake. “That’s the main thing about life. People think we are superior to animals. And they’re looking for this missing link,
but what if we are the link to animals and real human beings haven’t evolved yet? It’s pretentious to think we’re superior in the universe