We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

ut 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
because we can communicate with each other.”
“It’s so arrogant,” said William.
“Bees found out that the earth was round before us,” said Jake. “So bees are more clever than us.”
“They don’t kick up a fuss,” William added.
Did people take Anonymous too seriously?
“Anonymous takes Anonymous too seriously,” William said quickly. “When I started getting more involved it was 50 percent fun and 50
percent passing the time and that’s it. Now there are all these political messages and I just don’t care about it. It bothers me it’s a bunch of rich
kids whining about being oppressed. There are much worse things going on in the world than copyright law [one of the big causes cited by
the recent Anonymous attacks]. But I don’t think we should kick up a fuss anyway.”
“I struggle with that,” Jake admitted. “Sometimes I care so much about something, but the next minute I don’t. When I try and explain that
to people in the real world they attribute that to schizophrenia.”
“Sometimes something will happen and then you suddenly care about it,” said William. “It matters for thirty seconds.” Though this
sounded unusual at first, it was not all that different from the twenty-four-hour news cycle or the hype that surrounded popular new stories;
they faded just as quickly from the public’s short-term memory.
“That’s what it was like writing press releases for LulzSec,” said Jake. “‘I care, I care, I care.’ Then it causes a shitstorm in the news, and
then I think, ‘Whatever.’ I feel bad that people are getting arrested and inspired and I don’t care afterwards. Like the Antisec movement.”
“Opinions on stuff like that are so fluid,” said William, “maybe because we’re young and impressionable. Maybe we’re just honest when
we change our mind.”
“We care suddenly about something because we’re more enriched by the sense of victory,” said Jake, referring to the large-scale attacks by
Anonymous and the big LulzSec hits. “Then it goes and you don’t care anymore.”
Did either of them ever feel like he had been manipulated by Anonymous?
“Not at all,” said William.
Jake looked down for a moment, then answered. “Not manipulated, but influenced,” he said. “When you’re in a mob mentality with lots of
others. You have a ‘mob extreme’ version of yourself too, this one, unified mind-set where you don’t care that anything exists and you want
to wreck something.” William was nodding now.
“I’ve said no but the mob thing rings true,” he said. The issue of mental health meant a lot to him personally, but sometimes he’d see a
thread on /b/ where the original poster has said, “I’m really depressed and want to kill myself.” If the thread’s participants leaned toward
telling him to commit suicide, William would join in, posting a picture of a can of cyanide and reminding the OP to do it properly. “Which is
something I don’t even believe. I don’t want people to die, but”—he shrugged—“it’s something to write and something to do.”
Of course, both William and Jake had done their fair share of manipulating too. William was dismissive of the younger “goombie” users
and newfags on 4chan who cared about the V for Vendetta revolutionary symbols of Anonymous, and sometimes he would rile them up for
fun.
“They want to think the world is against them so there’s something to justify their angst,” he said. That’s why it was almost easy to get
people to join the revolution in Anonymous. “You can just make stuff up [about government or corporate corruption] and they buy it.” To
write a rousing post on /b/, for instance, you just needed to write in a way that would appeal to the Anon crowd, using linguistic devices like
alliteration, repetition, sound bytes, and dramatic words like injustice, oppression, a n d downtrodden to describe corporations and
governments, and justice, freedom, and uprising when referring to Anonymous.
“You could inspire some fifteen-year-old, or someone with a fifteen-year-old’s mind-set, to hate whoever you want them to hate,” said
William matter-of-factly. In having no clear goal, Anonymous was like any other modern-day movement that had become fragmented by the
user-generated, crowd-sourced nature of a web-enabled society. Movements like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street had the same issue;
they were often vague in their goals, but their supporters fought passionately against rival ideologies. Anonymous was a new movement, and
a new process for fighting perceived oppressors. And it could be manipulated.
“It’s easy to come up with examples of ways that we’re oppressed, and some idiot, some gobby student who has a political awakening at
fourteen or fifteen who thinks they’re clever will buy it!” William was almost shouting now. He stopped in a moment of self-reflection, as if
taken aback by the strength of his own opinion, then laughed a little. “I’m only five years older than these guys and I feel like I’m their dad.”
But Jake was nodding again. If you knew how to communicate with the Anons, sometimes you could direct them. “It’s just so easy,” he
said.
As Jake and William walked back to the train station through a biting wind, they swapped stories about elaborate trolling, barely noticing
how their earlier tensions had disappeared. Jake ran through one of his favorite incidents as William listened: Years before, he and a friend
had convinced an online enemy to perform a sexual act in front of his webcam in the middle of the night. They had filmed it, then told the
boy they would show the video to the local police and his school if he didn’t wake up his mother so they could show it to her. At four in the
morning, he did, and he cried most of the way as his mother watched, horrified. Jake and his friend had laughed.
“We decided to let him off by just showing his mum,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the strong wind.
William looked shocked. “That’s what you call letting someone off?” he asked, incredulous.
“Yeah,” said Jake, shrugging. William blew air through his lips, as if impressed.
William’s train pulled up and it was time to go. There followed an unceremonious good-bye, the weighty discussion and baring of souls
quickly forgotten in the final, awkward handshakes. Jake and William each nodded quickly to the other and then glanced in the opposite
direction. William got on the train without turning around. Jake went back to wait for his own train.
They had found Anonymous in the same place and adopted similar perspectives on life, but they were on divergent paths. Even after
meeting Jake and seeing the consequences of getting arrested for hacking, William still wanted to learn to do more than just trick someone
into giving him her Facebook password. He wanted to know how to break into a computer network. For weeks afterward, he continued
downloading free e-books and reading sections about programming on Encyclopedia Dramatica. Gradually he started testing popular hacking
techniques like the Cain and Abel password cracker, SQL maps, Googledorks, and Backtrack5. Then on March 10, 2012, William reached a