We are anonymous inside the hacker world of lulzse

Kayla’s story had become more important than the truth itself.
This spoke to the constant struggle within Anonymous: weighing the ethos of anonymity and lies that came with it against the need for
trust and truth. Anons have spoken of how persistent lying detached them from reality and “warped” their ethics. It was hard for someone to
remember what he was ultimately trying to achieve when he was constantly lying to others. Even Sabu started to believe his own lies by
openly claiming to the police that he was a federal agent.
During Operation Payback, thousands of new volunteers had trusted AnonOps operators who claimed that using LOIC would not lead to
arrest. That was naive of the volunteers, but there was also manipulation at work, or at least a major split in motives. The operators in
#command had quietly latched onto the idea of avenging WikiLeaks, because it would lead to publicity for their new chat network. They
hungered for the kudos of having thousands of people visit their channels and follow their orders. Then the botmasters hit PayPal,
MasterCard, and Visa to show off their power. The thousands of volunteers were oblivious to this, believing they were part of a digital sit-in,
for a cause they cared about. Similarly, in 2008 Gregg Housh and his #marblecake team had thought they were spearheading the mother of
all pranks, but Chanology had turned into serious activism. In many ways, Anonymous could be like a scam—with people attracted to the
camaraderie, learning, and new experiences, but coming away disillusioned by the disorganization, big egos, and sobering reality of arrest.
But Anonymous was something else too: a gateway to political activism, a strange but compelling elixir to the apathy among young people in
today’s real-time society.
These were issues Anonymous would deal with over time. No single person would make a final decision about how it evolved; it would
be a collective effort. People from this current generation of Anonymous would leave, having had enough of the Sabu drama. But plenty of
newcomers would take their places and make changes. And a few, including hackers that were there during #InternetFeds or even
Chanology, would stick around. A few have indeed stuck around so far.
“They still haven’t caught Kayla,” said Emick on March 6, the day Sabu was outed. “It’s an 18-year-old boy in California.” She laughed,
then went back online. Emick was still carrying on with her investigations, trying to track down who Kayla really was. She was sure it was a
composite name that more than one person had used and that while Ryan Ackroyd was getting charged for some of her offenses, others
remained at large. If Anonymous could share a collective identity, why couldn’t Kayla?
As for Jake, the Internet ban gave him a chance to reflect on the Web itself, a new entity that has become an integral part of everyone’s life.
In February 2012 he put a USB flash drive in the mail, and on it was this short missive—his view of how the Internet looks at us:
Hello, friend, and welcome to the Internet, the guiding light and deadly laser in our hectic, modern world. The Internet
horde has been watching you closely for some time now. It has seen you flock to your Facebook and your Twitter over the
years, and it has seen you enter its home turf and attempt to overrun it with your scandals and “real world” gossip. You
need to know that the ownership of cyberspace will always remain with the hivemind. The Internet does not belong to your
beloved authorities, militaries, or multi-millionaire company owners. The Internet belongs to the trolls and the hackers, the
enthusiasts and the extremists; it will never cease to be this way.
You see, the Internet has long since lost its place in time and its shady collective continues to shun the fact that it lives
in a specific year like 2012, where it has to abide by 2012’s morals and 2012’s society, with its rules and its punishments.
The Internet smirks at scenes of mass rape and horrific slaughtering followed by a touch of cannibalism, all to the sound of
catchy Japanese music. It simply doesn’t give tuppence about getting a “job,” getting a car, getting a house, raising a
family, and teaching them to continue the loop while the human race organizes its own death. Custom-plated coffins and
retirement plans made of paperwork…the Internet asks why?
You cannot make the Internet feel bad, you cannot make the Internet feel regret or guilt or sympathy, you can only make
the Internet feel the need to have more lulz at your expense. The lulz flow through all in the faceless army as they see the
twin towers falling with a dancing Hitler on loop in the bottom-left corner of their screens. The lulz strike when they open a
newspaper and care nothing for any of the world’s alleged problems. They laugh at downward red arrows as banks and
businesses tumble, and they laugh at our glorious government overlords trying to fix a situation by throwing more currency
at it. They laugh when you try to make them feel the need to “make something of life,” and they laugh harder when you call
them vile trolls and heartless web terrorists. They laugh at you because you’re not capable of laughing at yourselves and
all of the pointless fodder they believe you surround yourselves in. But most of all they laugh because they can.
This is not to say that the Internet is your enemy. It is your greatest ally and closest friend; its shops mean you don’t have to set foot outside
your home, and its casinos allow you to lose your money at any hour of the day. Its many chat rooms ensure you no longer need to interact
with any other members of your species directly, and detailed social networking conveniently maps your every move and thought. Your
intimate relationships and darkest secrets belong to the horde, and they will never be forgotten. Your existence will forever be encoded into
the infinite repertoire of beautiful, byte-sized sequences, safely housed in the cyber cloud for all to observe.
And how has the Internet changed the lives of its most hardened addicts? They simply don’t care enough to tell you. So
welcome to the underbelly of society, the anarchistic stream-of-thought nebula that seeps its way into the mainstream
world—your world—more and more every day. You cannot escape it and you cannot anticipate it. It is the nightmare on
the edge of your dreams and the ominous thought that claws its way through your online life like a blinding virtual force,
disregarding your philosophies and feasting on your emotions.
Prepare to enter the hivemind, motherfuck.
Since 2008, Anonymous had destroyed servers, stolen e-mails, and taken websites offline. But in the collective act of social engineering, its
greatest feat was in getting people to believe in the power of its “hivemind.” This was what attracted the supporters, what got them arrested,
and what inspired others to avenge their arrests. Anonymous was how a new generation of computer-savvy individuals could show the world
that they had a voice, and that they mattered.
What they do next has yet to be written. These small groups of young people from around the world, often male, often poor and
unemployed, who mostly just talk together in Internet chat rooms, have finally managed to grab hold of the public consciousness. They are