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Disclaimer: I just finished Accelerando a few days ago (late to the party). I'm hopped up on futurist vision. First, let's stipulate that 4chan's Anonymous rai

Disclaimer: I just finished Accelerando a few days ago (late to the party). I'm hopped up on futurist vision. First, let's stipulate that 4chan's Anonymous raids are mostly juvenile and often ineffective at doing anything meaningful to their targets. At the same time: The ability of a community to completely self-organize, without central direction, and instantly execute a publicly-visible plan like this is without precedent in human history. It stands to reason that as time goes on, larger groups of people will become involved in communities that exhibit 4chan-like cohesion. A larger pool means a higher likelihood of these groups including people with the knowledge and ability to do ever-increasing damage. The long-term implications are interesting. Into the future, are we talking about the instant formation and dissolution of "terrorist" or "dissident" groups, bound together by transient common interest and gone again within days or hours? If you're a government or corporation, this is terrifying. You can keep tabs on other governments, and even traditional terrorist cells, which each move at the speed of the usual group dynamics, proportional to their size. But what the hell do you do about groups you can't predict that are gone before you even figure out what's wrong? Groups that aren't bound together by national identity or other easily quantified affiliations – just ideas, ideals and transient events? There's something meaningful here that points to how we all get along in the future, in the same vein as the "post-secrecy world" presaged by Wikileaks-style activism enabled by network technologies. Or maybe I just need a nap.

tvon 16y ago
> The ability of a community to completely self-organize, without central direction, and instantly execute a publicly-visible plan like this (...) I don't see any reason to believe it went down that way. It's probable it was a group who already had much of the ability in-place to execute an attack like this, and who decided to target mastercard.com because it was found to be vulnerable, or because paypal and amazon were out of thier reach.
- danilocampos 16y ago
  That group would be Anonymous, in all of its gossamer affiliation. The idea of another group using 4chan/Anonymous as a front for its own goals seems needlessly complicated. "Anonymous" does all of this for Scientologists and cat abusers, why not Mastercard?
- deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
- alanh 16y ago
  Not a real group so much as whoever wants in, is in, on a per-effort basis; a movement is spearheaded by an individual or two and each so-called member spontaneously decides whether to participate or not. “Anonymous” is hardly a group or organization, any more than the IRC channel for your favorite framework. A weak analogy is whenever Redditors decide to contribute to a certain cause or user. No one decided for the group, and there was no real vote, but nevertheless without the community most individuals would not have contributed. Economist / Babbage: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/12/more_wikileaks http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/12/more_wikileak... (I think he gets the definition of OP wrong, but everything else seems to jive with my non-firsthand understanding.)
  - steveklabnik 16y ago
    It's relatively accurate.
aarghh 16y ago
Reminds me of a Frank Herbert story called "Committee of the Whole". It concerns an engineer who makes public the plans and method to build a super-weapon from everyday household materials - and this makes government oppression a thing of the past and forces human beings to get along.
woodall 16y ago
The idea of a giant hivemind conducting business as it sees fit frightens me. There are countless stories of 4chan, Reddit, et al. raiding the wrong individuals and causing great harm. Of course there are other times where everything goes better than expected, however, as Voltaire once said, 'It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.' The internet has no filter. Information flows at a steady constant pace; in fact most communication now a days can take place immediately. This has its pros and cons. Pros, well its awesome. Cons, without a filter many people will jump on a bandwagon without knowing the full details of a situation. Sometimes people do not think as logically as they think they are. Acting on hearsay and emotions alone will lead people to act reckless, and once that stone starts rolling it's hard to stop; zerg. This should not be taken as a generalization of online networks as there are outliers in most situations. This is just a reminder that not everyone on the internet has other people best interest in mind. Some people are just mean. The best relationships are somewhere in the middle.
- loewenskind 16y ago
  >The idea of a giant hivemind conducting business as it sees fit frightens me. What about a government doing as it sees fit? That should be more frightening to you because it's existing for a long time and it's cost countless lives. And it's still doing so.
  - woodall 16y ago
    I would choose order over anarchy any day. At least the government has a system of checks and balances; could be better but I'll take what I get. A utopia is built over time, instant is too soon. Of course, a government has the ability to influence a situation more than the Internet; they can pretty much do what ever they want. I don't see them throwing that weight around to much though. In fact, if the Wikileaks documents has taught anyone anything, it is that the government is on its grind 24-7 365. Dont get me wrong. DDoSing Paypal, Master Card, et al is pretty entertaining, but I wonder what that cost other people? They screwed with an individual organization, well they have millions of clients. Instead of giving the situation time to develop, the Internet took the easy path to instant gratification, destruction. If you mess with ourIdol(X) we(Y) will not hesitate to take you(Z) down, and not care about them(ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVW) A better solution would have been: Get the news. Allow the news to sink in. What is the gravity of the situation? Are there any opposing arguments? Let those arguments sink in. Rationally, which view is better? Has the news changed yet? Form opinion. Talk to opposition. Plan. Attack. All of that should take at least a 1 or 2 days. Internet, their on it in like 5 minutes.

tvon 16y ago

> The ability of a community to completely self-organize, without central direction, and instantly execute a publicly-visible plan like this (...) I don't see any reason to believe it went down that way. It's probable it was a group who already had much of the ability in-place to execute an attack like this, and who decided to target mastercard.com because it was found to be vulnerable, or because paypal and amazon were out of thier reach.

danilocampos 16y ago
That group would be Anonymous, in all of its gossamer affiliation. The idea of another group using 4chan/Anonymous as a front for its own goals seems needlessly complicated. "Anonymous" does all of this for Scientologists and cat abusers, why not Mastercard?
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
alanh 16y ago
Not a real group so much as whoever wants in, is in, on a per-effort basis; a movement is spearheaded by an individual or two and each so-called member spontaneously decides whether to participate or not. “Anonymous” is hardly a group or organization, any more than the IRC channel for your favorite framework. A weak analogy is whenever Redditors decide to contribute to a certain cause or user. No one decided for the group, and there was no real vote, but nevertheless without the community most individuals would not have contributed. Economist / Babbage: http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/12/more_wikileaks http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2010/12/more_wikileak... (I think he gets the definition of OP wrong, but everything else seems to jive with my non-firsthand understanding.)
- steveklabnik 16y ago
  It's relatively accurate.

aarghh 16y ago

Reminds me of a Frank Herbert story called "Committee of the Whole". It concerns an engineer who makes public the plans and method to build a super-weapon from everyday household materials - and this makes government oppression a thing of the past and forces human beings to get along.

woodall 16y ago

The idea of a giant hivemind conducting business as it sees fit frightens me. There are countless stories of 4chan, Reddit, et al. raiding the wrong individuals and causing great harm. Of course there are other times where everything goes better than expected, however, as Voltaire once said, 'It is better to risk sparing a guilty person than to condemn an innocent one.' The internet has no filter. Information flows at a steady constant pace; in fact most communication now a days can take place immediately. This has its pros and cons. Pros, well its awesome. Cons, without a filter many people will jump on a bandwagon without knowing the full details of a situation. Sometimes people do not think as logically as they think they are. Acting on hearsay and emotions alone will lead people to act reckless, and once that stone starts rolling it's hard to stop; zerg. This should not be taken as a generalization of online networks as there are outliers in most situations. This is just a reminder that not everyone on the internet has other people best interest in mind. Some people are just mean. The best relationships are somewhere in the middle.

loewenskind 16y ago
>The idea of a giant hivemind conducting business as it sees fit frightens me. What about a government doing as it sees fit? That should be more frightening to you because it's existing for a long time and it's cost countless lives. And it's still doing so.
- woodall 16y ago
  I would choose order over anarchy any day. At least the government has a system of checks and balances; could be better but I'll take what I get. A utopia is built over time, instant is too soon. Of course, a government has the ability to influence a situation more than the Internet; they can pretty much do what ever they want. I don't see them throwing that weight around to much though. In fact, if the Wikileaks documents has taught anyone anything, it is that the government is on its grind 24-7 365. Dont get me wrong. DDoSing Paypal, Master Card, et al is pretty entertaining, but I wonder what that cost other people? They screwed with an individual organization, well they have millions of clients. Instead of giving the situation time to develop, the Internet took the easy path to instant gratification, destruction. If you mess with ourIdol(X) we(Y) will not hesitate to take you(Z) down, and not care about them(ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVW) A better solution would have been: Get the news. Allow the news to sink in. What is the gravity of the situation? Are there any opposing arguments? Let those arguments sink in. Rationally, which view is better? Has the news changed yet? Form opinion. Talk to opposition. Plan. Attack. All of that should take at least a 1 or 2 days. Internet, their on it in like 5 minutes.