2012 just got more interesting
[ by Charles Cameron — 2012, apocalyptic, AntiSec, impact of decent graphic design ]
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1.
The artwork above is taken from an AntiSec / Anonymous proclamation. It’s the A in “AntiSec”, and I think it’s quite striking, has a bit of a Cirque du Soleil effect, or Kokopelli maybe. As regular readers know, I’m a sucker for decent graphics no matter where they came from, so this particular logo (I’ve only shown you the first letter, the whole thing is huge) caught my eye, and was enough to set me scanning the rest of the 421-page document.
The document itself was provided to me and many others a little over a week ago by way of a link in an email purporting to come from george.friedman@stratfor.com – i.e. George Friedman, the founder of STRATFOR, the “global intelligence company”. The email was headed “Rate Stratfor’s Incident Response” and told its readers (presumably people whose email addresses had been found in a Stratfor address book, which was downloaded in the “intrusion” in question):
We would like to hear from our loyal client base as to our handling of the recent intrusion by those deranged, sexually deviant criminal hacker terrorist masterminds.
The rhetoric here is interesting – “loyal client base” is phrasing I could easily imagine a bureaucrat using in a public document, while “deranged, sexually deviant criminal hacker terrorist masterminds” is way more fun but just a tad less, how shall I put it, official-sounding.
And with a come-on like that, I could hardly resist digging a little deeper…
So I clicked on through, and found myself looking at the long, long piece which opens with the striking graphic above. Okay, there was a lot of code, and I don’t read that — but the graphic at the head of the whole thing was neat, and in among the extended passages of code I found various paragraphs of English prose with enough lulz to keep me skipping and skimming, and…
Lo, I am rewarded. Because…
2.
There’s a reference to 2012, and indeed specifically to 21 December 2012. I love those – they’re apocalyptic!
Apocalyptic movements are a major interest of mine, not least because they provide the many varieties of human with an immensely rich playground for our hopes and fears — our sense of an unjust and imperfect world in which we live and the utopia it might and by rights “should” be – that bridges mundane reality with heightened imagination. And they’re found, as Richard Landes shows in his masterful recent book, Heaven on Earth: the Varieties of the Millennial Experience, scattered across the centuries and continents.
21 December 2012, as you may have heard, is when the Mayan calendar allegedly runs out — or rolls over, and a “new age” begins. And the 2012 Mayan Calendar prediction has spawned a popular apocalyptic movement with enough leeway in it to attract survivalists, sorcerers’ apprentices, and those who are deeply skeptical about organized religion alike…
Just my kind of thing, eh?
3.
This Mayan calendar / 2012 business looks to be a “bigger” apocalyptic event than last year’s two Harold Camping predictions combined, even though those spawned $100 million in billboard and other advertising worldwide, and had an impact as far afield as the Hmong montagnards of Vietnam, some 7,000 of whom are said to have gathered on a mountain to await the Rapture, and some of whom may have been “massacred” by security forces – the official response to these accusations apparently being that a group of secessionists were arrested.
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