2012 just got more interesting

January 16th, 2012 by Charles Cameron

In an act of loving egalitarian criminality, we used company credit cards to make donations to dozens of charities and revolutionary organizations, including the Bradley Manning Support Organization, the EFF, the ACLU, CARE, American Red Cross, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, some commies, some prisoners, various occupations, and many more unnamed homies. It took weeks of hard work, but it paid off: to the tune of over $500,000 dollars liberated in total.

That’s pure Robin Hood, isn’t it? Take from the rich and give to the poor? With some political analysis thrown in, and a touch of overturning the money-tables?

Note that phrase, “loving egalitarian criminality”!

I’m reminded of the Situationist Raoul Vaneigem‘s book, The Movement of the Free Spirit, of Robert Lerner‘s Heresy of the Free Spirit, and Norman Cohn‘s great The Pursuit of the Millennium which first introduced me to that most interesting of medieval heresies — and the antinomianism that runs like a thread through so many apocalyptic movements and moments.

Fascinating stuff, medieval heresy…

7.

I’m guessing from the way the writers of the email from pseudo-Friedman described themselves that they enjoy the rhetoric that is deployed against them – as I said above, they seem to feature a heady mix of irony and joy, and clearly took some pleasure in being called “PUNKS and CANNIBALS!!!” by one of their detractors. Which brings me to their motto:

WE ARE ANONYMOUS. WE DO NOT FORGIVE. WE DO NOT FORGET. WE ARE LEGION. EXPECT US!

I’m betting whoever came up with that phrasing was aware that in the New Testament (Luke 8.30), Jesus asked a man possessed by demons what his name was…

And he said, “Legion,” because many demons had entered him.

So that word “legion” is an interesting a little trip-wire that would pass unnoticed by most people, but would be liable to excite the wrath of those who see the world we live in through the lens of scripture — another hint of the significance of apocalyptic rhetoric in times of social discord…

8.

I started with a stunning graphic, I’ve been on about apocalyptic rhetoric all along, and I’ll end with two more apocalyptic graphics -– there are so many to choose from! — these ones come from a video on an extensive Christian site that’s set up to debunk 2012 theories in favor of the personal form of “end of the world” situation — cancer, heart attack, you know the story.

All of which might happen in 2012 – but then again, maybe not.

So there we go… whoosh!!

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Posted in 2012, Apocalyptic, black swans, Charles Cameron, Specs, Y2K | 9 comments

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  1. MikeF:

    January 16th, 2012 at 9:20 am

    Or Anonymous just really liked the movie Fight Club!!!

  2. Chris:

    January 16th, 2012 at 10:31 am

    If you’ve never immersed yourself in it Charles (or anyone else for that matter) you might want to consider checking out one of the main Anon groupings on IRC at some point, I recommend it, although its not for the faint of heart. I’m not surprised that theres a movement to lulzify the end of the world movement, its exactly the sort of thing which comes up in conversations on IRC, /b/ and other venues all the time.
     
    Of course, we can also expect to see endless articles in the mainstream media about this topic too, generally stirring the pot and getting people into a bit of a Y2K state of mind. I’m looking forward to the endless articles which contain some variation of the phrase (taken from the article linked below): “Experts say the date was considered significant for the Maya, but doesn’t imply an apocalypse. Rather it is the beginning of another calendar cycle, they say.” My favourite bit being the ‘they say’ tagged on the end, as if we should all be suspicious about their motivations, after all, these experts, what are they hiding?
     
    Hell, Mexico is even in a position of playing it up for the tourism, which is a bit of a perverse incentive – http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/10038704

  3. Ed Beakley:

    January 16th, 2012 at 7:02 pm

    WE ARE ANONYMOUS. WE DO NOT FORGIVE. WE DO NOT FORGET. WE ARE LEGION. EXPECT US!

    ”We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.”

  4. YNSN:

    January 16th, 2012 at 10:24 pm

    Members of LulzSec and Anonymous seem to listen to Deltron 3030.

    Deltron 3030 – Virus:
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrEdbKwivCI 

  5. Daniel:

    January 17th, 2012 at 1:23 am

    Project Mayhem was originally an anti-sec project (obviously they took the name from Fight Club, but the name itself has a history within the anti-sec sub-culture). In this case, PM is about attacking everyone involved in the security industry, which appears to be the same modus operandi of the group using the same project name now. These attacks were originally against white hat security publishers, and those involved in the computer and information security industry. Here is a Wired article from 2002 discussing them: http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2002/08/54400?currentPage=all
    .
    Obviously they’ve moved on to bigger things (like the prison industry). If you want a black swan type prediction, here is mine: they are going to try implement a mass prison breakout, probably through a combination of social engineering, and hacking.

  6. Chris:

    January 17th, 2012 at 9:30 am

    @Daniel, interesting idea. I think the feasibility of engineering a prison breakout is probably low, but its an interesting idea. Hacking is always a fun topic in this regard as it is something everyone knows enough about to be afraid of, without really understanding it (I’m not saying you don’t, just making an observation).
     
    Anon campaigns are always subject to mission creep, although because of Anonymous’s setup the ‘creep’ bit can often be as, if not more, successful than the mission. Large numbers of participants with various degrees of skill, each with their own person objectives, leads to this and often it leads to small, more elite groups doing their own thing. Lulzsec is probably the best example of this, certainly one of the few which has its own name, although Antisec is liable to become the inheritor of the lulz boat for the time being.

  7. Daniel:

    January 18th, 2012 at 6:06 am

    @Chris, Lulzsec aren’t really elite. They were skiddies that got caught, and their attacks consisted of low-hanging fruit (public websites of gov and business), and plain lies (the “attack” on Nintendo, or the tall tale about them dropping the users/pwd of the Australian university system). ~el8, phc, and other antisec groups that actually have serious skills are still in action, and at this stage haven’t been broken up (they also target hard systems, like the openbsd trojan they left behind, which takes some serious knowledge, as opposed to poor computer security systems that lulzsec attacked).

  8. Chris:

    January 19th, 2012 at 11:05 am

    @Daniel “more elite” in this context was meant to mean ‘any more elite than the baseline’, but I absolutely take your point, the truly elite groups within the hacker community are much more sophisticated and conduct a whole other level of operation. What Lulzsec had, which I would argue that few other groups of this size have shown, is a very good understanding of the ‘PR’ value of what they do. Indeed they led the world media on a merry dance for several weeks, usually it takes a celebrity marriage to get the media focussed on a single topic for that long.

  9. Charles Cameron:

    January 19th, 2012 at 9:06 pm

    I just wanted to say “thanks, all” — and I’m getting an education!