Last week I mentioned The Antisocial Network, which chronicles the rise and fall of Anonymous, the masked hacker collective which started out as a bunch of kids making edgy anime memes on 4chan.
Actually, it started years earlier, in Japan on 2chan.
Cynicism and romanticism would appear to be antagonistic philosophies. Cynics zealously distrust everything and revel in exposing hypocrisies and flaws in people’s ideals. By contrast, romantics exalt in intense emotions and the pursuit of the sublime. On the surface, cynics and romantics should clash and be incapable of meshing together. Yet it is the way the two sentiments became entangled that transformed a faction of 2Chan’s netizens into the far-right netto-uyoku.
The cynical romanticists require the media to provide them with shared grievances to bond over. The media, in turn, relies on the cynical romanticists to be rabid consumers.
Only a few years ago, stories about “Weird Japan’s” plummeting birthrates and celibate youth provided cheap clickbait entertainment to a snickering American audience. Now similar patterns are emerging in the U.S. as millennials experience declining levels of sexual activity, birthrates, and testosterone relative to their boomer parents. Americans have become their own clickbait. (emphasis mine)
In the U.S., as in Japan, civic and economic decline has been coupled with a growing web-based alternative media that runs on a lingua franca of irony and cynicism.
The documentary tracks the copying of Japanese trends by American teenagers, first online and then in person at 4chan panels at Baltimore’s Otakon. When those got out of hand — because when you run out of transgressive things to say and do to shock the mundanes into paying attention, there’s really nothing left but a Nazi salute — the people who had grown consciences went off and formed Anonymous. They confined their trolling to the Church of Scientology and other self-evident villains.
How do you get from supporting Occupy Wall Street to reporting January 6th participants to the FBI? You’ll have to watch the show. For those more interested in the growth of the QAnon conspiracy industry online, Bellingcat goes into more depth (at least up through 2022)1. Maybe my favorite bit from The Antisocial Network is one of the interviewees admitting that all the hubbub about Q knowing what Trump would soon tweet was complete and utter bullshit based on the simplest of hacks — changing the time stamps on Q’s drops to make them look like they came first.
I’m old enough that the Church of the SubGenius was a thing on campus during the late 80s - early 90s. I never paid much attention to it, but now (of course) there’s a documentary that I might get around to watching.
1971
I want to contrast this tomfoolery with a ten-year-old documentary on a more mature movement of people protesting the Vietnam War. More mature as individuals, and more mature as a collective movement. They started out with protests and street theater, including in some cases the Freedom Rides and other civil rights work down south, and graduated into direct actions, like breaking into draft offices and burning the paper draft records. They often got caught, as in Rochester’s Flower City Conspiracy of 1970.
The F.B.I. knew of the break-in before it occurred because of a wire tap on a telephone conversation between one of the Flower City Conspirators and the Rev. Philip Berrigan who was on trial as one of the Harrisburg 7 who also destroyed draft records.
But then, seeing those jail sentences, our heroes got smart and upped their game, with reconnaissance and actual planning. Rather than a federal building, they targeted an unguarded FBI office in a suburban apartment building. In true 70s TV fashion, one of them went undercover as a Swarthmore student doing an informational interview — ie, looking for professional opportunities for women within the Bureau.
She cased the joint during a fake job interview! Classic!
![In This Corner, Jaime Sommers | The Bionic Wiki | Fandom In This Corner, Jaime Sommers | The Bionic Wiki | Fandom](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F47dd9c93-e0e6-4583-80fd-be1c7d531b4c_250x337.jpeg)
From the website’s About page:
On March 8, 1971 eight ordinary citizens broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, a town just outside Philadelphia, took hundreds of secret files, and shared them with the public. In doing so, they uncovered the FBI’s vast and illegal regime of spying and intimidation of Americans exercising their First Amendment rights.
On the night of the “Fight of the Century” boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, the activists, calling themselves the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI, picked the lock on the door to the small FBI field office. They took every file in the office, loaded them into suitcases, and walked out the front door.
Mailed anonymously, the documents started to show up in newsrooms. The heist yielded a trove of damning evidence that proved the FBI was deliberately working to intimidate civil rights activists and Americans nonviolently protesting the Vietnam War. The most significant revelation was an illegal program overseen by lifelong FBI director J. Edgar Hoover known as COINTELPRO – the Counter Intelligence Program.
Who knew that photocopies could be identified forensically by matching defects on the Xerox machine’s rotating drum? Not our heroes, but as soon as they found out, they switched or defaced the drums on the college machines they’d been using to forward the files to newspapers, all of whom except the Washington Post refused to publish them and handed them back to the FBI. Even with that post-caution, their neighborhood in Philadelphia was soon host to a swarm of fake hippies (agents), and two of their members were caught in a separate draft-office job that took the heat off.
The others were never caught.
At least one of this group also lamented the unintended side effects of their actions on camera — making Americans more cynical, for one thing.
Also maybe more Romantic.
There’s also this 2022 paper from a bunch of academics at the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, who text-mined the drops for statistical evidence that Q was not one person, among other analyses.
"Theatricality is an inherent and essential part of terrorism. You can imagine a world where edgy types buy bootleg t-shirts supporting the movement and where graffiti artists spread the logo all across our cities."
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/ants-in-the-server-racks-21st-century
This book also has a section on the Russian troll farm Internet Research Agency's role in amplifying the juicy bits from John Podesta's e-mails that eventually spun off into Pizzagate and QAnon. https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393881516