Month: March 2011

3

I wake up with too many nightmares clouding my thought. I crack open a Mexican Coke and drink down that real sugar. I was in college again, lost in a dorm, assaulted by “bros,” manipulated into sexual humiliation by lesbians. I can’t go to work today. I go to Anonymous. In the middle of writing another long diatribe on the problems of the Anonymous cult, a car full of teenagers in Guy Fawkes masks show up in my driveway with signs. They read “GTFO,” “We Hate You Billy,” and “Failgore Troll.” I am not shocked, but I really don’t know how to react. Should I get my guns out and wave them around, maybe fire a few shots into the air? Should I go get these people to take off their masks and talk to me? Should I invite them in for some coffee?

I try to talk to them, but they won’t take off their masks. I can’t talk to them like that, it’s absurd. They have a lot of angry things to say, but nothing I haven’t heard before. I go inside and flick on my electric organ, play something in a minor key to drown out their insults. I keep playing for almost an hour, until they leave. I make myself some lunch. As I sit down to eat, another car pulls up. I figure it’s a bill collector or my boss wondering why I’m not at work. Maybe they’ll finally shut off my electricity, but no it’s just more protesters.

This time I cover my face with a bandanna and quickly make a sign that says “FUCK YOU KILGORE TROUT!” I join their ranks and protest myself like I often do online. The Anons don’t even seem to process the possibility that I am protesting myself to mock them. I get real close to the guy next to me, to be a creep. I sneak a peek behind his mask. I let out a reflexive “What the fuck!” There’s something metallic going from the mask into his eye sockets. For the first time in my life, I am actually scared of Anonymous.

I bolt inside, lock my doors, and load the AK-47. I take the safety off and chamber a bullet. Am I going insane? I start to think about the “collective conscious” and well, I believe in it for the first time. Damn!

It’s dusk before the protesters leave. I crawl out of the corner and put the AK down. Reality is like a shattered mirror.

4

I wake up early after just a couple hours of nightmare filled sleep. Too much purpose, too much paranoia, too much adrenaline for sleep. I drive to Roanoke and try to get my hands on one of these Guy Fawkes masks. I can’t find any except in the Wal-Mart toy department. It feels like it’s made of something more substantial and heavy than cheap plastic. $50 fucking dollars for this fucking thing. I don’t dare open it until I get to work.

It’s hard to explain to my boss what’s going on. I’ve drunkenly explained how I’ve become the enemy of Anonymous to my co-worker Neil, and he tries to cover for me, badly. I wait for everyone to go on lunch break and take a close look at the mask in good light. Nothing special on the surface. I think about my $50 regretfully as I cut this thing down the center with a bandsaw. It barely cuts, and causes the bandsaw to buck like it’s made of steel. What a fucking mess! The “mask” turns into liquid, or leaks where I cut it. It’s the color of used motor oil with a metallic consistency like it’s full of glitter. I don’t touch the shit with my bare hands, and throw away the nitrile gloves when I’m done cleaning the mess. The blade’s worn the fuck out, so I change it. Maybe it’s some kind of nanomachines or some shit. God, I start to think about how I accused the government of running Anonymous and I get a little sick to my stomach.

For fear of going home, I work the rest of my shift. When I do go home, my computer is borked. I can not even access the lowest level, the BIOS. Damn thing’s a paperweight. Fucking Anonymous! Fucking government! Shit, the organ still works. So does my typewriter. Can’t hack that shit. Maybe I am more overwrought than I should be. Then I remember those monsters! I check on my guns and even test fire the AK off the porch. I am relieved to hear it still fires.

I wake up and go straight to the computer. I always go straight to the computer. It’s my only source for information aside from paperbacks. Call me an addict, but at least it’s not television.

No e-mails, no facebooks, not even any interesting news. I take a shit, but don’t shower and forget to brush my teeth. I make a sandwich on the dirty kitchen counter and eat it, crumbs falling  where they may. I get back on the computer and try to find something interesting on reddit.

I get to work late. I shape a bunch of animals out of wood. It doesn’t always feel like it, but I do have a nice life.

At work I listen to science fiction on audiobooks I have pirated with bit torrents. Everyone at work pirates now. I taught them how. I listen to a lot of cyberpunk books. I definitely consider myself a cyberpunk.

In High School, I declared cyber war against the administration and staff. I knew more Visual Basic than the Computer Science class taught, so I pwnd every assignment in the first five minutes and  fucked around for the remaining forty. I coded malicious software, played Tribes, rendered fractals. My teacher had helped create the very first Multi User Dungeon ever made. During class, he played it more than I played Tribes. I crashed the MUD server while he was playing it. I wrote a program that flooded the server with randomized new user data. Simple stuff. I don’t think such a great  teacher could ever bring himself to take away my computer priveleges, but that day he threatened to.

I tried to stay away from getting myself in trouble by keeping my antics at home. This did not work. I learned Flash from a pirated copy. Flash was a powerful thing and I didn’t have much trouble with it. The administration revoked the students’ privelege to carry backpacks in the hallways. I fired back with a flash video of a  backpack eating their faces like Pac Man eats cherries. The video spread like a virus, even among the teachers. I found myself having some very uncomfortable lulz. The reality of the situation was that I had somehow  shifted opinion so wildly that they gave backpack rights back. It was then that I got a taste for power.

I created a central hub that linked together different students’ web sites. I called it the Titan Underground because the school’s mascot was the Titan. Then we began to use this hub for Anonymously written stories about the school. It quickly and naturally became a slick Anonymous message board that most students posted on. I did not moderate it whatsoever. I suggest all Anons who are still students do the same thing. This is a fun thing to do in school.

Somebody eventually wrote a piece that was purely slanderous towards Ms. X, a pregnant English teacher. I had Ms. X for English and she always complimented and encouraged my writing. Somehow I  feel like better maternity leave for teachers would have resolved this entire situation before it ever happened. I don’t blame Ms. X for her reaction. She wanted to sue me for publishing slander. The Principal would have fired her if she had sued me, so I was saved from the lawsuit. Still, they put me through drug counseling and psychiatric evaluation as punishment. They had my whole web site printed and laid out on a table. It was surreal, shocking. I felt guilty and regarded as insane so I didn’t write again for years.

The Titan Underground became the Elf Wax Times which became Chronicle.su. Ten years have passed since I crashed the first MUD ever made as its creator played across the room. Now I’m older and even more rash. I’ve attacked Anonymous  and they’ve attacked me back. These fucking kids think I don’t understand Anonymous. Sure, it’s hard to draw an accurate picture of Anonymous. Anonymous is a voice we all have inside us that we are conditioned to never use.

2

I don’t really know how I ended up here, sanding turtle bodies out of wood. After high school I went to college for computer science and it didn’t really work out for me. I had trouble socializing with the rich kids and didn’t really have the focus to be a programmer anyway. I dropped out after 2 semesters. Eventually I moved to the country.

I still think of her sometimes when I’m working on turtles. There was a thing, with her and the turtle and me. I know it’s completely unhealthy, the way I still think about her after two years. The whole world knows now. Everyone knew before Anonymous even leaked my love letters anyway. I tend to let out my inner voice more than is appropriate. Even now! She was the only person to ever tell me to my face that something I wrote was fucked up. In a world of spineless television addicts, she used the voice we are taught to fear. She’d been expelled from high school for creating a fake Myspace of her gym teacher and using it to stir up rumors of sexual misconduct. How I loved her fearlessness!

My dealings with Anonymous started when I wrote an attack piece on AnonNews.org. I found their press releases stinking of ideology and lacking of content on any issue. It’s all propaganda written by some nut or another. The first article I wrote was partially serious and contained a lot of pointed criticism and a list of actionable ideas to improve AnonNews. These are all the things that Anons demand of anyone who begins to criticize them. Met with almost complete indifference, I gave up on Anonymous for a little while.

There is a key similarity between Anonymous and their arch-nemesis, Scientology. Like Scientology, Anonymous is kind of a science fiction cult. There is a recurring theme that Anonymous is a hyperconsciousness or a collective of minds that form an entity in cyber space. This is fantastic wording considering the reactionary nature of Anonymous. Unlike the individual mind, Anonymous does not plan for future outcomes or posess even a shred of self awareness. Anonymous reacts like a school of fish darting away from predators and homing in on food. This is a kind of consciousness that is below the level of any single individual.

When a hell of a lot of otherwise uninvolved people decided “Hey, Anonymous is a thing for me,” this is when the cult became something infectable. WikiLeaks released Cablegate and Anonymous saw a surge in these kind of recruits. These are impressionable young people who think they’re joining a hyperconsciousness by jumping on whatever DDoS bandwagon is arollin’. They’ve choked down some propaganda that’s no better than Fox News and behave like they’re members of the fucking Tea Party, infected with ideals. The only real way to get through to them is mockery.

It’s easy to mock a cult with no direction. Just call it irrelevant. When people have no personal reason why they’re doing what they’re doing, this kind of a statement will make them furious. Ideology (fwd to 2:30 for the lulz) clogs normally reasonable thought processes with rationalization. My article, “Why Anonymous is Completely Irrelevant,” evoked as much rationalization as it did ad hominems. Hyperconscious? No, definitely not. Anonymous has proved that to me by its own actions.

Manipulating Anonymous became a game to me. I showed everyone how awesomely easy it was to troll AnonNews and the trolls invaded. Comments and press releases were overrun with troll posts. Eventually, AnonNews became hardened to trolling. It is here that I have probably done my best service to Anonymous. My original criticism to AnonNews suggested more discretion in the posting of Press Releases. Now there is.