WEEKEND OPEN BAR: Is Anonymous Righteous, Or Retarded?

[WEEKEND OPEN BAR: The one-stop ramble-about-anything weekend post at OL. Comment on the topic at hand. Tell us how drunk you are. Describe a comic you bought. This is your chance to bring the party.]

Words were launched, attacks salvo’d over the week when Anonymous decided they want to throw down with Sony. By now, you must have your dome piece fiercely ensconced in the sand-pipes to not know the swagger of these dudes. And dudettes? I assume there has to be some females.

Anyways, I’ve always dug on Anonymous. As I’ve written in prior posts, maybe it’s the teenage petulant FUCK THE MAN in me. Read an article and you’ll see the juvenility bleeding through my fingers into poorly edited (like this one is assured to be) ramblings of an over-caffeinated douchebag.

Mea culpa.

So seeing this group of a(A)nonymous people willing to at least throw cream pies, if not spin-kicks at enormous organizations incites the angry teenager in me. There is a sort of vicariousness to the experience. What sort of middle-class, quasi-entitled white kid would I be without a misplaced sense of slightedness? I’ve been wronged, dammit! I know, I’ve got it good. I know! Appreciation, I hope that more often than not, I rock it.

However, I think that it goes beyond that shit. I think there’s something invigorating about seeing an entity sticking up for what it believes in. Call their ideologies whatever you want. Sure I think it’s fucking phenomenal that they want to sucker punch something as insane, douchey, and rambling as Scientology. I love it. See teenage angst.

But these guys want to call out people on their bullshit.. Or again, at least throw a cream pie in the face of it. That’s more than most of us are willing to do despite our annoyance at Modern Day Machinations.   I mean, fucking think about it. This group is something out of a movie. Something out of Fight Club. An organization wreaking mayhem on enormous corporations, or Cults. I can’t help it, I find that fucking righteous.

It isn’t fiction, it’s fucking occurring.

There’s the flip-side to it, which is that these people are complicating the lives of people caught in the crosshairs. Collateral damage. There’s a phrase we should all be used to at this point in our Collective Hivemind Popculture Zeitgeist. It’s a wee bit hard to wiggle out of the accusation that there’s people being fucked with who didn’t do anything to offend them.

Case in point: Anonymous themselves stopping attacks on the PlayStation Network because they were afflicting pains in the ass of peoples who just wanted to get their fucking frag on. What sort of bullshit is that? I don’t feel particularly bad for CEOs getting caught up in the wash. They’re as least tenuously tied to the entire enterprise. But auxiliary connections? Sort of bullshit.

Still though, can you blame me for my admiration? Rhetorical question, don’t fucking answer that. I’ll think what I want, god dammit! To my Sci-Fi, comic book, heavy metal, fantasy-addled brain, this is something out of my fantasies. A real life hacker group! It’s like porn to me. Let us throw away contemplations of ramifications and just focus on how dope it is! You see what I’m doing? Mocking myself.

Accountability is a neat thing, and I’m in love with the idea of Anonymous perhaps more than the actuality of them. I love the idea of an organization who calls out groups who (they feel) are wronging not just then, but also culture in general.  As rampaging conglomerations run amok, absorbing and warping, there isn’t much to be done. I’d buy the argument that Anonymous really isn’t doing anything.

But maybe they’re drawing attention to it, their true effect a rippling of awareness throughout the various communities. A call to arms. Or at least momentary distractions. There’s that teenage idealism, the Damn the Man bleeding through again. Apologies! Apologies!

Again, there’s a good chance you can’t divorce what Anonymous stands for and their actions from the ideal that I hold of them in my head.  Well I can.

Anonymous: righteous, retarded, or somewhere in the middle?