While a number of members of Anonymous woke up to the sounds of an FBI raid yesterday, the rest of us woke up to the news that one of the group's most prominent members was acting as a government informant.

When the dust had settled, Sabu, a prolific hacker associated with LulzSec, Anti-Sec and the broader Anonymous community, was revealed to be a 28-year-old unemployed father of two from New York named Hector Monsegnur. After being arrested secretly last June and threatened with the loss of his children and a possible 124-year prison sentence, Monsegnur agreed to cooperate with law enforcement. The information he provided led to yesterday's arrest of six additional Anonymous members and further charges against those who had already been caught.

So, I finished Cole Stryker's book, Epic Win For Anonymous: How 4chan's Army Conquered the Web. Can't say that I really learned anything, but I doubt that academics who've been studying 4chan for the past two years are his target audience.

The book makes good on its promise to peer into 4chan without succumbing to the "fear, condescension, and hand-waving that dominate mainstream coverage of internet culture", and it's certainly one of the few accounts -- along with Julian Dibbell's work -- of 4chan by someone who "gets" it.

In his book, Crypto Anarchy, Cyberstates & Pirate Utopias, philosopher Peter Ludlow imagines “virtual communities as laboratories for conducting experiments in the construction of new societies and governance structures.” In the context of Metaviews' inquiry into the nature and future of authority, I believe it's important to understand how the modes of sociality and organization emerging within lulz-centric communities like 4chan, Anonymous and the now-defunct LulzSec are challenging and modulating our understanding of what authority is and how it is wielded.

4chan

On 4chan, for example, the notion that authority is something that you can collect and carry with you online is being contested. The radical anonymity of 4chan -- 90 per cent of all posts to the site are made without even so much as a pseudonym -- means the things we’re used to in other incarnations of web 2.0, things like followers, social capital, reputation, etc. are made impossible. If you arrive with a clever argument or a particularly humourous piece of content, you may be able to manifest a measure of influence in a given conversation, but you can’t take that authority and port it elsewhere within the community because every conversation starts at zero. It's just one of the many ways in which 4chan functions to draw a line in the sand between the real and the virtual; just because you're authoritative in the real world doesn't necessarily mean you get to take that authority for granted on the internet.

“inb4 shitstorm”

If you ever encounter this phrase on 4chan, it means that someone has predicted that a certain post, statement or event is going to cause a significant uproar in the community. And that’s precisely what happened yesterday when countless trolls, /b/tards and Anons discovered that their online storehouse of institutional memory -- a wiki known as Encyclopedia Dramatica -- had vanished from the web.

Launched in 2004, Encyclopedia Dramatica -- or ED to its friends -- was what Wikipedia would look like if you put it through some kind of inversion machine. Whereas Jimmy Wales and company forged a community around ideals like “neutral point of view” and “don’t be a dick”, ED threw objectivity out the window and prided itself on packing as much offensiveness as possible into every entry. Not surprisingly, those behind ED cited Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary as an inspiration.

ED quickly attracted the attention and interest of the nascent Anonymous subculture, and the wiki became, in the words of Wired, the place “where the vast parallel universe of Anonymous in-jokes, catchphrases, and obsessions is lovingly annotated”. Shifts in the culture, notable raids -- ranging from small attacks on other online communities to organized campaigns like Project Chanology -- and other ephemera were all carefully documented and presented in what can only be termed as Anonymous’ unique editorial voice.

However, those that went seeking that voice as of yesterday were redirected to a site called Oh Internet. Almost overnight, those behind ED had demolished the site and replaced it with a sanitized version boasting “toned down content style and a streamlined design”. Sherrod Grippo, one of ED’s founders, explained the move by saying “shock for shock’s sake is old at this point.”

He started one of the web’s most dynamic communities when he was just 15. He was a TIME man of the year before Zuckerberg. He testified as an expert witness during the trial of the young man who broke into Sarah Palin’s email account. He’s the liaison between Lerer Ventures and the burgeoning New York hacker community. To some, he’s “the supreme overlord of the Internet” (link NSFW). To others, he’s just an elaborate hoax. However, to at least a few of the internet’s previous generation of innovators -- including one of founders of the Huffington Post and the guy who started del.icio.us -- his ideas are worth over a half a million dollars.

His name is Christopher Poole, but he’s better known by his online handle: “moot”. He’s the brainchild behind 4chan, and the president of what will likely be one of the most intriguing start-ups of 2011: canv.as.

Some outlets are reporting that Operation Payback, Anonymous' two-month campaign against the forces of copyright, has concluded, while the homepage for the raid claims that the group has simply decided to change tactics in an attempt to legitimize itself.

Either way, it seems like the wave of denial-of-service attacks against targets like the RIAA, Gene Simmons and the U.S. copyright office have come to an end -- at least for now.

As part of my research, I lurked on a number of forums associated with Operation Payback -- I hung out on various IRC channels, and watched threads about the raid on 4chan -- and made some fascinating discoveries: the chat forums were populated by people from all over the world, the attacks consisted mainly of people using various flooding programs (such as the Low Orbit Ion Cannon pictured above) but some anons claimed to be using botnets as well, the sites and servers used by the group were just as likely to be the targets of DoS attacks as they were to wage them, there is no consensus within the community that Operation Payback is the right thing to do, and many users claimed that the raids were their first forays into the world of electronic (civil) disobedience.

However, it's not those findings that I want to talk about today. At the moment, I'm more interested in interrogating the role of DoS attacks in the contemporary political landscape of the internet.

Anonymous has no shortage of detractors. Some claim the group's antics inflame moral panics about online security and lend credence to arguments for tighter control of the internet. Others point out the hypocrisy of advocating free speech while simultaneously taking down a musician's website because of statements he made regarding piracy.

I'd thought I'd begin today's post with a quote from Gustave Flaubert:

"Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work."

I think Flaubert's words are as good a place as any to start a discussion of internet trolls. After all, according to Matthias Schwartz, a troll is "a normal person who does insane things on the internet."

Seeing as 4chan is widely regarded as one of the internet's net exporters of trolling activities, I've been doing a lot of reading on the subject. I've encountered excellent work by Burcu Bakioglu on trolls (also known as griefers) in Second Life, as well as the always-insightful Biella Coleman, whose ongoing study of trolls compares them to hackers, phreakers and mythological tricksters.

What attracted me to 4chan and Anonymous in the first place was the absurdity of it all. I had entered my MA program intending to study the impact of Canadian NGOs on on normative understandings of journalism in Africa, and somehow, the idea that I could write a thesis about LOLcats, m00t and Operation Slickpubes (NSFW) was too joyfully subversive to pass up.

However, like anyone who has spent some time among the trolls, I quickly realized how significant the community -- and the processes by which the community constitutes itself -- is. You can dismiss 4chan and its users as a peurile "internet hate machine" if you want, but it's becoming increasingly more difficult to do so. 4chan is the 285th most visited website in America (remember, there is something like 2 billion websites on the net), and the most active internet forum in the entire English-speaking world. The site receives over 11 million unique visitors per month and generates nearly one million posts per day. Not even YouTube musters that kind of user input.

Meanwhile, Anonymous -- shorthand for the subculture of internet users who frequent a series of online image and message boards, of which 4chan is simply the most well-known -- has been responsible for all kinds of crowdsourced antics ranging from a protracted protest against The Church of Scientology to flashmobbing an aging veteran with gifts on his birthday. At the moment, they're engaged in a battle with the anti-piracy lobby, having succesfully DDoS'd everyone from the MPAA to Gene Simmons.

As part of the research for my thesis, I've been digging into the history of imageboards -- things like 2ch and Futaba Channel in Japan (beware, the links may take you places that are NSFW), and of course the infamous online funhouse that is 4chan (notice that I'm not even providing a link).

Almost every piece of internet low culture has its origins on these boards, and trying to understand how it is that these anarchic behemoths, with their low-tech interfaces and puerile user-bases have become such a force on the contemporary web is a fascinating challenge. I'm sure I'll elaborate on this more over the course of the month (like any grad student, I will happily talk to you about my own research while feigning a passing interest in yours), but for now, I just wanted to get down (on paper?) an idea that popped into my head recently.

I think one of the reasons these sites are so prolific is that they function -- in a cultural sense -- as a microcosm of the web itself. What I mean is that it's possible to think of popular culture in the age of the internet as just one, gigantic archived imageboard.

Let me explain. These boards work on a simple premise: whenever someone replies to a post, that post is moved back to the top of the list of active threads. This is known as 'bumping' a thread (or age-ing if you're Japan). If you think of cultural artifacts as posts on a giant image and message board (we'll call it /pop/), and us as the users, then we're all dutifully bumping things -- back to the top of our twitter feed, our RSS reader or even just our inbox -- as we move through our little corner of the web.