"You can accomplish anything you want in life provided you don’t mind who gets the credit."
-- Harry S. Truman

As you may have heard, a serious case of infighting has broken out within Anonymous. It's already been dubbed a civil war by some spectators, and the twitterverse has already generated an #anongate hashtag.

The details are still murky, but it seems that a rogue network operator named "Ryan" has hacked the domains associated with the AnonOps wing of Anonymous, taking down the various IRC channels that the group uses to communicate in the process. For those unfamiliar, AnonOps is a splinter group of Anonymous that formed in the wake of Operation Payback last year. Since then, they've established a reputation as the more "moral" arm of Anonymous, eschewing juvenile pranks in favour of more principled actions in places like Egypt and Tunisia. AnonOps generated a lot of attention towards Anonymous, and represented an entry point into the group for those who might not want to lurk on the various -- and variously profane -- message boards more commonly associated with the collective.

Although dissensus is the norm within Anonymous, these latest events are a fairly spectacular example. It's also a great illustration of what myself and others have been calling the "anti-ego" ethic of Anonymous. Whether you're involved in an Anonymous raid, or just posting pictures of cats on 4chan, any attempt to accrue personal status or differentiate from the collective whole is considered bad form. On message boards, it'll likely to just get you mocked, but within the more serious ranks of Anonymous, it could earn you a cyber-beatdown.

As the following comment (taken from Anonnews.org) shows, there's been a lot of debate within Anonymous about whether the people behind AnonOps were violating the anti-ego ethic, exerting too much control and beginning to behave like leaders:

"From the fucking beginning (during the hack at Aiplex which started Operation Payback) there has been an secret club, an aristocracy in AnonOps, deciding how operations will play out in invite-only channels.

It's obvious, for they control the topic, the hivemind, the guides, every single thing behind the scenes.

I don't know if the Owen's current bureaucracy is to be trusted, or Ryan's new delegation (from 808chan!) is.

What I do know is that AnonOps no longer has a good reason to exist. The insane amount of power the channel operators wield, and the reputations gained by their NAMES, causes them to become dictator-like, as "power corrupts".

Notice the emphasis on names. The ire with which the term is employed reinforces how many Anons consider the development and maintenance of personal identity to be a cardinal sin. This also isn't the first time AnonOps has come under fire from within; last March, a group calling itself Backtrace Security began leaking IRC chat logs and IP addresses associated with the group in an attempt to lessen its valence within the community.

In my opinion, this latest round of internal bickering is an affirmation of the centrality of the anti-ego ethic to Anonymous. The group seems willing to inoculate itself against the formation of hierarchy and authority even if it means a reduction in efficacy. In contrast to the typical hacker/programmer ethos, "getting things done" is not the only arbiter of success; you've got to get things done as anonymously as possible. Hence why I used the Truman quote up there as an epigraph.

For those looking for more insight into the inner workings of Anonymous, this "civil war" is also indicative of the ongoing tension between the "lulzfags" and "moralfags". Those interested in the lulz resent any assertion that Anonymous stands for anything. For them, Anonymous stands only for what it's standing for at a given moment, and the only motivation for participation should be one's own enjoyment. The moralfags -- many of whom clustered around AnonOps -- on the other hand feel that Anonymous should channel its collective power towards good works and fight those who oppose the free flow of information. The fact that Anonymous has been so far able to contain these two conflicting desires is part of what makes the group so fascinating. It's why Anonymous can take credit for harassing an 11-year-old girl on YouTube as easily it can for helping keep the internet up and running in Egypt during Mubarak's last stand.

Whether this latest rupture will further polarize the two factions within Anonymous remains to be seen, but it would be silly to suggest that the group is going anywhere. Anonymous is less of a bounded entity, and more of an idea; and like V from V for Vendetta -- whose Guy Fawkes mask Anonymous has so readily appropriated -- says, "you can't kill an idea."