Wandering around various sites on the 'toobs can be an informative, educational and down-right depressing adventure.
The recent hijinks by Anonymous against the Church of Scientology should serve as a blueprint for the progressive grassroots movement. No, I'm not talking about doing DoS attacks and throwing teabags laced with yeast down toilet bowls. What I am talking about is organization: motivating thousands of angry, disgruntled and disenfranchised people to take it to the man.
If Anonymous can organize a massive protest this quickly, then what are progressives doing wrong?
It's easy to dismiss the Web Warriors as a group of bored teens with plenty of time on their hands, a group ripe for causing trouble and easy to manipulate by handing them the role of "outsider". Or to take the other tract, caling them hackers and "terrorists", and a threat to religious freedom. In fact, they're neither.
Who is Anonymous?
Simply, they're the millennium's first-generation of freedom fighters.
Both government and big business are afraid of them; they certainly aren't afraid of their citizens or their customers. Anonymous has been able to slip into secure systems for fun. Overall, their motivation is not maliciousness, but curiosity. Yet, they've gained access to some impressive bits of classified information. Imagine such whistleblowers turning their attention to the servers of the RNC, big oil, COM and the health care industry? Have no doubt that they could uncover some of the dirtiest tricks, lies, fraud and corporate abuse ever to be served against the American public.
Anonymous is unknown. No one really knows how many people make up their culture, and few understand it. Outside of their online handles, even those self-identifying as Anonymous don't know the real life identities of fellow members. Are they teens? Are they hackers? Are they mostly male? So far, they've managed to camouflage their online personae to keep them separate from their real-life identities. How many of us posting our thoughts on the current situation in the United States worry about the possible fall-out our views will have as this country slides deeper into fascism and theocracy? There's a reason most use handles, and it's not so we can be snarky or make trolling comments.
With little fanfare or organization, Anonymous quickly managed to rally people to actions of peaceful protest and uncivil disobedience. Currently, some are using Guy Fawkes masks or zombie makeup to hide their features in public, but at least they're out there. Now. Doing something. We can barely manage to get five people to show at weekly peace vigils. Obviously Anonymous has tapped into something that anger against the war, fear of lack of health care, frustration at a government that doesn't listen to its people has not.
Whether or not you agree with Anonymous's motivations against their latest target, they've got a (dis)organization that the progressive movement should envy. As more in this country awaken to despair, as food banks close due to too many people and too few donations, as universal coverage becomes an impossible dream, as businesses close and jobs get outsourced, one would think there would be protests and actions spontaneously erupting on a massive scale; yet, there aren't. Progressives have tried to change things by being above board, by playing by the rules and walking the straight-and-narrow. So far, that has netted us little: the board's been overturned, the rulebook thrown away and we've been kicked in the pants from both our supposed-friends (Pelosi and Reid, I'm looking at you) and our enemies. Maybe it's time to re-evaluate what we do, how we do it, what we say, and how we say it in a time when being anonymous may be to our best advantage.