FightBack

by Daphne Lawless

As Alec Hardison says on the hit TV show Leverage: “it’s the age of the geek, baby”. Information technology workers are increasingly important and increasingly recognizing their own importance. Here’s why.

What makes Marxism different from other schools of thought which seek to understand and to change the world is that it precisely identifies who the agent of that change will be. The working class – to use the old-fashioned term, the “proletariat” – are the section of society who must work for wages and salaries to survive, who are the most exploited part of society, but at the same time potentially the most powerful.

This is because, in the words of the old union song: “Without their brains and muscle, not a single wheel would turn”. Profit, the life-blood of the system, is made by their work. If they withdraw that work, if they seize the means of production and turn them to production for use instead of profit, then the whole basis of the world system could be turned upside down. Read the rest of this entry »

Guy Fawkes mask, associated with Anonymous, worn at a Wellington demo in solidarity with Palestine

Daphne Lawless.

For those who’ve been watching Internet culture for a while, it’s still a bit of a culture shock to see Anonymous being discussed in the mainstream media. As this article is being written, Anonymous has been credited with bringing down the website of a large private university in India whose boss had been censoring Internet articles criticising him. Also in the news, Anonymous claims to have hacked some 600,000 Israeli email accounts as part of an ongoing campaign.

The media generally describe Anonymous as a “hacktivist” group. But the most important thing to understand is that Anonymous is not a group of any sort, or an ideology. It’s an idea, and a culture.

The birthplace of Anonymous as we know it was the infamous webforum 4chan, whose “random” board (/b/) is known (among much less polite things) as “the cesspool of the internet”. Contributions to 4chan are all credited to “Anonymous”– there is no way to trace any image or message to any individual.  Under the Anonymous moniker – except a permanent ban for anyone posting child pornography – posters to /b/ (known as “/b/tards”) are free to act out the darkest impulses of their psyche and of the cultural environment.

The board has become notorious as the place to go for the most sexist, racist, homophobic, gory and otherwise transgressive content imaginable. However, the no-limits creativity of this environment also has also given birth to so many of the Internet injokes we can now take for granted. “LOLcats”, for example, began as a 4chan custom known as “Caturday”. You can now buy T-shirts, calendars, badges and other items featuring images  and concepts which had their origin on 4chan. Of course, the anonymous originators of this content don’t get a slice of the profits.

In this culture, harrassment and “trolling” are not only tolerated, but considered high entertainment. Those who get on Anonymous’ wrong side can expect to have their personal details broadcast, their websites and email addresses hacked, and to be harrassed with prank phone calls and bogus pizza deliveries – and worse.

But – perhaps surprisingly – the power of Anonymous began to be used for pro-social causes. One famous target of Anonymous was an American teenager who posted a YouTube video of himself abusing his pet cat. Another was neo-Nazi talk radio host Hal Turner, who was driven off air and unmasked as an FBI provocateur. Read the rest of this entry »

From The Spark September 2010

Byron Clark (Workers Party, Christchurch branch organiser)

New Zealanders love Facebook. Many will talk about how much they hate
it, but the numbers show otherwise. One in four New Zealanders is a user of Facebook, for those aged 25-34, its one in three, and for
those 15-24, its nearly three in four. Much of the media commentary
around Facebook has ignored the social context in which the social
networking website has grown. The majority of New Zealanders work for
a living, and the nature of work in the 21st century makes previous
‘offline’ social activities and communication harder to retain. As The
Spark has noted, about 36% of full-time male workers and nearly 19% of
full-time female workers now work 50 or more hours a week. Almost
16.5% of full-time male workers and almost 8.5% of full-time female
workers actually work more than 60 hours a week. Work hours are longer
than the average in the traditional blue collar jobs; Over half of
agricultural and fisheries workers and over a third of plant and
machine operators and assemblers work more than 50 hours a week. Read the rest of this entry »