Postdigital Anthropology: Hacks, Hackers, and the Human ... · of computer hacking. She has written...

INTERV IEWS

Postdigital Anthropology: Hacks, Hackers,and the Human Condition

Gabriella Coleman1& Petar Jandrić2

Published online: 2 August 2019# Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Gabriella Coleman holds the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy atMcGill University. Trained as an anthropologist, she researches and writes on culturesof computer hacking. She has written two books on computer hackers, CodingFreedom (2013) and Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anony-mous (2014). She is working on transforming a personal collection of video clips into apublic resource. Published under the name Hack_Curio, this online video portal willshowcase short video clips with adjoining entries that help explain why hacking is oneof the most important phenomena of global culture and politics in the late 20th andearly 21st century. It will go live in the fall of 2019.

About the conversation

In January 2018, Petar Jandrić emailed Gabriella Coleman with an idea for thisconversation. They met online in April and conversed for more than 3 h. After severalpost-transcription e-mail iterations, the conversation was completed over a very longperiod of time.

Digital Colonization and its Enemies

Petar (PJ): Your first book, Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking(Coleman 2013), tells a stunning history of the political economy of (early) computerdevelopment and its main protagonists. What, for you, is hacking?

Gabriella Coleman (GC): As an anthropologist, I do not define hacking normatively,as a philosopher might do. Instead, I define it through my field work encounters: in its

Postdigital Science and Education (2019) 1:525–550https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-019-00065-8

* Gabriella [email protected]

Petar Jandrić[email protected]

1 McGill University, Montreal, Canada2 Zagreb University of Applied Sciences, Zagreb, Croatia

http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi=10.1007/s42438-019-00065-8&domain=pdf

mailto:[email protected]

most basic form, hacking is a social phenomenon that is intimately connected to com-puters and composed of different types of technologists who self-identify as hackers.

There are different kinds of communities of practice that engage in activities thatpractitioners themselves define as hacking; from those who write free and open sourcesoftware like Linux, those that write privacy enhancing software, others who securecomputers, and those who break into computer systems either for exploration orhacktivism. Neat and tidy definitions of hacking are quite hard to formulate, especiallysince it’s a fraught term, even amongst hackers. Still, I recently attempted to definehacking as the amalgam of craftsmanship and craftiness. Hacking is learning and buildingtechnology, combined with a drive to either push the envelope of what’s possible, orundermine existing technological or social systems, in order to create something new.

PJ: In the chapter ‘The basic “specs” of a lifeworld’ (Coleman 2013: 25-28), youdescribe the proverbial hacker from the early days of the computer – a young boy,deeply in love with his first computer, who frantically types BASIC code and lives inhis own world. Later on, ‘[t]hanks to the holy trinity of a computer, modem, and phoneline, he began to dabble in a wider networked world where there was a real strangebrew of information and software to ingest (Coleman 2013: 26). I was deeply moved bythis image because it immediately reminded me of long nights I spent typing BASIC onmy own Commodore 64 while parents were asleep…Yet, this romantic image is longgone – today’s hackers report very different routes into the trade. What can we learnfrom this historical image of the hacker for the contemporary moment?

GC:You are absolutely right that the pathways to hacking are nowmuchmore diverse.And not only that, but there also are various paradigms around hacking: from hardcoreanti-capitalist hacktivism to capitalist drenched entrepreneurialism… There are so manydifferent ways to be a hacker today than say in the 1980s or even 1990s. In CodingFreedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Coleman 2013), I explain how featuredprogrammers and hackers first formed a relationship with computers in isolation, usuallyindependent of a broader community of like-minded computer enthusiasts. Only later didthey conceptualize their activity in terms of hacking, perhaps because they read hackerliterature (like a zine or textfile), went to a math camp, or connected to others through abulletin board system. Today, technical people from a very young age can learn about theircraft online and connect with others. However, today there are so many different avenuesfor technical activity that a lot of technical people are not going to fall into hacker circles.

PJ: People can learn a lot online, but face-to-face communication is also important.Please describe the relationship between online and offline ways of building hackingcommunities.

GC: Before I began my research, I assumed that computer hacking was rootedprimarily online – and obviously this dimension is still incredibly important. Infra-structures like Internet Relay Chats or Bulletin Boards were (and still are) profoundlyimportant for hacker technical production and forms of sociality. However, when I wentto my first hacker conference—the free software Debian developer conference inToronto in 2002—and then to other international conferences, I came to realize thatlong-distance collaboration would be impossible if you did not get to know each otherand form friendships. The bonding that transpires in conferences is profound, and that’snot unique to hacking. Any professional group, from doctors to journalists to lawyers totechnologists to hackers, would not function unless they met face-to-face – the confer-ence is an incredibly important ritual in so-called secular society (Coleman 2010).

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Still, hacker conferences are different than academic conferences in one importantrespect. At academic conferences we get together to talk about our research – we do notdo our research there. At hacker conferences, however, you can both talk about hackingand hack. As a result, the social entanglement runs deeper. Hacker conferences are alsoincredibly festive events where you recreate what you do – let us hack together, andthen let us also drink a lot and party a lot. You celebrate what you do as you do it.Furthermore, hacking is not a singular thing. There are many different types such ashardware hacking and free software hacking, and there are also some big regionaldifferences (e.g. between Italy and Spain).

Hacker conferences such as Chaos Communication Camp, hosted by the oldesthacker association, the Chaos Computer Club, and Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE2018) hosted by 2600, bring together different tribes – different generations of hackerswith distinct technical skills (hardware, software, biology, and so on). So, whenattending a hacker conference, you all of a sudden realize that you are a part of a huge,multi-generational, international movement, and many feel something like joy or pridebeing connected to this grouping of people. More so, when hackers travel to any majorcity, from Berlin to Tokyo, they can plug into the local hacker scene or space.

One final point: while a lot of young hackers - past and present - may have grown upin small towns or suburbs, eventually many end up in big cities such as London, Paris,San Francisco, and Berlin, and geeks and hackers ended up working together andhanging out socially as well. The idea of the hacker as a primarily lone individual whodoes not interact much with others is just plain false, even though, of course, there arehackers who are a-social and can thrive in this scene.

PJ: In 1950s and 1960s, American astronauts who landed to theMoon were made intoheroes, and their wives and families were cast as role models for suburban families.Starting in the 1970s, and probably culminating around the brink of the millennium,computer experts became the new heroes of the nation, and their wives and families haveagain become role models in the domestic sphere (or, at their best, in charity foundations –such asMelinda Gates). How do you go about this strongmasculinity which characterizesheroes of all American frontiers, including hackers? Is it still the case?

GC: You are spot on: one prevalent way of framing the hacker has been by castinghim as the male hero-technologist who conquers the electronic frontier. The paradigm isensconced in books like Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolutionor, to some lesser degree, in Bruce Sterling’s The hacker crackdown: Law and disorderon the electronic frontier (1992), or certain films like WarGames (Badham 1983), etc.The figure resonates because it taps into a broader and long standing powerfulAmerican mythos of the rugged frontiersman (see Dean et al. 2019). It also resonatesbecause of larger than life individuals, even mythical characters in the hacker worldsuch as the founder of the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman. However, thatfigure of the male frontiersman has come at the expense of recognizing the collectivist,social practices within the hacker world. Those unfamiliar with hackers tend to seethem as being individualistic to the core, unable to barely sustain any social bond orrelationship - and to be sure, a lot of the technical work required solitude. Still,prevalent conceptualizations of hacking as individualistic have come at the expenseof seeing the more co-operativist and collective social practices.

The individualist paradigm shapes people’s self-understandings and limits certainpossibilities, so I tried to complicate this image and offer another paradigm in my books

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Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Coleman 2010) and Hacker,Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Coleman 2014). Withsome exceptions, both the Free Software Movement and Anonymous are extremelycollectivist. Bruce Sterling’s The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on theElectronic Frontier (1992) is a phenomenal book because the narrative does not relyon single individuals; it is about the underground scene, those hackers that broke intosystems for mischief, fun, exploration, and learning. The hacker underground was anover the top macho and Sterling shows this, but at least he was able to avoid the triteand false story of the single great individual. With some exceptions, most of thesefigures (whether it’s Steve Wozniak for hardware hacking or Richard Stallman for freesoftware) have tended to be male and the hacker world was primarily a male world.Obviously, that has changed to some degree in recent times. Certain domains, such asfree and open source software projects like Debian and Python, have openly grappledwith the problem of diversity and have sought a solution, first asking ‘what are wegoing to do?’ and then moving forward with an intervention. As a result, we now havegroups like Women (The Debian Women Project 2018), or Python’s diversity list(Python 2018). While problems with diversity still loom large, many groups havetaken initiatives over the last decade to address these problems.

Certain technical domains have historically had more women - or at least they aremore visible. One such domain is hardware hacking. Take Addie Wagenknecht—abrilliant hardware hacker and artist who helps run the Open Hardware Summit (OpenSource Hardware Association 2018). There is also Limor ‘Ladyada’ Fried, a hardwarehacker and the founder of Adafruit Industries (Ceceri 2011) who was the first femalehacker to be featured on the cover of Wired in 2011. In the underground of small hackergroups that have historically broken into systems, there are less female examples, but Isuspect there are some that we simply do not know of as they have received next to nocoverage.

PJ: At least since Vannevar Bush’s metaphor of science and technology as ‘theendless frontier’ (US Office of Scientific Research and Development 1945), computerdevelopment has been seen as the new ‘electronic frontier’ (Rheingold 1995; Turner2006; Jandrić 2018a; see also conversations with Howard Rheingold and Fred Turnerin Jandrić 2017). In my previous book, Marcell Mars and Tomislav Medak assert thatsuch mindset ‘easily melds with entrepreneurial culture of the Silicon Valley. Therefore,it is hardly a surprise that individualism has become the hegemonic narrative of hackerculture’ (Jandrić 2017: 262). Let us brainstorm a bit: can you draw some similaritiesbetween people such as Christopher Columbus, Francisco Pizarro González, MarkZuckerberg, and Elon Musk? How relevant are these similarities?

GC: The connection between a frontier mentality and the hacker world, as RichardBarbrook and Fred Turner have explored, seamlessly melds with the entrepreneurialspirit of Silicon Valley. Some people think that all hackers are raging hacktivists, at rootprogressive political actors, which is just not the case – there are many hackers whichslot in easily into capitalist cultures and push them along without even thinking aboutthe negative repercussions of their technologies with some glorifying their technologyas a positive force on the world.

That is the colonial project at some level. I read a profile of Mark Zuckerberg bySteven Levy (2017) and he was very hackish growing up: always playing withcomputers, doing things that he wasn’t supposed to do… He had that mindset of


craftiness, but then he developed into a perfect example of the colonialist who ispushing boundaries in ways that have pretty negative consequences but are dressedin the clothing of a progressive political project—a manifestation of what Barbrook andCameron identified as The Californian Ideology (1996).

People like Richard Stallman and Kevin Mitnick, however, are quite different. Insome ways, Richard Stallman is a bit like Don Quixote. When he came up with the ideaof free software, he was like a mad man who was going against the grain of thecapitalist direction that software was going. Stallman was also extremely aware of thesurveillance implications of closed software systems that were controlled by corpora-tions and governments; at some level, he is the anti-Zuckerberg. Kevin Mitnick is alsovery interesting because he was breaking into systems for his own edification – thiswasn’t about making money or conquering the world through software projects. Hisactivity, which was part of the hacker underground, is a form of social practice and atype of knowledge that also has disrupted dominant economic logic at some level. ButStallman and Mitnick tend to be the important exceptions that go against the grain ofthe colonial mindset that people like Mark Zuckerberg put into practice.

PJ: Extending the above thought experiment a bit further, can you perhaps draw ananalogy between colonizing physical worlds (such as America) and developing /colonizing the Internet (see Jandrić and Kuzmanić 2016, 2017)?

GC: That’s an extension of what I was just talking about. Whereas someone likeRichard Stallman created the material and philosophical conditions to prevent techno-logical domination through free software, many others create the technological andideological conditions to capture people’s attention and data. What’s important tounderstand is why some hackers have forgone economic opportunities to halt thoseprocesses of colonization; there are only small pockets of freedom in a vast colonialempire.

An open source project, Tor (Tor Project 2018), which allows people to be a little bitmore anonymous on the Internet, disrupts the colonial project of surveillance capital-ism. It is remarkable that without these renegade hackers, we would not have any kindof software that allows people to be anonymous or allows them to encrypt theirsoftware. There is a surprising number of hackers who decide to contribute to projectslike Tor, Tails, Signal, and Leap, when they could just be making a lot of money. It isinteresting to explore why they are saying: ‘we’re not going to sail with the Pinta, theNina, the Santa María, but instead we’re going to build our own little ship and dosomething different.’ Why some hackers have decided to turn away from the entrepre-neurial capitalist spirit is far from obvious—and is begging for explanation (seeColeman 2017a, b for such an attempt).

The Anonymous Response to Surveillance Capitalism

PJ: Your second book, Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces ofAnonymous (Coleman 2014), provides amazing insight into the world of Anonymous.What is Anonymous, and what makes it so unique?

GC: Anonymous is an open source name that, in recent times, has been used bytechnologists, activists, hackers, designers, and artists, to organize different forms ofcollective action from street protests to computer hacking. Anonymous is a bit difficult


to describe, at least succinctly, because different groups have used it for differentpurposes, and its early history had nothing to do with helping people (but rather, oftenhurting them). Indeed, in the mid-2000s, there was barely a bone in Anonymous’ bodythat would indicate it would one day land in activist and hacktivist territory. Back then,the name—and this is important—was adopted from the default ‘Anonymous’username given to 4chan posters. 4chan is an anonymous discussion board that wasfounded in 2003, and grew to include a slew of boards dedicated to various topics fromanime to literature to fitness. One of 4chan’s most distinctive socio-technical features isanonymity: posts on the imageboard are attributed to Anonymous, with the option tofill in a name field. But no one does that; instead, the community preferred the sharedauthorship and shunning of individual reputation, which eventually grew into a full-blown ethic.

Back then, Anonymous developed a reputation—a terrible one—due to prolific actsof Internet trolling, which almost always entailed—and continues to entail—prankinghitched to defilement, trickery, or cruel torment. Trolling styles are diverse, butAnonymous-style trolling was episodic, swarm-like, and prolific enough that in 2007,Fox News anointed Anonymous as the ‘Internet hate machine’ (Fox News 2007). Evenif Anonymous was often considered hateful, however, it had not yet hooked intobroader political mobilizing on the left or right. Six months after the Fox News story,trolls used the moniker Anonymous to target the Church of Scientology—a campaignthat morphed into a sincere crusade against the cult, an offensive that continues todayunder the same Anonymous banner. Crucial to this transformation was a video firstdesigned as a troll, that surprised both insiders and outsiders by prompting an earnestdebate about protesting the Church. Critics of the Church also swooped in at this timeto urge these trolls to join their cause. And they did. Anonymous moved forward withan experimental but ultimately successful protest on Feb 10, 2008, carried out in 127cities across the world with over 7000 people showing up. They adopted the GuyFawkes mask to insulate themselves from harm—a pop culture icon that became asymbol for the movement.

Anonymous thusly started to become political out of a practice of apolitical (butoften terrifying) trolling. Eventually, the name became associated almost entirely withprogressive, liberal or left activism—perhaps because, by 2010, these collectives hadestablished themselves with infrastructure off 4chan proper, getting a foothold on chatrooms (where I spent much of my time doing research) and other activist communitiesboth online and offline (contributing to Iran’s failed Green Revolution, or fightingcensorship in Australia). More so, in 2010, a new and extremely prolific Anonymousnode appeared and cross-pollinated with ‘hacktivist’ and WikiLeaks types, pushing iteven further away from the boards and from pure trolling. By 2011, even thoughAnonymous was much more than hacking, a lot of politically motivated computerintrusion was happening under the name.

Anonymous may strike as completely unique—a phenomenon of the 21st digitalcentury—but its semiotic features connect it with other phenomena. It’s a perfectexample of what media scholar Marco Deseriis (2015) calls ‘the multiple-use’ or the‘improper name,’ which is there for anyone’s use, but in a very particular way: bydesign, a multiple-use name rejects individual authorship in favor of showcasing anunknown collective—a conglomeration of people that often shifts. For example, somefamous multiple use names are Capitain Ludd, Luther Blisset, Nicolas Bourbaki, and


Karen Elliot. Using a collective name forces people to relinquish individual fame orrecognition, and instead pushes them to organize something, maybe an activity or apublication or call to arms, in the name of a collective.

What I found refreshing and fascinating about Anonymous was how seriously theytook the anti-individualism, anti-celebrity ethic. Say you were hanging out on a chatchannel and you sought some recognition or fame for some action you took (and to beclear, on chat channels people used stable nicknames, so reputations formed). Morelikely than not, if you made such an attempt, someone would puncture and/or deflateyour ego: you’d be criticized, chastised, or marginalized in some fashion. I wasintrigued by Anonymous because these activists came together not only to supportmany of the social movements and causes that I supported at the time—such as theArab Spring, Occupy, and fighting creepy security companies—but they did so in away that eschewed hyper-individualism. It was rather exhilarating for a collectiveenterprise to emerge in this way, and in a moment where other online currents wereall about showcasing the individual through something like social media.

PJ: Please describe similarities and differences between hacking and the activities ofAnonymous.

GC: TodayAnonymous is often identified with hackers and hacktivism. Their legacywill be measured and tied to hacking: breaking into a system, sabotaging it, or stealinginformation and putting it out in the world. Still, the majority of people originallyinvolved in Anonymous were not hackers. In contrast to many areas of hacker produc-tion where serious technical skills are a pre-requisite to participate, Anonymous wasmuch more open and participatory. Anonymous produced a lot of manifestos, videos,and artwork, so a lot of the people who got involved were not hackers but rather weregeeky types. Geeks and hackers are bedfellows—they may not have the same skill sets,but they hang out in similar places and care about similar issues (over net neutrality orcopyright restrictions, for instance) and share a similar vocabulary.

Still, what remains curious about Anonymous is its diverse roots. Because partici-pants are ‘hidden’ from each other, Anonymous is more diverse than other non-anonymous political domains. When we interact in face-to-face domains, or in special-ized online domains like Free Software, we know who we are dealing with, and wetend to be attracted to people like ourselves. With Anonymous, however, participantsdid not really know who else was involved, which eliminated the tendency for peopleto seek out those who were similar to them. Take, for example, LulzSec, a hacker groupin Anonymous. Although its members were all technical people, its makeup was prettydiverse: it included hardcore left anarchist Jeremy Hammond, ex-soldier in Iraq RyanAckroyd, Puerto Rican ‘Sabu’ Monsegur who came from a background of drugdealing, a young (at the time) 16-year-old Iraqi immigrant in London… and 2 Irishlads—one who had a rather well developed political sensibility, and the other who wasmotivated by a sense of justice. Although differing in political, social, and ethnicbackgrounds, they were united by Anonymous, where they came together to hacksystems and to flaunt the pathetic state of Internet security. Compared to explicitlyleftist hacker-inflected projects such as IndyMedia (2018), which was an importantcitizen media platform run by bona fide left activists, Anonymous had much lessideological unity. Nonetheless, people came together to act.

PJ: In Improper Names: Collective Pseudonyms from the Luddites to Anonymous,Marco Deseriis (2015) defines improper names as


the adoption of the same alias by organized collectives, affinity groups, andindividual authors. (…) Contrary to a proper name, whose chief function is tofix a referent as part of the operation of a system of signs, an improper name isexplicitly constructed to obfuscate both the identity and number of its referents(Deseriis 2015: 3).

By adopting an improper name, Anonymous has made a huge leap from anindividualist ethos of hacktivism to a new form of collectivism. How does this leapwork in practice? What are its main consequences?

GC: Anonymous’ ideology of collectivism and its rejection of individual fame isembedded in what they do, not just what they believe. Cynics may charge back on that,though: of course, it’s handy to remain anonymous because it functions pragmaticallyas a shield against law enforcement. But compared to the legal activities that transpiredunder the name Anonymous, the number of illegal activities was minuscule. Mostpeople were making and releasing videos, cheerleading on Twitter, or creating beautifulposters – all signed with the name ‘Anonymous’ (which was one of the ground rules formaking and releasing this stuff).

Remaining anonymous, though, is not an easy thing to do—I’ve gotten to experi-ence it firsthand. As an anthropologist who studies hacking, it was important for me toparticipate in Anonymous. I did not break the law when I was participating (not that Icould have, as I have no hacking skills!); instead, I worked with other people to createtexts for a couple of videos. In one case, I was very proud of a video I contributed to—Ithought the text was very poetic, and I wanted nothing more than to let the world knowthat I helped create this cool call to arms. Yet, I’ve never publicly identified myself,because if I did, I would be violating a core rule of the organization – not to attributeindividual authorship to creations. This is an incredibly hard rule to follow. Onoccasion, some people seek fame and recognition, but are criticized to the point thatthey are eventually kicked out (see Coleman 2014 for details). Anonymous submergesthe individual author within the collective, and they are proud of it!

PJ: Speaking of anonymity, my first instinct is individual: getting lost in a crowd,making a fake Facebook account… Yet, Deseriis shows that:

Anonymous allows for the experience of anonymity online to be named as ashared experience. Once anonymity becomes Anonymous, it also becomespseudonymous. That is, it is no longer an undifferentiated or anomic socialphenomenon, but something that can be mobilized and contended by differentparties towards a specific goal (Deseriis 2015: 176).

Please unpack this relationship between anonymity and pseudonymity.GC: Although this is mostly right, I would perhaps complicate the quote a bit: for

much of Anonymous’ early history, the name Anonymous (with a capital A) existedand functioned as a multiple use name. As such, the participants taking the name were,for the most part, not pseudonymous but Anonymous. Let me discuss how the ethic andname came into being.

A baseline commitment to anonymity was borne on 4chan, back in the mid-2000s,largely due to technical features backed by social norms. A former Anonymous troll


turned subsequent member of the Anti-Scientology brigade explained the dynamic betterthan I can: ‘The posts on 4chan have no names or any identifiable markers attached tothem. The only thing you are able to judge a post by is its content and nothing else. Thiselimination of the persona, and by extension everything associated with it, such asleadership, representation, and status, is [became] the primary ideal of Anonymous.’ Isubstituted ‘is’with ‘became’ because initially anonymity existed as a perfect example ofwhat RaymondWilliams defined as a structure of feeling, or what might be better termedas an infrastructure of feeling: ‘social experiences in solution, as distinct from othersocial semantic formations which have been precipitated and are more evidently andmore immediately available’ (Williams 1977: 133-134). Eventually, around 2005,Anonymous indeed precipitated anonymity as a primary ideal with participants suturinga structure of feeling to a moral code and to the name Anonymous. This code embodiedvarious facets, from the idealization of meritocracy to casting anonymity as a virtuousalternative to our celebrity obsessed culture. This was enabled by the collective name‘Anonymous’ and its consequent symbols of a headless man or a woman in a suit.

After 2010, when quarters of Anonymous became more firmly rooted in activism,this commitment underwent metamorphosis. It became ‘more nuanced…incarnatinginto the desire for leaderlessness and high democracy.’ These two tweets are goodexamples of what he means: FemAnonFatal is a Collective•NOT an individual move-ment NOT a place for self-promotion NOT a place for HATE BUT a place forSISTERHOOD It Is A place to Nurture Revolution Read Our Manifesto... •You ShouldHave Expected Us• #FemAnonFatal’ Ego & fame are by default, inherently contradic-tory to anonymity. The tallest blade of grass gets cut first. Remain unknown. Be#Anonymous. —Anonymous (@YourAnonNews) April 16, 2012.

‘This desire for leaderlessness and high democracy,’ with a few exceptions like thesetweets, was hard to see; it was largely visible to those like myself and a few othersinteracting closelywithAnonymous.More so, the normwas not only idealized, but sociallyenforced because by this time, with the activist oriented Anons, more social interactionoccurred pseudonymously. The era of anonymous Anonymous had ended by 2010.

Indeed, in chat rooms where Anonymous launched their ops, most chose to bepseudonymous and thus interacted with stable, pseudonym nicknames. Reputation,based on what you said and did, accrued. Soft leaders and more visible playersemerged. For instance, a Twitter account like AnonyOps (Twitter 2018) was one of ahandful of the more visible players. Behind stable anonymous names, people devel-oped personas and reputations, and some got very close to each other. Stability ofpseudonymous interactions and identities enabled lived ethical relations, which aremuch harder to achieve in a purely anonymous space. There were chat rooms dedicatedto topics from ‘let’s talk about the philosophy of anonymity’ to ‘let’s have a chat roomfor the reporters.’ This created shared collective identities and provided shared spaceswhere people could either be chastised or praised. And indeed, when people were seento pine for attention, or especially when they acted non-anonymously, they wereroutinely cut down or kicked out. Still, while the ideals of anonymity matured overtime, this ethic (and the multiple use name ‘Anonymous’) was borne, somewhatsurprisingly under the conditions of mass, deep anonymity.

PJ: Anonymous seems to self-regulate quite nicely. Please describe this mechanismof self-regulation. How, where, when, and by whom is it decided that an action will bemade by Anonymous (as opposed to the same action just being anonymously done)?


https://twitter.com/hashtag/Anonymous?src=hash

GC: The brief and simplistic answer is that anyone can simply decide by tagging anaction or claim as ‘Anonymous.’ This has happened many times. If a single person or agroup feels the need to call attention to some injustice, they can organize somecampaign under the name ‘Anonymous.’ This is one of the reasons that so manyAnonymous nodes have spawned across the globe. But, as with most things, this storyis also a bit more complicated.

Firstly, some actions never take off. Sometimes this is because those with power donot give an ‘op’ (also known as an operation) much attention in comparison to others.Just like other domains, Anonymous is not lacking power plays and/or micro-politics.Secondly, while Anonymous did attract many different types of people, many of thoseinvolved—thought not all—had connections to the Internet. This means that it wasmore likely that a certain population—geeks of one kind or another—would adopt thename. Thirdly, patterns that formed between 2010 and 2012 meant that many ofAnonymous’ actions tended to lie on the liberal to left side of the political spectrum(with a few exceptions). In this regard, the fact that Anonymous got involved in theperiod of progressive ferment from 2011 onwards was important.

Still, there were exceptions, though rare, to this trend. For instance, there was afascist Anonymous node in Germany with a large Facebook following. Many of theother German groups were quite upset and tried to brand that group as ‘faux-Anony-mous.’ This was ultimately unsuccessful, though, given that anyone can take on theAnonymous name. Still, the great majority of nodes, groups, and actions tended to lieon the liberal to left side of the spectrum simply due to historical contingency: a numberof the big operations from 2011 to 2012 were squarely of the hacktivist sort or wereimbricated in the progressive social movements of 2011, especially. If you went to anyof the street demonstrations or camps that unfurled that year, you’d likely see Anon-ymous masks. So, a pattern of identification developed so that ‘progressive’ typestended to deploy the name. As the reactionary and far right grew in importance, theynever took the name—even though it was possible to. Perhaps it was the left/liberalbranding that made it an unlikely choice.

PJ: Is this pseudonymity a bit dangerous? When you are partially anonymous orpseudonymous, then you can build a reputation; when you build a reputation, then you canget access to more and more sensitive material; and then, as you show using the exampleof the Anon named Sabu (Coleman 2014), you can sell this information to the FBI…

GC: Absolutely – the FBI has used this tactic to access sensitive information.Through pseudonymous interaction, people got to know each other pretty well, andcame to trust and like each other. This led to the sharing of too much information, andsubsequently, their capture (that is, once an informant existed). Good rapport andchemistry help when you are working on a shared project and giving out some personalinformation can be useful to create ties. This, however, eventually became theirAchilles heel. Being constantly online, even if pseudonymously (such as Sabu, Kala,or Topiary on Twitter), drew a lot of attention from law enforcement and haters. Forexample, Sabu was outed as Hector X Monsegur by a small security group calledBacktrace Security (he had used his name in public before and it was tied to the nickname Sabu). The FBI was also following him. At one point he logged in withoutanonymizing himself, and they found his IP address.

Hacker collectives who are breaking the law must think very seriously abouttechnical and social anonymity. Anonymous provided the proof of concept but did a


terrible job of it. It is very difficult not to give real details about yourself, and the morestable your persona is, the more likely someone will eventually find you. Future groupsmust be much more careful. Maybe they should put themselves out in a more limitedway to draw less attention and give a lot less information about themselves. It is alsovery useful to appear for a period of time, disappear, and then completely reinventoneself as a new persona. Persistence of identity, even if pseudonymous, is a securityvulnerability.

We have seen some groups, such as Phineas Fisher (see Blackbird 2018), who havedone very similar work to Anonymous: hacking leak sensitive, politically worthwhiledata to the world (see Coleman 2014 for the history of the hack-leak combo). Whoeverwas behind the persona, whether an individual or group, was far more security savvythan Anonymous. After a big hack, they would hardly broadcast the information aboutthe hack for a few weeks or a couple of months. Then, they would disappear and re-emerge again only when they did a new hack a couple of years later. Phineas Fisherrecently killed off the persona all together, announcing, ‘I’m never coming back as thispersona.’ If a new persona is created in the future, it will have to be substantiallydifferent, so that people will not connect it to Phineas Fisher. In order to achievesecurity through anonymity, hackers have to be much craftier in putting their onlinepersona out there.

PJ: Does this mean that social anonymity is a bigger challenge than technicalanonymity?

GC: Both are tough to achieve. For technical anonymity, you can never rely on justone tool. You need at least a couple of different ones. Even then, though, if you makejust one mistake, you are screwed. Social anonymity is even harder, insofar as it is inhuman nature to share personal information. In fact, it’s so innate that some people donot even know they are doing it, or how/why they get caught! A good example isJeremy Hammond, a very experienced hacker who had been jailed, but had taken verystrong technical precautions in his work. One of his mistakes, though, was using thenickname Anarchaos, signaling that he was an anarchist hacker (which there are few ofin the United States). Under this online nickname, he mentioned things about hisprotest history, like having attended the Republican National Convention protest. Assuch, with the help of their informant, Sabu, the FBI was able to collect whatAnarchaos was publishing online.

When the FBI arrested Jeremy Hammond while he was on probation for drugtesting, they noticed that Anarchaos (and some other affiliated nicknames) stoppedpublishing. Clearly, they likely knew that Jeremy Hammond was Anarchaos! Perhapsthis could/would have been avoided if Jeremy Hammond used a very different nameand persona. For instance, had he made his identity seem like an Australian libertarianreally into bitcoin and not even a left anarchist, and had he used Australian mannerismsand talked about Fosters beer, it would have maybe thrown the FBI off a little bit. ButJeremy Hammond’s persona was his life. This makes his story a good example of thetribulations associated with sharing too much personal information (even when tech-nical precautions are taken seriously).

PJ: Let us move away from the individual – what is the relationship betweenAnonymous and democracy?

GC: Until recently, online spaces were often cast as uber participatory and byextension, more inherently democratic. Many theorists have convincingly and


thoughtfully punctured that argument, however (Barney 2000; Dean 2009; Dean et al.2019). People are more apt to listen to these critiques now than ever before given whathas transpired on the Internet. From Russian propaganda (and Donald Trump’s Twitteraccount), to any of Facebook’s scandals, the far right’s use of the Internet has finallykilled the wicked witch of techno-utopianism, a myth not sustained by us, but bypundits and journalists. But it would be as foolish (more like suicide) to abandon thesetools and all they can offer for social movements.

For nearly 20 years, boosters and critics alike tended to refer to somesingle—and I think incorrect—category of activity called Internet activism ordigital activism—a term that has adorned countless infographics and hundredsof book and article titles. Commentators are slowly recognizing that the Internetrefers not to a technological singularity, but rather that it encompasses amultitude of tools (from geeky non-corporate chat channels to corporate socialmedia), distinct communicative genres (like the Twitter #hashtag or anonymoustrolling), tactics (like hacking into a company to retrieve evidence of corruptionor sophisticated grass roots propaganda campaigns), and specific media (likepunchy videos or Internet memes). Different actors and social movements wieldthese genres and tools differently to produce incomparable types of activism.Some interventions, like hacking, are historically novel and are antagonistic andrisky; other interventions are remediations of older formats: such as the onlinepetition. Flattening and papering over these has made it harder to both assessthe use of these tools and appreciate how we might strategically wield differentgenres of protest.

To return to Anonymous: this collective is not a great model for how to run anorganization democratically. Actually, it’s not an organization— it’s a little too chaotic.It’s still, though, important and admirable.

Firstly, Anonymous provides the space where people can come together for acollective endeavor while being asked to put aside the need for individual recognition.Given the rampant individualism and desire for fame and recognition in Westernsocieties, we need more spaces where we can practice the art of self-effacement andwork toward collective goals. Again, Anonymous provided an admirable model forhow and why this is done. Secondly, the logic of Anonymous allows for certain formsof decentralized autonomous collective decision-making without requiring consensusand uniformity across the network. In other words, instead of demanding that people allshare the same ethic, Anonymous works under a ‘meta-ethic’ that suggests that ‘youcan do want you want, and I can do what I want.’ This meta-ethic does not workeverywhere, but there is some value in an experience where you cannot necessarilypolice everything. This is like the diversity of tactics in anarchist organizing wherepeople say: ‘I don’t agree with your tactic but go ahead and do it!’ This democraticthrust in the ability to accommodate difference is admirable.

With that said, though, problems arise if the name is used for extreme racist or otherinterventions that make people uncomfortable. As I already mentioned, in Germany, forexample, the name Anonymous was used for fascist projects, and other GermanAnonymous groups said: ‘that’s not us, we’re not the fascists.’ So, you can see thatthere are real limits to configuring a name as a commons for anyone to use. Policingboundaries is important, but so is the space to allow for a diversity of tactics anddifferences. This can prevent total fragmentation and division.


Finally, Anonymous provides a model for how to remain unwatchable and un-trackable. Historically, states went after individuals engaged in political projects;currently, surveillance capitalism works by collecting and aggregating individual data.Anonymous monkey wrenches that logic and makes it hard to tally and trace who theyare. It is important to think about how people as individuals and groups can makethemselves illegible to the state and to capitalism.

PJ: I’m glad you mentioned anarchism! In our recent dialog, Jodi Dean gave asobering critique of anarchist horizontalism:

Albert-Laszlo Barabasi’s Linked: How Everything Is Connected to EverythingElse and What It Means for Business, Science, and Everyday Life (2003) showsthat complex networks are not flat or horizontal at all. Complex networks arecharacterized by free choice, growth and preferential attachment. These threecharacteristics generate hubs, and their links are distributed according to powerlaws where the top (hub or most popular node) has twice as many links as thenext one, which has twice as many at the next and so on. So there is the one at thetop and the many at the bottom. The curve is thus very steep with a long flat tail.The horizontal processes favored by anarcho-libertarians create the conditions ofhierarchy that they are against. It’s like they see the long tail, but not thehierarchy, the steep curve. (Dean et al. 2019: 223).

Can we say that Anonymous is organized in anarchist ways, and that it will fall into thesame trap?

GC: I agree with Dean’s critique – power has the tendency to pool among hubs ofpeople or single individuals. But I also think that there are ways one can modulate that!Organizing is a very strategic enterprise and we have to be comfortable with differenttypes of formats and their limits. We need to think when we need a leader, or when it’sbest to forgo a leader and organize in a flatter fashion. An anarchist consensus-basedformat, which tries to fully do away with hierarchy, can be naïve and problematicunless you find a way to work against the tendencies that Dean describes. That is, justbecause the tyranny of structureless is real, one can institute mechanisms in non-hierarchical spaces to modulate the pooling of informal power. Also, not every politicalintervention or organization should be consensus driven.

In Anonymous, the hackers had more power at some level. They could not do whatthey did without the video makers, the media makers, and the people who could rallytheir troops, so there was a weird sort of symbiosis. The hackers, though, also had themost to lose—many lost years in jail. Anonymous was also less organized than certainanarchist collectives that try to intentionally build up non-hierarchical consensus-basedcommunities. Anonymous was more chaotic and harder to predict, so it was a differentbeast altogether (even if it had some of those tendencies). I do not think we necessarilyhave a vocabulary, yet, to understand Anonymous. Michel de Certeau (1984) rightfullynotes that tactics are more short-term and spontaneous, while strategies are more stable.Anonymous was really tactical at some level and is not a good model to think aboutstrategic long-term interventions. Anonymous is very valuable as a political formationto rally troops, to publicize information, and to hack, but it should not be used as themodel for other forms of political organization.


PJ: In 2016, after Oxford Dictionaries announced post-truth as their Word of theYear (Oxford Dictionaries 2016), the concept suddenly gained a lot of popularity. In anarrow sense, the concept of post-truth refers to a curious mix of truth and lies exhibitedin Donald Trump’s presidential campaign (Jandrić 2018b). However, a deeper inquiryinto the concept reveals philosophical questions about the nature of truth and humancommunication (Fuller and Jandrić 2019; Dean et al. 2019). Arguably, Anonymous’actions are often directed towards revealing the truth. What are the potentials of theseactions in the post-truth world?

GC: One can only conceptualize and understand a moment in time in relation to thecontext. In its heyday, I would often portray Anonymous as confusing because onecould never be sure when they were telling the truth or when they were telling lies.Measured against the rise of Trump, however, or against the Russian propagandamachine, or against the Far-Right, Anonymous is very earnest, straightforward, public,and transparent (see Coleman 2014). They never doctored information when dumpingemails, their manifestos were calls to arms, and they worked with journalists instead oftrying to trick them into publishing false information.

Still, Anonymous demonstrates that relying on pure reason and truth is not enough.We always need a catchy vehicle or channel to compel people to pay attention: and hereAnonymous shone. They were rather performative, relying on a politics of spectacle toensure protracted attention. Those who think we can just rely on unmasking lies to getat truth are extremely naïve. I think that liberals who have tended to elevate the powerof truth and reason are finally understanding this. Anonymous offers very importantlessons about the role of emotion, fantasy, and visual culture in getting people to payattention to problems.

PJ: You are a writer, a researcher, and a prominent public intellectual with anamazing number of public appearances. What does it mean to be a public intellectualin the age of post-truth?

GC: In the United States, papers like the Washington Post and the New York Timesare portraying themselves as bastions of truth. In comparison to Fox News or Breitbartthey are beacons of truth, but prior to this era, scores of critics, scholars, and activistswere critical of the liberal mainstream media, for very good reason. They have fallenvictim to state and corporate propaganda, purport to be neutral when bias is a conditionof knowledge, and often are not as independent as they purport to be (Lawrence et al.2007; Herman and Chomsky 2002). This has been well documented, but one of myfavorite books that really gets at the stakes of the devastation that can follow mediamanipulation is Merchants of Doubt (Oreskes and Conway 2010). The authors docu-ment how scientists and industry played the mainstream media to sow doubt overtobacco and climate science. In the era prior to post-truth, mainstream media was notnecessarily a shining armor of truth. So, it’s worth thinking about how existingweaknesses in our media landscape have made the current scourge of lies more likely.Scholars and experts, of course, should intervene as much as they can to stamp outinaccuracies and other manipulations. But we are not always sought out and heard.There is a cottage industry of scholar-pundits who get tapped as ‘experts’. Some aregood, others offer quite questionable analysis.

Because there were so few people looking at Anonymous, I was sought out as anexpert. I spent a lot of time clearing up a lot of misunderstandings about Anonymous.Some journalists really wanted to find the one leader, which was a laughable inquiry


given how many people were contributing. These journalists, though, were simplyobsessed with it (or with portraying them as cyber-terrorists)! I think the expert canproductively work with journalists in order to diminish misunderstandings and manip-ulations and help them provide more accurate reporting. With that said, though, I do notthink we could simply believe that truth in reporting, even in its best forms, can eversolve the problem of getting people to believe in the truth. Truthful journalism ineducating the public is necessary but insufficient. In order to change people’s minds, weneed much more targeted public relations and an honest propaganda campaign.

The Transgressive Nature of Hacker Anthropology

PJ: Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Coleman 2013) andHacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Coleman 2014)are ethnographic works. What are the distinctive contributions of ethnography andanthropology to our understanding of the digital realm?

GC: Along with Christopher Kelty (2008), I was one of the first to conductanthropological work on hackers. However, I built my research on a foundation ofexcellent journalistic, historical, and critical work in the field, and have drawn from thelikes of Fred Turner (2006), Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron (1996), MacKenzieWark (2004), Steven Levy (1984), and Bruce Sterling (1992).

What an anthropologist is well positioned to do is to measure what people sayagainst their practice. What hackers say about what they do sometimes aligns with theirpractice, but other times it does not. For instance, a lot of work on hackers hashighlighted hacker’s embrace of individualism because it is what they do talk about,value, and instantiate. Hackers also behold rather communitarian social habits, yet thatcommunitarian sociality is less commonly a part of their vocabulary. Rather, their self-understandings are largely dominated by discourses of individualism and anti-author-itarianism, especially, but not exclusively, in the United States. As an anthropologist,you can see that is part of the picture but that hackers engage—deeply and quitemeaningfully—in collective social practices, yet fail to articulate that in their proscrip-tions, norms, and writings.

PJ: Speaking of anthropology, one usually imagines researchers staying withfaraway communities and engaging in unusual activities (Schneider 2013) - such asspiritual healing in Guyana, which was your first academic interest. Yet, you broughtanthropological practice into a completely different environment – IRC chatrooms andother online spaces shared by Anonymous. Arguably, your job was much morecomplex than standard anthropological research – before starting, you first needed toreinvent anthropological method for the digital environment. Please describe the mainchallenges facing a classically trained anthropologist in this exciting venture into thedigital realm.

GC: My first challenge was simply convincing my advisor that hackers werelegitimate to study. My sense is that my peers could see that hackers might beinteresting politically but believed that they lacked cultural depth. Secondly, anthro-pology is often rooted in fieldwork and the immersiveness of fieldwork is alwaysoverwhelming, whether it’s for hackers or religious healers in Guyana. As a researcher,you arrive as an outsider and a stranger and have to convince your interlocutors that it is


okay to belong and to essentially snoop around – not for weeks, not for months, but foryears! It’s really awkward, unnatural, and weird! And that challenge remains in all trulyethnographic environments. Thirdly, when you do anthropology research in a farawayplace, it really requires you to be there, and when you are not, the work more or lessstops. This contrasts digital anthropology, which is always on and ongoing (today thatsituation is a bit more complicated, though, given that there is usually some onlineelement to most research areas). The pressure to always do research is constant, andyou have to know when to step away. Finally, hackers are highly educated and somecan be judgmental about your skills (or lack of them). Being a woman certainly helped,insofar as they did not expect me to have the same technical skills as a male counterpartand were just thrilled that I was using Linux and stuff like that. I suspect it would havebeen harder to garner their respect had I been male.

For my first project on the Debian community and free software, face to faceresearch was particularly important; I was living in San Francisco in order to spendday in and day out day with hackers. I was constantly attending small events and largeconferences. It became apparent rather quickly that the perception that most hackersinteract simply and only online was just plain wrong. In the past – or in circles wherethe law is broken – of course interaction remains online. But most hackers alsocongregate face to face all the time and tend to cluster in high tech cities like Berlin,San Francisco, and Sao Paolo.

In that regard, Anonymous was much harder to study. Because of their law-breaking, my research had to be primarily online, and I did not know who was behindthe screen. Initially it was very exciting, but then it drove me crazy having all theseconversations with people I did not know beyond a two-dimensional nickname andscreen. I also was on lock down, chained to the computer every day. Like so muchanthropological research, it became all-consuming.

PJ: In spite of the radical change of context, digital anthropology is far fromimmune to traditional anthropological questions. Please describe your level of involve-ment with the Anonymous, and the main challenges in setting boundaries between you(the researcher) and the protagonists (those researched). How did you decide where todraw this boundary?

GC: Many journalists who covered Anonymous accused me of doing good workbut also of getting too close – which they saw as causing unrepentant bias in myresearch. My reply (at least in my head) was something like: ‘I am doing exactly what Iam supposed to do, you just don’t understand anthropology.’ We’ve long been com-fortable with the intimacy borne from being in the trenches, but that situates yourknowledge in ways where objectivity—if such a thing even exits—is impossible. I amtotally fine with that state, though. You just need to make your positionality clear andthat’s always what I’ve tried to do in my work.

The accusations – or at least remarks – were so (annoyingly) consistent, I eventuallywrote a piece about my interactions with journalists and their perception of my so-called bias entitled ‘Gopher, Translator, and Trickster: The Ethnographer and theMedia’ (Coleman 2017a). This article helped explain my methodology and type ofexpertise to journalists. It’s difficult to understand something without doing it, and therewere moments where I definitely contributed to the labor of Anonymous’ operations. Iwas quite comfortable helping them – with proofreading, editing manifestos and calls,getting journalists on the channels, and coordinating connections – as long as I was not


breaking the law. I could have been more involved, though, if I had created a call foraction or started an operation, but for me it was enough to experience what they weredoing to gain the respect and trust of people. You cannot just be there and not help! Thisclose intimacy, within bounds of reason, is what anthropology is all about. I have beentold that I have Stockholm syndrome, that I was so involved that I did not see theterrible qualities of Anonymous, but I am very well aware of some of the limits of thisform of activism and broached the topic in my book. Also, people within Anonymousare very thoughtful, even self-critical themselves. Every domain has its internal criticsand talking to these internal critics is particularly important.

PJ: What about emotional engagement and boundaries?GC: There are different anthropologists and different approaches. I developed

friendships, and friendships are emotional. Some anthropologists do not become friendswith the people that they are studying, though. That’s a personal choice which has somelimitations. I’m glad that there are anthropologists who do not become friends withtheir subjects, so they have distance which allows them to do certain things. But I cando things that they cannot do and vice versa.

PJ: Anthropologists are not flies on the wall. They need to simultaneously have onefoot in and one foot out – close enough to earn a group’s confidence, and far enough toremain researchers. This is especially important in the case of Anonymous, who oftenengage in illegal activities. In Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces ofAnonymous (Coleman 2014), you explain that you earned the confidence of Anony-mous by becoming their knowledgeable public voice. What are the main challengesassociated with this role?

GC: I decided to start speaking with press about Anonymous in late 2010, soon afterI became fully embedded. At the beginning, talking to journalists felt precarious. I wasconcerned that I may be spreading lies and misinformation because I did not knowenough, or that I was being fed false information, or that I would say something thatwould make Anonymous upset and lead them to slam the door shut. Those early pressinteractions were psychologically unnerving. I was concerned that the access and trust Ihad gained could just end any moment. Eventually as I learned more and more aboutAnonymous, I grew more confident in my ability to speak to the media.

Actually, I eventually talked to so many journalists that they became ethnographicsubjects as well! I started to treat themwithmore nuance… and the first thing to note is thatjournalism is not some unitary block. The variation in quality and approaches is significant.Motherboard (2018), ABC, CBS, and othermainstreammedia, reside on difference planetswhen it comes to their technology expertise. Motherboard has many journalists on staffwith deep knowledge about hackers and technology. Conversely, an ABC producer onceasked me how ‘he could find the Julian Assange figure of Anonymous?’ I had to suppressmy laughter…and explain ‘No, there is no Julian Assange figure of Anonymous!’

PJ: After publication of Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces ofAnonymous (Coleman 2014), you became a prominent public figure – and you are nowbeing invited to give numerous talks, interviews, etc. Please describe the relationshipbetween your academic persona and your public persona. Do they complement eachother, get in each other’s way, or both? How do you balance the popular and theacademic?

GC: At the university, introductory lecture classes are filled with students who arebasically members of the public and they may or may not be interested in your area of


expertise. During my talks I therefore approach members of the public like I approachmy first year and second year students. Seen in that way, it’s not all that different tointerface with the non-university public. With that said, academic writing is verydifferent from popular writing, and it’s not always easy to switch. In the public sphere,there is a pressure to comment on things as they are happening, and I still find that veryhard. Then there is the question of format. On the one hand, I find these 800-word op-ed pieces, published in places like the Guardian, pretty meaningless. Every once in awhile, someone says something interesting, but it tends to be things that scholarsalready know, and I’m not even convinced that they reach anybody except peoplewho already know them.

On the other hand, scholarly journal articles are just boring and hard to get through.Sometimes there is something really important, innovative, and meaty and so of courseI do appreciate what gets written. There is just too much (and much of it is ofquestionable quality). I do think that we need more hybrid formats. For instance, Ireally like Limn (see Coleman 2017b) – it is a scholarly magazine that publishes at amore rapid pace and in a more accessible format. In Limn you can publish something alittle bit longer than a journalistic piece, maybe 2000 or 3000 words, but you arewriting it when things are still a little bit new and have not fully been worked out. So,you get your piece out there, you get feedback, and then you can spend a couple ofyears doing another, more substantial piece.

PJ: These days, there is a lot of talk about the need for transcending traditionalborders of academic research (see Jandrić 2016). You also work across the bordersbetween anthropology and information science. What do you make of traditionalacademic disciplines and the need to transcend them?

GC: It’s important to develop expertise in a discipline because it helps orient andground you as you confront the sheer complexity of any cultural and political phe-nomena. It provides a starting point, a set of questions, some methods, and texts so youcan navigate that terrain. Methodologically, I am a classical anthropologist and appre-ciate my vigorous training in anthropology as I know I have a solid bedrock andfoundation for proceeding with my research. At the same time, though, disciplinaryparadigms can limit us as well. If your work cannot speak beyond your discipline, thenthere is probably something wrong – or you are thinking to insularly. Social phenomenaare complex; while I focus on cultural elements, there is still political economy orpsychological elements at play. We simply cannot address every element that feeds intoa certain topic. Rather, we must divide and conquer. You have to find this balancebetween being grounded in a discipline and speaking beyond your discipline, whichrequires reading about, taking seriously, and integrating other approaches in yourwriting and thinking. Media, communication, and information studies are really goodat that interdisciplinarity, partially because they do not have as much of a shared historyas disciplines like anthropology, sociology, and history.

PJ: In Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous youwrite that LulzSec and Anonymous live out Nietzsche’s maxims: ‘They dared tosubvert and break formal law, etiquette and mores, and experimented with the art oftransgression. They reminded us: to make life into art, and art into life, you sometimesneed to break rules’ (Coleman 2014: 562-563). How do you see the relationshipbetween art and academic research?


GC: This is one of my favorite quotations! I fully am an empiricist, and still thinkimagination and intuition are important for my own scholarly practice: they havehelped me conceive of my priorities and how to write. I’ll give an example: an intuitivemoment, for instance, led me to hone in on humor in the hacker world and I ended upwriting extensively about its existence in my first book. One day I had what I can onlydescribe as a vision that humor played an outsized role among hackers – and I ran withit. I was not thinking in any rational way. It just hit me in a very emotional way andthat’s when I decided to focus on the topic. So, one side concerns feeling your waythrough important research questions.

The other side concerns the aesthetics of writing—an area that, to our peril, we oftenoverlook. We offer arguments but what about rhetoric? What about presentation? Whatabout getting people to listen to our arguments? We need a vehicle to transport it andwe should be thinking as much about the container as the content. We should be asobsessed with crafting compelling, accessible, and enticing formats as we are withformulating our arguments.

The Postdigital Challenge of the Existential Condition

PJ: The era of cheap oil, globalization, and digital technologies has brought aboutsignificant change in our social arrangements. Early theorists like Manuel Castells(Castells 2003) have talked about information capitalism; these days, scholars like JodiDean (Dean 2009; Dean et al. 2019) are developing new concepts like communicativecapitalism. What is the position of online activism within communicative capitalism?

GC: I’m not a fan of the terms ‘online activism’ or ‘digital activism’ (though I’m thefirst to admit, I’ve been guilty of using them as well). There are just too manyincomparable forms of activism that can be carried out online: what exactly connectsactivities like hacking into a computer, the establishment of the independent medialcollective IndyMedia in the late 1990s, and online petitions (just to mention a fewexamples)? Very little. Sure, digital tools have now become omnipresent, and socialmovements cannot exist without them. Still, because these genres are mushed andmashed together and because pundits have historically treated new media as thepreferred conduit for social change, the critical work by Jodi Dean (2009), Astra Taylor(2014) and others served a vital corrective role. Dean’s analysis on the symbiosisbetween communication technologies and capitalism (which is spot on) is a paradigmthat is now being blown to pieces because of the use of technologies by conservativeforces and the emergence of tools of surveillance, domination, manipulation, andpropaganda such as Facebook. Still, even if technology will never save us and canoften hurt us, using these tools for social movements (in a non-naïve way) can providea different path for communicative capitalism. That is, political organizers and activistsmust deploy all available technologies, genres, and platforms to organize, agitate, getthe word out, and enroll new participants. To simply critique technology and then fail touse it, would be short sighted.

PJ: These days, there is a lot of talk about reinventing Marxism for the digitalage (see Dean 2009; Dean et al. 2019). What is the relevance of Marx’s theories foryour work?


GC: Many free software hackers have managed to create spaces of non-alienationfor their labor. Projects such as Python (2018) and Debian (2018) consist of individualswho autonomously come together, who have access to the means of production, andwho are in control of the fruits of their labor in ways that do not happen when you workfor a software firm. But it would be very naïve to stop at the Marxist analysis for theseand other cases of hacker labor because hackers’ love of autonomy and creation is alsoexploited by technological capitalist giants. Google, for example, exploits hacker laborin a profound way. They will tell hackers: ‘you can work 20 percent on your ownprojects that we don’t own and control.’ Google draws hackers into working for theircompany by exploiting hackers’ commitments to their own autonomous side projects!Free software hackers create sites of non-alienation, and then their commitment getsexploited by the big technological giants where many of them end up working.

Still hackers have often been too insular, ensuring their productive freedom butcontributing to tech giants and companies that are exploiting their workers and others.In response, we need to try to convince hackers and technologists to form or join uptech-oriented collectives and cooperatives. This is where the work of Trebor Scholz andNathan Schneider (Platform Cooperativism 2018) is so important: they recognize thatsome of the new economic models introduced by capitalist platforms like Uber arepowerful and here to stay. They just need to be refigured so that workers are in control.And more so, so that the sharing economy does not screw over citizens – which we arebeginning to see with Airbnb in every major European and North American city.

PJ: Speaking of Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider, what do you make of theemancipatory potentials of Platform Cooperativism (2018)?

GC: When we think of free software projects like Python or Debian, many may notimmediately think of them as worker owned online cooperatives, and yet in manyrespects that’s exactly what they are. While many of the participants are not workers inthe traditional sense—garnering a salary and benefits and clocking 9 to 5 day—they dodetermine and control the means of production. In this way, free software projectsshould be seen as cooperative. We have a lot to learn from them. A class of collectivesoftware institutions has staying power and many have lasted. Debian, for example, hasexisted for 23 years – that’s ancient for Internet time.

Online cooperatives - when compared to brick and mortar factories that requiresignificant capital to get going - cost less to start up. Given the existence of actualfunctioning worker cooperatives in the form of free software projects, it is totallyrealistic to take existing economic businesses like Uber and AirBnB and remake theminto cooperative platforms! The difficult part is not so much the software (althoughsomeone needs to code it) but rather is the hard work of organizing workers so that theycontribute to such projects in large enough numbers to provide meaningful alternativesto the existing capitalist driven ones.

PJ: Please explore the relationship between digital participation and knowledgemaking.

GC:When people are writing about open source software projects like Wikipedia, Iam always disappointed by the obsessive emphasis on peer-to-peer production, open-ness and participation. Many of these projects are predicated, to some degree, on thesethree elements. But these projects only thrive because they are not open, they are notsimply peer to peer, and because participation is constrained. They flourish becausethey are institutions, with overt policy and procedures, and these elements are so often


missing from the conversation and, with some important exceptions, even the analysisof these projects. We have tended to hyper focus on and elevate openness andindividual participation as ideals because of the way they align with and confirm ourcultural ideals and biases, but we ignore and fail to think through how these projectsscale and organize themselves as institutional collectives.

Making the institutional dimensions readily apparent and visible is important forseveral reasons. Many projects have failed because they model themselves on theseprojects thinking ‘we just have to keep our doors open, do nothing, and magicallypeople will participate and everything will be good!’ No way! Successful projects worknot because people participate (they do) but because participants architect complexsocial collectives with procedures and governance. This was the emphasis in my workwith the free software project Debian (Coleman 2013). I made visible the collectivismat work in these projects. I disagree with the critique that goes: ‘participation alignswith liberal individualistic philosophy, so let’s do away with participation.’ Our societytends to idealize participation and individualism, so it’s impractical to stomp it out ofexistence. Instead, let us also show where participation meets collectivism (as itinvariably does).

PJ: Many early theorists of online communities believed that participatory technol-ogies such as Web 2.0 will indeed bring about radical equality (e.g. Rheingold 1995,2002; Rheingold in Jandrić 2017) or even certain forms of anarchism (Jandrić 2010).However, it soon became clear that even the most egalitarian technical infrastructureseventually produce non-egalitarian spaces. For instance, Ford and Wajcman show that‘Wikipedia is held up as the collaborative utopia: a world model of free, decentralizedparticipatory democracy. Yet underneath this idealized image, an obdurate genderdivide remains: the overwhelming majority of contributors are male’ (Ford andWajcman 2017: 522). How would you explain this tendency; what can we do about it?

GC: Egalitarian practices and norms, whether in anarchist collectives or in acade-mia, always have the tendency to creep toward hierarchy. Structurelessness is alimitation on egalitarian-like spaces. As the famous title of an important article on thetopic put it, there can be a ‘tyranny of structurelessness.’ The more that we recognizethat human interaction often tends towards hierarchy, the more we can create proce-dures to reign in that tendency. That is, egalitarianism is a practice that requiresprocedures, vigilance, and constant modulation. The choice is not between hierarchyand structureless but about thoughtful mechanisms to share and distribute power.Anyone who has worked in a context with no power and total hierarchy and workedin contexts with power sharing and egalitarian ways, I think, knows that the latter ispreferred over the former. However, the tendency for power to pool and corrupt willnever, ever disappear even in self-avowed egalitarian spaces. There are spaces that aremore or less egalitarian, and there are procedures that are more or less successful, butthey require constant revisiting.

Furthermore, equality comes in different forms and in different levels. Take forexample the American university system: is it a meritocracy? At some level not at all,because if you come from a well-off family and you have gone to good school, you arefar more likely to get in and succeed. At that level, it is a total myth. But, once you arein, higher grades aren’t given to those with better looks, connections, and power. Or forinstance, in Canada or parts of Europe where education is more affordable across the


board (compared to the US) the so-called meritocracy is still rather partial but betterfunctioning than in the US where education is so expensive.

It is the same with online spaces. And while participants in volunteer projects suchas Wikipedia, Debian, Python, and Tor often embrace meritocracy, they are very awareof these dynamics and the limits of meritocracy. They are stacked against people withless power, less education, etc., and if these projects really want to be more open, thenthey have to intervene in their recruitment, codes of conduct, and policies, to level theplaying field.

PJ: The mission statement of Postdigital Science and Education begins with thefollowing statement:

We are increasingly no longer in a world where digital technology and media isseparate, virtual, ‘other’ to a ‘natural’ human and social life. This has inspired theemergence of a new concept—’the postdigital’—which is slowly but surelygaining traction in a wide range of disciplines. Published in the influential Wiredmagazine, a major source of inspiration for the growing body of postdigitalresearch is Nicholas Negroponte’s article ‘Beyond Digital’ which boldly claims:‘Face it—the digital revolution is over’ (Negroponte 1998). This does not meanthat the digital is not important. However, continues Negroponte, ‘its literal form,the technology, is already beginning to be taken for granted, and its connotationwill become tomorrow’s commercial and cultural compost for new ideas. Like airand drinking water, being digital will be noticed only by its absence, not itspresence’ (Negroponte 1998). (Jandrić et al. 2018: 893)

Please comment on the concept of the postdigital. What are its theoretical and practicalpotentials?

GC: I appreciate the concept because it acknowledges that technology, in manyparts of the world, is so woven into every aspect of our lives that it’s not meaningful todifferentiate between online and offline. This digital dualism, as some have phrased it(Jurgenson 2011), created this weird, ontological division that proved to be unhelpfuland plain wrong in some cases. For instance, for the first 15 years of digital studies, thedigital domain was somehow cast as immaterial. The emphasis on infrastructure, all therage today, was non-existent. I understand the need to talk about things like cognitivelabor, but you cannot have cognitive labor without a machine, electricity, servers, andthose that maintain the machines. The level of ignorance was astounding. It is a goodreminder that our models—always limited and provisional—can be just plain wrongand we should always subject them to scrutiny.

Without a focus on the material basis of software and the Internet, most earlyscholars of the Internet – with a few exceptions (Barney 2000; Agre 1994; Chun2005; Galloway 2004) –missed the boat on things like surveillance and control. Or, forinstance, other scholars were casting things like online publishing and interaction ascheap and inherently democratic. Once you consider the cost of servers, electricity, andlabor, there is nothing cheap about online platforms. Nor is there anything inherentlydemocratic about their mere existence and it is astonishingly naive to ever think that isthe case. But it also seems to be an enduring and persistent way to think abouttechnology – especially communication technologies – in the West.


However, even if more people are online, technological saturation is and will alwaysbe uneven. Access, literacy, and use are still unevenly distributed. The state oftechnology in North America, Europe, and parts of China and Japan should not bethe standard by which we describe the state of the world. Too many descriptivecategories like the ‘networked age’ or the ‘network society’ were too sweeping andfailed to take into account distinct patters of use across the world...

PJ: A century ago the Frankfurt School started speaking of about the irrationalconsequences of rationality, and the debate over the ‘irrationality of rationality’ hascontinued until this day (Ritzer and Atalay 2010: 386; see also Ritzer et al. 2018). Doyou see grassroots movements such as hacktivism and Anonymous as potentialcorrectives for this trend, as a part of the problem, or both?

GC: There are many facets to the irrationality of rationality, but one stems fromtreating technology—in all instances—as progressive when in fact it is often wielded asa tool of oppression, preventing human flourishing, well-being, and solidarity. Becausehacktivists and Anonymous are so closely allied to technology, one might assume thatthey simply perpetuate the problem but generally they act as a correctives to theirrationality of rationality. Firstly, they provide some of the most trenchant critiquesof technological systems, say, of those tied to surveillance, and those corporations andinstitutions that implement them. Secondly, they often build tools, like the browser, Tor,which provides technical alternatives to the hegemonic tools that set into motion theirrationality of rationality. Finally, a class of hackers overtly risk a lot by hacking,sleuthing into systems to retrieve politically important information to leak. Takentogether they remind us that technology is a terrain of judgment and friction: thereare choices about what technologies we design and use and there is nothing inherentlygood about technology per se.

PJ: People always had a profound interest in creatures which combine human andnon-human characteristics such as Frankenstein. With Dona Haraway’s (1991) cyborgand Katherine Hayles’ cybersphere (2006), this interest has entered the discourse ofsocial sciences and humanities. You are an anthropologist, and anthropos meanshuman. What, in your opinion, does it mean to be human in our historical momenthere and now?

GC: Your question echoes the age-old existential condition: what does it mean tolove, to suffer, and to die? As an anthropologist, I am keenly interested in the humancondition, on the one hand, as it manifests irrespective of time and place and, on theother hand, as it is shaped by radically unique conditions of time and place. Anthro-pologists tend to put more emphasis on the differences, as we have often pushed againstan excessively powerful Enlightenment view of the human being as universal andrationally economically motivated. Even if we eschew universalism, perennial ques-tions around existential conditions such as sickness and drying, or caring for others, doforce us to consider what binds humans together in spite of the radical differences thatare set into motion by things like radical alterity, culture and technology. What strikesme as unique about the present concerns the global existential crises affecting everyoneand everything. The planet is now sick, poisoned and altered by an unfettered economicsystem that has taken no regard for caring for our planet and in fact has been fine withexploiting it over and over again. While certain segments of the population are alreadyliving under conditions of precarity and uncertainty (refugees, the dispossessed), theworld’s population, in some form, now faces climate precarity and uncertainty. We have


no clue how things will specifically pan out in the next few years, much less decade,except that they will be bad. Given current signs—the constant churn of record-breaking heat waves—all indicators are frightening. So now, humans are faced withthe mind bogglingly difficult task of the survival of the human species. Humans havepulled off remarkably complicated projects—like blasting people into space—but thesheer complexity of the coordination solutions, first to configure stop gap and then amore substantial realistic solution to our climate crisis, is something we have neverfaced. It’s impossible to say whether we will rise up to the challenge to fix the problem,but it will most certainly force a rethinking of what it means to be human.

Acknowledgments The interview was transcribed by Gordon Asher and Leigh French. We extend ourdeepest thanks to Helen Alexandra Hayes for her thoughtful edits in the piece.

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