Complex contention: analyzing power dynamics within Anonymous

Abstract

Anonymous is notoriously elusive as the movement takes on radically different guises, constantly mutates, and traverses national borders and ideological divides. Since Anonymous is difficult to grasp with conventional social movement theory, this paper uses insights from complexity theory to analyze the movement’s evolution in general and its dynamics of power in particular. While participants in Anonymous radically reject hierarchy and leadership, dominant groups emerged at various points in the movement’s evolution. This paper aims to explain how such dominant groups emerge and concentrate power and how they subsequently dissolve and lose power. Drawing on ethnographic research as well as secondary sources, it identifies mechanisms of power concentration and diffusion within nominally horizontalist movements.

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Complex contention: analyzing power dynamics
within Anonymous
Justus Uitermark
To cite this article: Justus Uitermark (2017) Complex contention: analyzing power dynamics within
Anonymous, Social Movement Studies, 16:4, 403-417, DOI: 10.1080/14742837.2016.1184136
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SOCIAL MOVEMENT STUDIES, 2017
VOL. 16, NO. 4, 403417
https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2016.1184136
Complex contention: analyzing power dynamics within
Anonymous
Justus Uitermarka,b
aDepartment of Sociology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; bDepartment of Sociology,
Erasmus University Rotterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
ABSTRACT
Anonymous is notoriously elusive as the movement takes on radically
dierent guises, constantly mutates, and traverses national borders and
ideological divides. Since Anonymous is dicult to grasp with conventional
social movement theory, this paper uses insights from complexity theory to
analyze the movement’s evolution in general and its dynamics of power in
particular. While participants in Anonymous radically reject hierarchy and
leadership, dominant groups emerged at various points in the movement’s
evolution. This paper aims to explain how such dominant groups emerge
and concentrate power and how they subsequently dissolve and lose power.
Drawing on ethnographic research as well as secondary sources, it identies
mechanisms of power concentration and diusion within nominally
horizontalist movements.
e nebulous entity Anonymous has claimed responsibility for a dizzying number and variety of
actions, ranging from outing child molesters and chasing cat abusers to hacking into security rms
and taking down websites of global corporations. Journalists oen refer to Anonymous as a ‘hacker
collective’ or a ‘group of hackers,’ but the movement lacks the cohesion and continuity usually associated
with groups or collectives. Anonymous lacks a central authority, has no foundational ideology, does
not represent categorically dened groups, does not consistently endorse ideologies, and has no xed
objectives. Anonymous can speak out against racism or promote it; Anonymous may demand mil-
itary action against dictatorial regimes or oppose it; and so on. ese specic qualities—the lack of
a stable ideology, identity, or organizational base—mean that Anonymous’ evolution is rhizomatic.
Rather than being built on a foundation or directed from the top-down, the movement results from
the constantly changing conuence of distributed users and systems. While participants can push the
movement in a certain direction, the movement’s evolution is beyond anyone’s control. How are we
to make sense of such a movement? If Anonymous can take on any form, then how does it take on
particular guises in dierent episodes of contention? If there is no central coordination or leadership,
how can we understand that some participants nevertheless have more power to dene what the
movement stands for than others?
is article analyzes the power dynamics in a movement that is, in actual fact but especially in
the rhetoric of its participants, intrinsically unruly and indeterminate. While many movements have
embraced networks as an egalitarian alternative to hierarchical institutions, nominally horizontal
© 2016 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the
original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
KEYWORDS
Anonymous; horizontalism;
power dynamics; complexity
theory
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 2 June 2015
Accepted 14 April 2016
CONTACT Justus Uitermark j.l.uitermark@uva.nl
OPEN ACCESS

404 J. UITERMARK
networks tend to generate highly uneven patterns of connection and marked asymmetries of power.
is is also the case for Anonymous: although many participants propagate an image of the move-
ment as leaderless agglomerate, at various points in the movement’s development, specic individuals
and groups had dominant positions. What we need is a theoretical perspective that acknowledges
Anonymous’ intrinsic pluriformity and complexity while at the same time providing the analytical
tools to grasp the movement’s qualitative changes over time. Following recent theorizing in social and
natural sciences as well as a few pioneers in social movement studies, I propose to use concepts derived
from complexity theory to understand Anonymous’ development and identify specic mechanisms
of power concentration and diusion. e literature on complexity has much to oer as it highlights
how, in the absence of central coordination, highly uneven congurations can emerge. is paper’s
key argument is that we can understand how fundamentally polysemous, uid, and mobile signiers
can be momentarily and partially stabilized as certain groups come to dominate by outshining and
outanking others within the movement. e empirical analysis below aims to explain how such groups
emerge and concentrate power and, just as important, how they subsequently dissolve and lose power.
e next section distills from dierent variants of complexity theory concepts that can help under-
stand power dynamics in movements that resist central leadership and a foundational ideology. Aer
briey setting out the methodology for this paper, the following section analyzes Anonymous’ muta-
tions, focusing especially on the mechanisms through which power within the movement is con-
centrated and diused. e conclusion of this paper reects on the rhizomatic qualities of social
movements and asks how social movement theory should be amended to incorporate the dynamics
observed in the case of Anonymous.
Complexity thinking on—and within—social movements
While social movements may exhibit certain regularities or obey certain rules, they are essentially
generative, creative, and transgressive. Social movement scholars have long recognized this, and oen,
this attracted them to the study of social movements in the rst place. But it has proven dicult to
develop a framework that adequately captures these qualities (Goodwin & Jasper, 1999). Movements are
dened by their capacity, however partial or precarious, to shape their own development. Movements,
in order words, self-organize. Self-organization, a central concept within complexity theory, refers to
the ‘spontaneous occurrence of order’ (Kauman, 1993, p. viii). For social movements, this requires a
level of autonomy from the established order that movements challenge. ‘Social movements,’ Castells
says, ‘exercise counterpower by constructing themselves in the rst place through a process of auton-
omous communication, free from the control of those holding institutional power’ (Castells, 2012, p.
9). Movements carve out online and oine spaces in which participants recursively and self-referen-
tially enact the movement. is explains why invariant models fall short: movements are not only or
primarily determined by outside causes but to at least some degree self-organize. is does not imply
that movements are ‘agents’ or make strategic decisions. Movements are agglomerates beyond the
control of any individual or groups. But they are also beyond the sole determination of environmen-
tal factors. To the degree that such self-construction succeeds and autonomy emerges, movements
self-organize: they reproduce themselves with the help of their ‘own logic and components’ (Fuchs,
2006, p. 102). Complexity theory has provided one way to move beyond reductive analyses and empha-
size the emergent, indeterminate, and iterative qualities of movements. ere are two strands in the
complexity literature that each have a specic contribution to make to the study of social movements.
Rhizomatic movements
One strand in the literature provides the philosophical tools to think of movements as unstable agglom-
erates of actors and networks traversing and defying categories and borders (cf. Chesters & Welsh,
2006; Hardt & Negri, 2004; Melucci, 1996). As recent social movements, especially the alter-globali-
zation movement, attempt to break out of national connes and engage in the collective project of

SOCIAL MOVEMENT STUDIES 405
creatively rethinking the foundations of social life, authors in this strand argue for an analogous move
of scholars to rethink the analytical categories and presuppositions through which they make sense
of social movements (Cox & Nilsen, 2007, p. 426). e concept of rhizome is oen used to highlight
that social movements emerge from the contingent combination of heterogeneous impulses (Chesters
& Welsh, 2006; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). While all movements emerge from distributed interac-
tions among heterogeneous elements, rhizomatic movements explicitly resist ideological uniformity
and organizational consolidation in favor of more open-ended modes of organizing. In other words,
rhizomatic movements cannot only be objectively considered as complex and emergent but are also
actively conceived and modeled that way by participants (Uitermark, 2015). For instance, the Spanish
indignados and worldwide Occupy movements categorically rejected the delegation of power and
instead hoped that a set of basic rules for deliberation would enable the movement to evolve itera-
tively. ey self-consciously declared that they had no intention of formulating a desired end state
for the movement; revolution was to come about in a bottom-up evolutionary fashion, as reected in
the slogan ‘(r)evolution’ carried on banners at various protest sites. e desire for ‘ad hoc, leaderless,
participatory, and horizontalist’ styles of organization is not new, but ‘technology has brought a new
dimension to protester desires for horizontalism by allowing ad hoc organizing to address collabo-
rative needs in an unprecedented fashion’ (Tufekci, 2015, p. 13; see also Bennett, 2013; Juris, 2012;
Sitrin, 2012). Anonymous thrives on and stimulates these desires; the movement is highly heteroge-
neous in terms of ideology (Fuchs, 2013; Goode, 2015) and has been conceptualized as ‘a hybrid of
swarm and network’ (Wiedemann, 2014, p. 322). Anonymous participants routinely emphasize the
movement’s radical openness and egalitarianism. While it is practically impossible for any authority,
leader, or organization to control the appropriation of Anonymous symbolism, participants in the
movement have also cultivated a culture that mitigates against the concentration and imposition of
power (Coleman, 2014). is nds its expression in embracing anonymity not only as a practical
means of evading the persecution for illegal acts but also as a condition that allows a higher state of
organization and consciousness by shedding and superseding individuality. Anonymity is expressed
and dramatized by Anonymous symbols like a suit with a question mark instead of a head and the Guy
Fawkes mask donned by the lead character in the movie V for Vendetta. e conception of Anonymous
as an emergent creature that is more than the sum of its parts nds expression in slogans like ‘because
none of us are as cruel as all of us’ and analogies of the movement to a ‘swarm,’ ‘giant globs of digital
mucus,’ a ‘hydra,’ a ‘global consciousness,’ or a ‘hive.’ While the movement’s self-representations convey
important dimensions of Anonymous’ evolution, Anons are obviously not like bees in a hive or birds
in a ock. Far from a supercreature that is eortlessly construed out of genetically pre-programmed
units, like a hive or a ock, Anonymous is the emergent and contested outcome of Anons who work
with and against each other.
Self-organization, power concentration, and saltations
A second strand in the literature on complexity focuses on the network dynamics that result from
cooperation and competition. is strand is especially helpful for understanding processes of power
concentration and power diusion. Processes of power concentration are endemic to complex systems
as well as rhizomatic movements. One central theme in research on complex systems is that networking
among nominally equal nodes tends to produce highly uneven congurations (Barabási & Albert,
1999). e irony that rhizomatic movements face is that their rejection of the delegation of power
can leave self-organizing processes of power concentration unchecked. Jo Freeman argues that the
rejection of formal structure gives free reign to ‘informal communication networks of friends’ that are
‘inevitably elitist and exclusive’ (1973, p. 154). ese observations, derived from a study of women’s
consciousness-raising groups in the 1970s, take on new meaning for movements that embrace net-
works as their preferred vehicle for organizing. Increased possibilities for networking not only allow
new modes of egalitarian organizing but also revamp mechanisms of power concentration. Analyses
of complex systems have identied a range of mechanisms through which inequalities emerge in the

406 J. UITERMARK
absence of design and enforcement by a central authority. For instance, pronounced patterns of strat-
ication and segregation may be the macro-level eect of micro-decisions to socialize with similar
persons (Schelling, 1971). ese eects are present at the level of societies and also within movements
as participants who share certain interests and ideas pull together. Many analysts have further found
that complex systems are highly uneven in terms of network connectivity: some nodes and clusters of
nodes have many more connections than others. New nodes tend to connect to already well-connected
nodes and thereby reinforce their centrality (Barabási & Albert, 1999) and well-connected nodes
tend to preferentially connect to each other, creating what is called ‘rich clubs’ (Colizza, Flammini,
Serrano, & Vespignani, 2006). ese mechanisms of concentration are found in a great variety of
complex systems, ranging from the human brain (in which cortex regions are nodes connected by
white tracts) and the global airline trac network (in which nodes are airports connected through
routes) (Alstott, Panzarasa, Rubinov, Bullmore, & Vértes, 2014) and can also be expected to occur
in movements as they, too, emerge from distributed local interactions (cf. Uitermark, 2012). We can
therefore expect that certain groups consolidate and acquire central positions within the movement’s
network system (cf. Nunes, 2014).
While mechanisms of power concentration are endemic to rhizomatic movements, so are mech-
anisms of power diusion. Maintaining dominance in any complex system is hard work for elites as
they have to expend resources and sustain internal cohesion (cf. Richards, 1993). Within rhizomatic
movements, elites face the additional problem that putative challengers can call upon an egalitarian
ethos to question elite dominance; due to the general antipathy against the usurpation of power,
structural inequalities among participants are unlikely to remain uncontested (Coleman, 2014). In
the belly of the beast—the Internet settings where Anons congregate—we do not see the harmonious
collaboration of people who instinctively know their place within the collective (like birds or bees
would) but an incessant struggle. Exactly because the movement lacks generally accepted procedures
for making decisions and allocating power, there is a constant struggle to dene what Anonymous
is and how it should operate. Any hierarchy is thus fraught with tension and subject to challenges.
Out of these processes of power concentration and diusion emerge congurations where some
participants, action repertoires, and discourses are more prominent than others. While movements
are unstable due to their participants’ constantly changing connections, they occasionally undergo
sudden changes that complexity researchers call ‘phase transitions’ or ‘saltations.’ As Woese (2004,
p. 180) argues, ‘evolution, as a complex dynamic process, will encounter critical points in its course,
junctures that result in phase transitions (drastic changes in the character of the system as a whole).’
Such phase transitions, or ‘saltations,’ are sudden, qualitative changes. Saltational evolution is what
we are interested in when we want to examine Anonymous as this movement took on radically dif-
ferent guises in its short history. ese saltations are related to (but not determined by) the settings in
which movement participants mobilize. ese settings aord (Wellman et al., 2003) dierent kinds of
congurations, with some settings (like chat channels) allowing users to build reputations and attain
privileges and other settings (like image boards) encouraging users to shed individual distinctions and
identities. As the movement emerges on the interface of systems and users, it develops not only dierent
claims and repertoires but also dierent congurations of power. By conguration of power, I refer
to the movement’s uneven network structure and the relative prominence of participants and groups
of participants within it. In sum, the perspective outlined suggests movements evolve constantly and
occasionally undergo drastic qualitative ruptures. e goal is to reconstruct Anonymous’ evolution
and tease out processes of power concentration and diusion at various stages of its development by
examining its changing logics of collective action.
Methodology
is case study is based on an ethnography and secondary literature. In December 2010, I started
visiting online settings where Anons congregated, including chat channels, image boards, and var-
ious social media. Between December 2010 and August 2011, I especially spent time on the chat

SOCIAL MOVEMENT STUDIES 407
channels of the IRC network of Anonymous Operators, which at the time served as an important site
for the preparation and coordination of Anonymous activity. By spending hours glued to my screen,
chatting with anons, and doing background research, I got a ‘feel for the game’ (Bourdieu, 1997)
without getting a full grip on the technological details or being able to observe all of the movement’s
activities. In the very beginning of what became my eldwork, I considered myself a prospective
activist and curious citizen more than a researcher. Over time, my interest in the movement became
more academic. Every time I had conversations I might want to use for research, I identied myself
as an academic researcher and explained my purposes. I shared initial insights with some Anons
with dierent positions within the movement, including several who had been involved in high-level
hacking activities. Aer completing one exploratory article (Uitermark, 2011), I took steps back and
digested my experiences while still keeping track of developments through social media and reading
secondary literature (especially Coleman, 2014; Olson, 2012). ese accounts supplemented my own
primary research because they validated many of my impressions and provided fuller insight into
the dynamics within groups organizing within exclusive and secretive chat channels. In addition to
these secondary accounts, I drew on media interviews given by arrested Anons and leaked logs from
chat channels. Although I have on occasion been present in channels where hacking activities were
coordinated, I did not have the nearly same level of access as Olson, Coleman, or embedded journal-
ists like Garrett Brown (who is currently serving prison time for his involvement in Anonymous).
Whereas these authors tend to focus on the groups and campaigns that caught the public’s attention,
most of my observations concerned campaigns that did not make news headlines. ese observations
thus shed light on the parts of the movement that receive little attention in journalistic and media
accounts, yet constitute the bulk of activity at any moment in time. In addition, I could observe and
experience how rank and le participants view elite users and the campaigns they are involved in. By
triangulating data obtained from these dierent sources, I developed an understanding of the dynamic
of the overall movement conguration and the position of dominant groups within it. It is notoriously
dicult to separate fact from ction as Anons oen withhold or manipulate information to trick or
manipulate Internet users and enforcement agencies. For this reason, and to protect the privacy of
the movement’s participants, I do not use direct quotations or observations in this piece. My interest
is in the movement’s general development, not in the nitty-gritty of the countless operations carried
out under the Anonymous label. By abstracting away from the particularities, I hope to shed light on
the broad dynamics of power concentration and power diusion.
Anonymous’ respective congurations of power
Phase 1: the quest for lulz
On so-called image boards, users usually do not use screen names other than ‘Anonymous.’ 4chan is
the largest of these image boards with 10 million unique visitors per month (Grigoriadis, 2011). Each
day, 800,000 messages are posted on the site—more than 550 per minute (ibid.). On the largest sub-
board (/b for ‘random’ messages), most messages stay on the front page for less than ve seconds and
on the site for less than ve minutes (Bernstein et al., 2011). e image boards are a swirling stream
of ephemeral messages and pictures related to everything from ponies and necrophilia to religion and
porn. Reecting the demographics of the bulk of the users—teenagers and young men from the United
States and Western Europe—the boards represent an absurd combination of teenage fantasies and
fears. Within this setting, selection occurs by the users—if they comment on a message, they ‘bump’
it and push it up on the site. Because users adopt the same screen name (‘Anonymous’), people prole
themselves as established users through Internet dialects while slurring insults to outsiders who do
not conform to the informal rules (Bernstein et al., 2011). e ruthless slandering goes together with
bonding—the insiders are considered ‘/b/ros’ or ‘fellow-anons,’ the outsiders are designated as ‘faggots,’
‘newfags,’ or ‘niggers.’ Message boards remained the prime settings for collective trolling, but the cam-
paigns also spawned a network of smaller and larger chat networks like ‘partyvan’ or ‘bantown’ where
devoted users plotted and coordinated raids. e raid on Habbo Hotel became a landmark event for

408 J. UITERMARK
collective action springing from this environment. On 12 July 2006, Bill Cosby’s birthday, thousands
of black men dressed in disco outts and with Afro haircuts, ‘nigras,’ ooded Habbo Hotel, an online
meeting space for teenagers. e nigras blocked the swimming pools and formed swastikas. When
Habbo’s moderators removed the nigras, the crowds, noting that only black characters were removed,
protested against the moderators’ racism. e nigras dispersed, hid in libraries and private rooms, and
then regrouped to again raid the pool. A year aer the rst Habbo raid, the nigras came back with
more inciting and bizarre rhetoric. In an absurdist parody of Martin Luther King’s ‘million men march,’
the nigras announced they were to block Habbo’s swimming pools ‘to stop the AIDS!’ and protest the
racism of the Habbo moderators. e raids on Habbo Hotel and many other targets demonstrated to
participants as well as onlookers the potential of synchronized and subversive mobilizations, even if
they were at this point merely ironic and playful.
e conguration of power in this phase is characterized by ephemeral collective action and unsta-
ble hierarchies. Campaigns are impulsive, whimsical, and brief, with participants typically taking
interchangeable positions as faceless anons. is is not to say that degrees and types of participation
are the same. Exactly because the campaigns mobilize masses, participants who put eort and wit into
directing the crowd wield disproportionate power. Already early on in Anonymous’ history, users opted
for chat channels to plot campaigns, in eect taking on leading and coordinating roles. However, the
mass dynamics on the image boards decided which campaigns took o and which did not. Such cas-
cades are intrinsically dicult to predict (let alone steer) even in complex congurations where more
inuential participants can be recognized (as on Twitter, for instance; see Bakshy, Hofman, Mason, &
Watts, 2011), but the default anonymization on image boards deprives users of the possibility to see
whether initiators of a campaign have the qualications to pull it o. e image boards are a ‘hetacomb
of failed attempts with few survivors’ (Koopmans, 2004; p. 371) because the vast majority of calls to
action remain unanswered. e result is an extremely volatile dynamic where campaigns that generate
a positive feedback early on (i.e. they quickly draw in many participants) succeed in generating the
critical mass necessary to collectively disrupt games, manipulate polls, or cause other kinds of mayhem.
At this point of Anonymous’ development, it ‘was strength in numbers. e more people were there,
the bigger the deluge’ (Olson, 2012, p. 52). Anonymous had emerged from the relatively autonomous
space as a self-organized and self-referential entity. Participants developed a conguration of power
characterized by ephemerality of collective action and interchangeability of participants. Participants
mobilized under the same banner and used a distinct set of symbols and slogans, but did not develop
a stable division of labor, xed roles, or durable networks.
Phase 2: the battle against scientology
e moment that Anonymous engaged in a sustained battle against the Church of Scientology in 2008
is widely regarded as a qualitative change of the movement (e.g. Coleman, 2014). From the 1990s on,
critics had made public revelations and released classied documents to draw attention to what they
considered coercive, exploitative, and manipulative strategies on the part of Scientology. ese battles
intensied in 2008 when Youtube removed a leaked video of scientologist Tom Cruise, attesting to
the extraordinary acumen and prowess of the Church’s followers. Responses to the rst call for action
posted on 4chan’s sub-board/b were mixed, with some openly hostile to the idea (‘I think scientology
is cool and the guy who had this awesome idea to create a fake religion just so he can collect money
from idiots is brilliant!’), others skeptical (‘mission impossible—a random image board cannot take
down a pseudo-religion with the backing of wealthy people and an army of lawyers’), and others
falling in line with the idea (‘We are the true face of the human race. We are the anti-hero, we will do
good, and fuck anyone, good or bad, who happens to be in the way. e world is a fucked up place,
and apathy and weak willed liberal fucks won’t change it. We will, or we’ll all die trying...’). A new
call to action on the next day solicited more and more positive responses as users noticed that the
Scientology website was experiencing downtime. Anons wrote short instructions how recruits could
participate in a so-called Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack in which bogus packages are send

SOCIAL MOVEMENT STUDIES 409
from multiple computers to clog Scientology’s servers. ey also published addresses of Scientology
buildings so prospective participants could call for taxis and pizza delivery.
e image boards were crucial sites for mobilizations, but the campaign sprawled to other settings.
Opposition against Scientology had already proliferated in many corners of the Internet and the move
to ‘a better place to plan’ was already hinted at in the rst call to action. Veteran critics of Scientology,
new Anonymous recruits, and many other Internet users responding to the battle cries increasingly
gravitated to Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channels. IRC aords a very dierent set of roles than image
boards. IRC networks have network administrators that have ultimate command over the channels,
chat rooms on IRC can be closed to non-invited users, chat rooms feature a range of dierent posi-
tions with dierent privileges, and last but not least, all these features are associated with user names.
ese characteristics of IRC imply that there are many visible dierentiations among users in terms
of reputations and roles.
Gregg Housh, an avid 4chan user based in Boston, came to play a key role in this period. When
Housh and four other activists congregated in one chat room to discuss press strategies, they discov-
ered that they collectively had the skills to make a clip and put together an Anonymous video press
release with a computerized voice uttering declarations of injustice against a background of dramatic
visuals. e video press release became a hit in obscure places like 4chan but also in more main-
stream Internet venues like Gawker and Reddit. e then little known publishing platform Wikileaks
released classied Scientology documents that Anonymous volunteers helped to interpret and circulate
(Domscheit-Berg, 2011). Anonymous also adopted street protests in this period. Housh had applied
for a permit and was subsequently targeted by Scientologists, but instead of backing o, Housh spoke
out strongly against Scientology in the courts and especially in the media. To deal with the massive
inow of recruits, Housh and his fellow activists made separate chat rooms for activists based in dif-
ferent cities and they also set up an exclusive and secret chat room called #marblecake for people who
were deemed competent and committed enough to serve as coordinators.1 Prompted by a video from
a veteran opponent of Scientology (colloquially referred to as ‘wise beard man’), they also developed
elaborate protest manuals, instructing activists how to challenge Scientology while keeping within
the law. Housh turned from a 4chan enthusiast with an appetite for mayhem into a strict coordinator,
saying he ran meetings in a designated chat room for high-level activists ‘with an iron st’ (cited in
Olson, 2012, p. 88).
While whimsical mass trolling continued unabated on the image boards, Anonymous had developed
an entirely dierent conguration as it took on Scientology and settled in IRC channels—a saltation
had occurred. Movement participants organizing in this setting developed a clear organizational
structure, calibrated a set of protest tactics, and had pushed forward spokespersons with clearly dened
talking points. Well-structured and strongly connected groups developed synchronized and sustained
campaigns with the purpose of winning over the public rather than shocking it. However, the trans-
formation of Anonymous from a ruthless and unpredictable pack into a protest machine triggered
negative feedback. ere were bitter complaints about ‘moralfags’ and Housh and his associates saw
their infrastructure come under DDoS attacks. One Anon broke every rule in the protest manual by
busting into Scientology’s New York oces covered in a ‘thick layer of petroleum jelly’ with a ‘gener-
ous admixture of pubic hairs and toenail clippings’—an eort not only to shock Scientology but also
to upset what had become an all too predictable movement seeking respectability rather than thrills
(Dibbell, 2009).
Phase 3: the battle for wikileaks
As the battle against Scientology suered from dwindling momentum and inghting, groups of
Anonymous activists initiated other campaigns, for instance, providing Iranian insurgents with so-
ware to evade surveillance during the 2009 uprising. Coordinating from a designated IRC network
hosted in a number of countries to minimize chances of persecution, Anons had struck against a
range of targets with DDoS attacks and occasionally with an SQL injection attack (Olson, 2012). While

410 J. UITERMARK
Anonymous had now become a label for online activists in pursuit of structural social change, the
movement did not converge on a shared goal or gravitate to a particular setting; no campaign drew near
as much attention and participants as the battle against Scientology. In 2010, Operation Payback had
as its goal to strike against organizations combating media piracy. In short, in 2010, Anonymous was a
fragmented movement engaging in a range of campaigns on a number of dierent platforms—there was
no dominant logic, even if some campaigns (like Operation Payback) were more prolic than others.
A qualitative change occurred when, in December 2010, Wikileaks hit the global headlines.
‘Operation Payback’ morphed from a campaign about copyrights into a campaign about Wikileaks.
e successful disruption of websites of large nancial institutions like PayPal, Mastercard, and VISA
also made global headlines, creating a positive feedback loop: the number of users in the IRC channels
exploded in a matter of days from hundreds to thousands. New recruits provided their bandwidth
for DDoS attacks, drew attention to the campaigns on social media, and set up new communication
forums. Anonymous did not only scale up but also changed qualitatively. Movement participants wrote
manifestos and press releases explaining the rationale of the attacks and identifying Anonymous as a
force of reason and freedom:
e battle standard that Anonymous follows, however, is the freedom of information. Without information, one
cannot ght for any other cause. Children will remain abused if their plight remains unknown. Nations will rage
wars against their own people if cloaked in secrecy. Crimes will go unpunished, victims will go uncomforted,
and walls will remain undefended. As omas Jeerson put it, ‘Information is the currency of democracy.’ But
we would go further and say that information is the life-blood of society. (Anonymous Press Release, December
16, 2010)
e movement not only solidied its discourse but also its methods. While DDoS attacks had oen
been used against copyright organizations, now DDoS became a mass tactic as recruits hooked their
computers into a network controlled by an operator in one of the IRC chat rooms, in eect forming
a voluntary botnet. Many participants used the Low Orbit Ion Canon, an ironically named computer
program designed to make participation in DDoS attacks easy for participants without specialized
computer skills. LOIC predates Wikileaks by a few years, but the program was pivotal in accommo-
dating new recruits who were willing to participate in the attacks but lacked technical competence
to operate botnets or use scripts. At the highpoints of the attacks, more than a thousand participants
reportedly hooked their computers into the volitional botnet, enacting the virtual equivalent of a block-
ade or sit-in (Coleman, 2014). e image of masses of Internet users converging on targets provided a
powerful impetus to the idea of Anonymous as an egalitarian mass movement. Movement participants
in IRC channels were intensely debating targets and politics but most of all they were thrilled by the
experience and the idea of Anonymous as a collective and collaborative project that transcended
each and therefore belonged to all. However, there were important and largely invisible inequalities
among participants. Although much of the deliberation on targets took place in public channels and
through instant surveys, more privileged users—those with botnets, hacking capabilities, writing
skills, or administrative privileges—coordinated in channels that were invisible to other users and by
invitation only. A few users in control of (non-volitional) botnets provided the majority of digital re
power. On at least one occasion, a channel administrator also manipulated the LOIC settings to make
it seem as if the attacks were carried out by masses of Anons while his botnet was in fact leading the
attack (Olson, 2012). Elite users consciously and eectively created a mise-en-scene where rank and
le users could participate in a simulated experience of bringing down websites of major corporations.
e conguration of power at this point was characterized by marked imbalances between dier-
ent groups of participants. Already during the campaigns against copyrights, inuential users made
decisions in a channel called #command. is channel included botnet operators whose digital re
power basically gave them the capacity to decide which targets would go down. Other users in this
channel manipulated Anons in the public channels into thinking that their crowd-sourced packets
were clogging the target websites while in fact the botnet operations were pulling the strings (Olson,
2012). As campaigns in retaliation for the Wikileaks blockade took o, media coverage intensied and
masses of new recruits ocked to the movement, the elite users within #command consolidated their

SOCIAL MOVEMENT STUDIES 411
dominance. However, the users in #command could sustain their dominance for a limited amount
of time only.
Phase 4: proliferation and fragmentation
As the numbers of users grew, inghting intensied and users branched o to create exclusive channels
of their own. Participants who had been drawn to DDoS operations against nancial institutions stuck
around on the Anonymous Operators network and created channels and operations of their own. It
became increasingly impossible for individuals or groups to direct and coordinate the movement,
even though this did not keep some from trying. With thousands of users active in dozens of chan-
nels at any moment, the Anonymous Operators IRC network had become a tumultuous and unruly
powerhouse of online activism. While Internet users were still appropriating the Anonymous label in
other settings too, the Anonymous Operators IRC network by itself had become a launching pad for
many dierent campaigns and also featured channels for dierent geographical regions, interests, and
campaigns. While veteran and elite users were active in a number of these campaigns, connecting and
coordinating dispersed eorts, many campaigns were relatively independent: their initiators embarked
on their own agenda and developed hierarchies that were internal to their channels and campaigns.
Although the overall conguration was inherently fragmented, some individual campaigns came
to stand out due to self-reinforcing mechanisms: if a campaign took o for whatever reason, it drew
interest, and consequently attracted more participants until interest dwindled and participants changed
target or moved elsewhere. is pattern continued as the revolutions associated with the so-called
Arab Spring took o and one country aer another attracted Anonymous’ attention. For instance, the
designated channel for Operation Tunisia (#optunisia) was bustling with activity as Anons engaged
in crowd journalism, developed soware to evade surveillance, monitored attempts by the Tunisian
Government to entrap Internet users, and engaged in DDoS attacks. Experienced hackers also used
their skills to deface websites operated by the Tunisian Government. While the Tunisian Government
was increasingly restricting access of citizens to all but its own websites, those websites were hacked and
their front pages replaced with manifestos lambasting the government and cheering on the Tunisian
insurgents. Aer the Tunisian revolts had subsided, Anons gravitated to mobilizations for Egypt,
Algeria, Libya, and other countries. Each of these operations developed its own hierarchies and divi-
sions of labor, with some particularly active and prominent Anons being active in the chat channels
of multiple or all mobilizations. In addition to the sheer number and diversity of campaigns, ssures
within the elite made it increasingly dicult for them to sustain their dominance. Squabbles among
elite users spilled over into public channels and on occasion escalated into full-scale conicts involving
extensive name calling, ‘doxing’ and DDoS attacks. e proliferation of campaigns and elite divisions
created an unstable conguration of power; there were operations and Anons with more clout than
others, but the overall conguration was volatile and fragmented.
Phase 5: the elite hacker spree
Hackers had been involved in Anonymous operations from the early days. While their skills provided
them with resources to do things others could not, thus far, hackers had not formed a distinct clique.
is slowly changed as users built up reputations and socialized in exclusive chat rooms where they
could solidify their ties and reect on their position within the overall movement. In February 2011,
users in one such chat room discussed media reports on research conducted by Aaron Barr, director
of the cyber security company HBGary Federal. Barr had developed a method to identify Internet
users and he claimed it was so successful that he had uncovered the names of Anonymous’ leaders.
While Barr’s claims were discussed and laughingly dismissed in the channel for Operation Egypt, the
most prolic operation at the time, a group of hackers were meeting in an exclusive chat room, called
#HQ, to coordinate retaliation against Barr. Aer a couple of days, they gained access to the servers of
Barr’s company, defaced his website, took over his Twitter account (and renamed it ‘Colossal Faggot’),

412 J. UITERMARK
and obtained troves of emails sent by Barr and his associates. Barr’s emails contained all sorts of
embarrassing information, including a slide show that proposed to undertake a slandering campaign
against Wikileaks. Although the hack was done by a few individuals, many Anons participated in a
crowd-sourced eort to go through the emails and to ridicule Barr with memes. News on the cam-
paign against Barr spread through social media and was covered on programs like the Colbert Report.
e reorientation from revolutions in the Middle East to a security company in the United States
had been entirely improvised—the hackers decided to go aer Barr only aer he had presented his
research and le his servers vulnerable to attack—but it did provide a prototype for a new model
of mobilization. e hackers would obtain information by breaching systems and then involve the
Anonymous community to publicize their ndings. is implied a clear division of labor: groups of
hackers initiated campaigns and selected targets while rank and le users engaged in applauding,
exploiting, and communicating the breaches. is new division of labor and implied stratication
were further buttressed by the arrests of dozens of Anons who had been involved in DDoS campaigns
as coordinators or attackers. ese Anons had dierent statuses in the movement—some were well-
known and respected gures in chat rooms while others were marginal or entirely unknown—but they
shared in common that they had not used botnets. While their roles in the attacks had been marginal,
their incapacity to eectively hide their identities had made them targets for law enforcement. Up to
that point, it was assumed that law enforcement had either no interest in going aer Anons whose
individual contributions were negligible, or that this was infeasible given their high numbers. ese
developments reinforced inequality within the movement: the masses of Anons lost their functionality
for the attacks while skilled hackers became more prominent. Not only did they deploy their technical
skills, they also became celebrities within the movement, with other movement participants being
increasingly reduced to a role as supporters or spectators.
Olson (2012, p. 218) sums up the successive rounds of self-selection through which this dominant
group emerged: ‘eir group now consisted of Topiary, Sabu, Kayla, Tow, AVunit, and occasionally
the hacktivist called Q—a concentrated group of elite Anons. AnonOps had been a gathering of the
elite in Anonymous; #InternetFeds a group of even more elite; and #HQ was a distillation of that.’
Although Olson captures the general dynamic, chat logs and interviews reveal that the group actually
was considerably larger and more fragmented; many other users were invited to #HQ and users were
always active across a range of dierent channels on dierent IRC networks, creating a mishmash of
networks rather than a clear hierarchy (Coleman, 2014). It is nevertheless fair to say that these few
users now formed a tight core within the much larger and more ephemeral movement.
Aer having gradually grown closer and forming a distinct group, the hackers involved in the
HBGary hack started Lulzsec. Lulzsec’s Twitter bio originally stated that the group was there to aid
Anonymous, but this was later replaced with ‘the world’s leaders in high-quality entertainment at your
expense.’ e members of Lulzsec hacked dozens of companies and organizations in May and June
2011, including X-factor, Sony (a couple of times), gaming platforms, the Sun, and contractors for the
FBI. In stark contrast to the urry of verbose statements made during the campaigns for Tunisia and
other Middle Eastern countries, Lulzsec provided minimal and nihilistic explanations for its targets,
emphasizing that they did it for the lulz (for laughs). On the occasion of their thousandth tweet, the
group wrote a memo conveying the group’s nihilistic and hedonistic approach to hacking:
Do you feel safe with your Facebook accounts, your Google Mail accounts, your Skype accounts? What makes
you think a hacker isn’t silently sitting inside all of these right now, sniping out individual people, or perhaps
selling them o? You are a peon to these people. A toy. A string of characters with a value....
Yes, yes, there’s always the argument that releasing everything in full is just as evil, what with accounts being
stolen and abused, but welcome to 2011. is is the lulz lizard era, where we do things just because we nd it
entertaining. Watching someone’s Facebook picture turn into a penis and seeing their sister’s shocked response
is priceless. Receiving angry emails from the man you just sent 10 dildos to because he can’t secure his Amazon
password is priceless. You nd it funny to watch havoc unfold, and we nd it funny to cause it. We release personal
data so that equally evil people can entertain us with what they do with it.2

SOCIAL MOVEMENT STUDIES 413
In an exchange with 4chan users who were infuriated that their gaming websites had been knocked
oine, Lulzsec described itself as ‘the concentrated success of 2005 /b’ and there is some truth to that.
Several hackers in the group had been involved in the Anonymous world for years and through iter-
ated selection, they had now formed this small elite group of approximately six individuals. Although
Lulzsec said that it was not part of Anonymous, its hacking spree made it into the movement’s focal
point. Anons ocked to Lulzsec’s IRC channels, discussed their hacks on social media, and browsed
through the hacked data that Lulzsec was publishing online.
e conguration of power had changed: there was one small and consolidated focal group that
stood out within the movement. is is not to say that Lulzsec’s members were masterminding the
movement. Chat logs as well as interviews indicate that the Lulzsec members did not only cause havoc
but were also caught in the storm. ey acted ad hoc on vulnerabilities that others had discovered
and improvised their responses to their growing number of enemies, including rival hacking groups,
disgruntled Anonymous activists, and of course various branches of law enforcement. One of the
rst major gures to be arrested was a young man that used the screen name ‘ryan’ who had been
providing some of the infrastructure for the group. Lulzsec closed shop aer a 50-day hacking spree,
but members and supporters remaining at large did not stop. Some within the group sought a return
to hacking for social justice. When Lulzsec disbanded, they established #antisec, a campaign directed
against the public and private security industry:
Top priority is to steal and leak any classied government information, including email spools and documenta-
tion. Prime targets are banks and other high-ranking establishments. If they try to censor our progress, we will
obliterate the censor with cannonre anointed with lizard blood.
Hackers breached the systems of a range of dierent organizations, ranging from Arizona’s border
police to NATO. e Stratfor hack is one of the biggest carried out as part of #antisec. Following leads
from Sabu and working with others, a hacker using screen names ‘sup_g’ and ‘anarchaos’ obtained
more than ve million emails from the security company and a wealth of credit card data that were
used to make donations to charities.
Although the political emphasis changed from Lulzsec to #antisec, the conguration of power
remained the same: a few skilled and well-connected users served as the movement’s prime hub.
Users within this hub brokered information on vulnerabilities of potential targets, connected dierent
groups and individuals, and played a large role in representing the movement to the media. is is in
particular true for Sabu, a restless and devoted hacker who incessantly incited and provoked others
to strike against establishment institutions ranging from border police and banks to governments and
consultancy agencies. Sabu also served as a key broker: Anons with information on vulnerabilities or
in the process of a hack would approach Sabu to get him or his many associates involved. Although
there were certainly many Anons who undertook actions independently of Sabu and his crew, Lulzsec
and #antisec marked a period of concentration where a group of elite hackers took a position that
was similar in terms of network conguration to that of Gregg Housh and his associates during the
heydays of the campaign against Scientology: attention, resources, and social contacts were in very
important part channeled to and through a small group of elite hackers who functioned as the move-
ment’s prime hub.
Phase 6: accelerating global protests through weak ties
Shortly aer the Stratfor hack, it became clear that Sabu had become an informant for the FBI. In court
documents, the FBI describes him as an ‘extremely valuable and productive cooperator’ who contrib-
uted directly to arrests of other Lulzsec members and spent months assisting law enforcement in the
investigation of numerous hacks and hacking groups. Sabu had rst been Anonymous’ connection to
the underground hacking scene; now, he performed the same role for the FBI. Law enforcement also
arrested Anarchaos, Topiary, Kayla, and Tow. Many Anons were devastated by the arrests and espe-
cially by Sabu’s betrayal, but this did not mean that operations were halted. In fact, various hacks were

414 J. UITERMARK
committed to demonstrate that the series of arrests neither deterred nor demotivated Anonymous. But
the conguration in which these actions took place changed drastically. In line with Julian Assange’s
network theory of power, one might say that the crackdown increased the thresholds for conspiring
(Assange, 2006). First, the arrests and Sabu’s delivering of fellow activists to law enforcement under-
scored that it is dangerous to trust others or to claim credits for a hack. Developing direct ties to
undertake collective action was therefore discouraged. Second, the hub’s disappearance implies that
others lost indirect ties to hackers, journalists, and a huge following on social media. e crackdown
did not end Anonymous, but it did fragment the movement.
Anonymous lived on, not so much as an internally cohesive social movement, but as a set of sym-
bols and communication channels that are appropriated by a range of dierent groups for a range
of dierent purposes. e masks that activists donned at the protests against Scientology have now
become ubiquitous as they show up in demonstrations from Brazil to Hong Kong and from Turkey to
the United States. e infrastructure that Anonymous has built up over the last years is now used to
communicate about a range of protests in dierent countries. Rather than pushing for change itself,
Anonymous accelerates the diusion of protests that are initiated by others. For instance, Anonymous
did not originate the idea to occupy Wall Street, but through Twitter, IRC, and other channels of
communication, it did play a crucial role in accelerating Occupy. e conguration of power, then, is
that Anonymous provides weak ties among a range of dierent protests in a variety of geographical
contexts, serving as a relational infrastructure that connects and accelerates activism originating both
within and outside of Anonymous.
Conclusion
Analyzing Anonymous is hard not only for journalists and the public, but also for social movement
theorists. Attempting to understand Anonymous requires a rethinking of what movements are and
how we can understand them. New movements generally challenge old frameworks and therefore
prompt the reconsideration and reformulation of established theories and vocabularies (Jasper, 2012)
and this rethinking is particularly urgent now that there is a consensus that deterministic models fail
to recognize the contingency, creativity, and unpredictability of movement dynamics (Goodwin &
Jasper, 1999; McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001). Deterministic models assuming unitary actors or dis-
crete factors cannot grasp Anonymous as the movement takes on radically dierent guises, constantly
mutates, and traverses national borders and ideological divides. While familiar analytical concepts
like ‘resource mobilization,’ ‘political opportunities,’ ‘framing,’ ‘networks,’ and ‘emotions’ may help
understand certain aspects of Anonymous, they do not (individually or together) allow a compre-
hensive understanding of movement dynamics. Much of what is normally considered foundational
to movements is absent in Anonymous. For example, while the literature has suggested that ‘shared
beliefs’ and ‘solidarities’ are an essential part of social movements (e.g. Diani, 1992, p. 9), this is
emphatically not the case for Anonymous, whose participants acknowledge and embrace the fact
that the movement can pursue radically dierent goals. Anons are keen to point out that the move-
ment does not have a foundational ideology and does not represent any particular interest, value, or
identity. Although it could be suggested that Anonymous is anomalous or perhaps not a movement
at all, I would rather argue that Anons highlight what in other movements is easily overlooked or
downplayed: the lack of any intrinsic foundation or coherence in terms of values, solidarities, or net-
works. For instance, while it may seem evident that the LGBT movement revolves around the rights
of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people, in practice, this is contested. For instance, some
consider same-sex marriage as the movement’s ultimate goal, others vehemently oppose marriage as
an institution of heteronormative sexual morality that should be dissolved rather than demanded,
and yet others focus on cultural self-expression rather than legal rights. By reexively acknowledging
that it is impossible to x what Anonymous stands for, Anons remind scholars that movements are
in essence fully performative and self-referential: they are brought into being by the expressions of
their participants and the participants are dened as such through their expressions. When taking on

SOCIAL MOVEMENT STUDIES 415
the task of developing an analytical vocabulary that can make sense of unpredictable and contingent
movement dynamics, Anonymous is therefore an ideal test bed. In this context, Beraldo (2014, p. 9)
proposes to analyze Anonymous as a ‘movement brand,’ ‘a loosely connoted, but highly denotable
sign, circulating through the digital ecology and mobilizing activists around disparate objectives all
over the world.’ Anonymous, and arguably other ‘movement brands’ like Occupy, represent sets of
signiers that take on radically dierent meanings depending on the contexts and networks in which
they are mobilized. Participants are perennially engaged in struggles to settle what is intrinsically
unstable: what the movement is, what it stands for, and who its legitimate spokespersons are. One of
the challenges for social movement researchers is then to explain why some meanings, groups, and
repertoires dominate at the expense of others. e analysis showed that this occurs when one or more
power concentration mechanisms are at play. First, Anons cluster through processes of self-selection:
they seek each other out based on their status, interests, and skills, with the eect that one or a few
clusters contain higher concentrations of elite movement participants than others. Second, clusters
with elite participants can develop collective power. As the cluster’s participants develop strong inter-
nal links, they come to perceive themselves as a collective actor and they can eectively pool their
resources, develop a division of labor, and coordinate actions, increasing their collective power to
plan and carry out complex and high-prole collective action. ird, this group can come to serve as
a hub for other clusters and individuals. Movement participants, journalists, and opponents prefer
to connect to already well-connected movement participants, reinforcing the centrality of the core
group and especially its celebrity gureheads (Barabási & Albert, 1999; Colizza et al., 2006). ese
three mechanisms were fully and jointly at play during the campaign against Scientology and in the
aermath of the HB Gary hack. As a core group concentrates power, the movement’s diversity does
not necessarily disappear but recedes to the background. As the spotlight is xed on the core group, its
actions and discourse increasingly dene what the movement does and stands for. e group around
Housh stressed the coordination, standardization, and disciplining of protest and the group around
Sabu focused the movement’s energies on committing and exploiting high-prole hacks. In both cases,
there were countless Anons who took an altogether dierent approach but they received much less
attention from the movement’s constituents, scholars, and especially the public at large.
However, there are also mechanisms of power diusion. First, the concentration of power antag-
onizes movement participants with a marginal position and a dierent vision of how the movement
needs to develop: power concentration generates resistance from within the movement. Marginalized
groups or rival elites always have incentives to question the status quo, but this is especially the case
for rhizomatic movements whose participants can call upon an egalitarian discourse to criticize power
holders or, in Anonymous parlance, ‘leaderfags.’ Second, centralization breeds vulnerability as it pro-
vides opponents—including rivals within the movement, counter-movements, and law enforcement—
with a target, increasing the probability of central gures being neutralized through assault or arrest.
Gregg Housh and others who spoke out publicly against Scientology were targeted by Scientologists
as well as Anons who accused the group of usurping power. Sabu and others within Anonymous’
circle of prominent hacktivists were almost all arrested by law enforcement and had also come under
pressure from a diverse group of opponents, including rival hacker groups and disgruntled Anons
seeking to uncover their identities.
If the substance of movements—their goals and means—cannot be presumed, it must be explained.
e empirical analysis in this paper thus explained Anonymous’ changing repertoires and goals with
reference to underlying network mechanisms. e analysis presented here captures these varied con-
nection patterns as congurations of power, focusing in particular on the degree to which logistic,
symbolic, and communicative power is concentrated in one among many clusters. It is true that
Anonymous is ‘a hydra,’ as movement participants oen say, in the sense that the movement consists
of multiple and relatively autonomous clusters. However, some clusters may come to play a much more
prominent role than others. Investigating the underlying mechanisms and patterns of power concen-
tration and power diusion is, therefore, both of crucial importance in understanding Anonymous
and in the study of movement dynamics in general.

416 J. UITERMARK
Notes
1. Since Housh has become the entry point into Anonymous for both the media and academia, it is easy to overstate
his role in driving the demonstrations. However, it should be recognized that the proling of one key person as
a spokesperson is not an aberration but an outcome of the structural forces driving Anonymous’ move out of
the image boards: Housh became identied as a result of his involvement in a street protest and became a key
gure as journalists and others were looking for a reliable source and spokesperson.
2. Retrieved May 10, 2015, from http://pastebin.com/HZtH523f.
Acknowledgments
e thoughts presented here were rst explored in a paper in the Dutch journal Sociologie (2011). I would like to
thank Dorien Zandbergen for comments on that piece. is paper has beneted from comments from the editor, two
anonymous reviewers, Davide Beraldo, and John D. Boy.
Disclosure statement
No potential conict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Justus Uitermark is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Amsterdam and the Gradus Hendriks pro-
fessor in Community Development at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Uitermark is a political sociologist interested in
urban governance and social movements. His books include Dynamics of Power in Dutch Integration Politics (published
by University of Amsterdam Press, 2012) and the forthcoming Cities and Social Movements (with Walter Nicholls,
published by Wiley).
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