I recently rewatched V for Vendetta, it’s a comfort film for me, it gets me every time.
On my rewatch, I realized that much like the Matrix - which was also made by the Wachowski sisters - it’s more of a social allegory than anything else. V for Vendetta has more to do with homophobia and the need to steer away from right-wing populism, than it does with overthrowing corrupt governments.
I’m firmly convinced the people involved with Anonymous never actually watched the film while choosing their aesthetic, and simply chose the Guy Faux mask because the movie came out around the time of their rise in popularity, and it happened to be about the overthrow of a corrupt government, which coincided with the occupy protests that Anonymous attended.
To me, this clarifies why Anonymous so often chooses the worst battles to back. They don’t actually do their research on topics, they’re just a bunch of liberals who learned how to hack and only get their news from western-backed sources. There’s a reason some of the biggest players of 2008-2012 Anonymous were hired to work with the NSA, they’re just fingers for the oppressive hand of the US state. Whether they want to be or not.
I’ve seen the movie, but was too young to think about the political side of it, but recently I had a comrade who’d read the graphic novel explain it to me as essentially being an anarchist book glorifying the propaganda of the deed: the idea that a single liberator / assassin could kill enough of the bad guys, that it would inspire the population to emulate his example and revolt.
I agree tho anonymous pretty much has no ideology or political leaning outside who they think it would be funny to troll.
In my experience, the concept of “Anonymous” is difficult (if not impossible) to grasp. They aren’t forming a clandestine hacking group. Nor are they following a specific goal or try to align with (popular) culture.
They are individuals with individual world views (which sometimes contradict each others) whose only common feature are the lack of a publicly trumpeted identity. Nothing more, nothing less. Declaring them as part of a bigger organizational structure, be it political, social or otherwise, completely misses their point.
When Anonymous started it prided itself as an invincible force.
No one could touch them or control them as they were and remained anonymous,
or so the thinking went.
And it quickly went from pranking individuals to gaining a small victory against Scientologists,
a faltering Christian cult that has trouble losing members to secularism,
just like Christianity in general ever since the television was invented.Then it fell apart during Gamergate through cheap feminist media tricks.
The feminists where able to concoct a false narrative and run with it,
One part of Anonymous fell for it, while another part Anonymous was unable to form their own narrative,
so far-right nationalists did it for them and swooped them in.The rest forgot that in order to stay relative, one has to create better media platforms and not stay stuck on jumbled imageboards when there are organized video platforms.
