The limits of hacker activism: if you really want to change the world, you need not to be Anonymous

Activism is utterly impossible if you have no way of keeping track of your fellow activists and of forming even weak ties with them.

By Helen Lewis

(Photo By Anonymous activists meet in Brisbane wearing signature Guy Fawkes masks, 14 November. Photo: Getty)

On 7 June 2011, a 27-year-old school dropout called Hector Xavier Monsegur went offline for 24 hours. For most of us, this would indicate nothing more than a day spent enjoying the fresh air, but his closest online friends were immediately suspicious. They knew Monsegur only as “Sabu”, a fellow member of LulzSec, a splinter faction from the “hacktivist” group Anonymous. To them, being offline for a whole day was deeply odd behaviour.

Gabriella (Biella) Coleman, an anthropologist who has studied Anonymous for half a decade, describes what happened next. “They asked him to ‘open a box’ – hack into something. As proof.” Sabu did so and they took him back into their confidence.