Anonymous, Decentralized activist group
We are Anonymous
We are Legion
We do not forgive
We do not forget
Expect us
We are everywhere and nowhere
If Industrial revolution was shift from human to machine, digital revolution was shift from papers to binary numbers.
Digital revolution changed most of the documents into a form of bytes, and translated/digitized documents are no longer located at libraries or cabinets. Digitized data allows to transfer long distance within a second. The world of sending out papers through post service has been end. Everything has been changed. Instead of reading books, people are prefer to watch their smart phones. Because everything is in digital world.
EVERYTHING IS HERE
Anonymous is here to break their trust of digitized documents are safer than physical copies. Anonymous is voluntary, decentralized digital activists behind anonymity. Their major goal is reveal concealed information to public for their right to know.
Anonymous is like group of dots. Each dots are within an invisible boundaries, and follows the group's goal, but they work individually.
Unlike other activist groups, Anonymous does not have an official leader or board members. Instead of designated group of people giving directions, they work by themselves. They set up their goals such as get digitized files to prove one company's tax evasion, individually, and use their computer knowledge in order to achieve the goal. When one of their member ask for help, other members would join into his team, to complete bigger, yet more complicated tasks. Each member will contact through internet community, or messenger apps; encrypted communication.
But they are not always hiding behind the screen and passively involving to their community. They do physical protest to show the rights to be informed, the rights for the truth. To maintain their group's identity, everyone puts on mask of the V from the movie, V for Vendetta. This movie and the main character clearly represents their motivation of their activities.
Since 2015, there was no official movement from Anonymous by themselves. Seems like they are no longer fight for the justice. But in 2020, Anonymous has returned, not for their own purpose, but to support the death of George Floyd.
Unlike their past movements, Anonymous now started to support other activist groups behind the screen. In order to support #Black Lives Matter movement, they attacked on local police department database to reveal similar cases like the death of George Floyd. Instead of standing at front line of the protest, they provided information that will strengthen other activist groups' voice.
Anonymous X Architecture
Anonymous is unlike other activist organization. They are all individual, and every activities are done under anonymity, in non-physical form. But their goal is clear, delivers the information that most of the public could not know, or reveals the secretes that are crucial to the society.
In 2020, we are currently living in the middle of flooding information. One who can control the information can rule the world. It is our duties to distinguish the clarity of the information. Anonymous' activities are highly related to the information technologies but if a certain group of people does not have enough resource to get correct and clear information, no matter what anonymous do, they will never recognize.
I selected New York City as my research site. New York City is the most diverse city in the world, where it lucidly shows the information inequalities along definite borders. Even though information is open to everyone on the internet, I still believe that there is relationship between education level and the amount of information that the public can access.
This map is about the locations of residents in New York City, differentiated with colors in order to show their education attainment level. As it shows, most of the Downtown-Upper East and Upper West area has been occupied by mostly graduate or bachelor degree earned group while Harlem and entire Bronx shows the totally opposite result.
Even if the physical distance in between high-education area and low-education area are so close to each other, the virtual distance of information accessibility is not close at all. Going back to the idea of Anonymous, they are fighting for the equal information accessibility under anonymity.
During my research on the relationship in between the residential area and the education level of residence, I could observe one interesting physical structure that literally divides in between two groups. The Northern line of commuter train from Grand Central Station travels underground until 97th street and starts to go overground after that. The initial threshold in between educated and uneducated area at Upper East Manhattan was generated by the commuter train rail.
Street-scape after train treks shifted to overground.
