it's far too late to be thinking so much. ed is such a drug

The thing is.

The thing is, I don't remember how it was before.

It's frustrating when Livejournal goes down. When YIM or AIM start hijinking--you see where I'm going with this. I started in fandom in usenet and mailinglists and went to chat halfway through Voyager and full time once I hit X-Men. I know--I know the universe of fandom wasn't always this fast. The speed of gossip's always beat the speed of light. The thing is gossip can precede the event to gossip about. There's nothing new in making what was fantasy a fact; science does it all the time. People do it, too.

From boji, two links:

matociquala fighting meme with meme (or) how to use narrative as a weapon and cristalia The Medium. The Message.

I think they have the voice I've been searching for in what this felt like when I read about it the first time in startled fascination. I was excited, and I wasn't sure why or how to phrase it; I mean, what the hell could I say? I didn't know what I was looking for, why I kept searching it up, and dear God, no one sane should spend that much time on Encyclopedia Dramatica, that's asking for some kind of cognitive dissonance or getting way too fascinated with LOLCode. Getting on digg to sweep through and watch it manipulated, look at technorati and del.icio.us and ponder myspace and facebook and think yes. Yes. That's it.

---

I'm pulling a short thread to quote from here:



magistera: The thing is, though, Anonymous is more about internet drama than anything else. They're a bunch of '/b/tards' from 4chan/7chan, and this isn't their first 'raid' - the last one I remember coming to my attention was a series of coordinated attacks on feminist blogs. They're pretty indiscriminate in choosing their targets - all they really care about is the drama, and lowering the signal-to-noise ratio on the internet.

Reply 1: matociquala: Again, you're missing the point. Once the meme is of the leash, there's no telling what happens next.

It's just a meme.

But a religion is just a meme.

I'm not saying it *will* have any effect. I'm saying it could. And the manipulation interests the fuck out of me.

Reply 2: cristala: I'm not sure the intent matters at this point.

If people in the wider internets have this speak to them for whatever reason? It doesn't matter if they did it for drama. It will become what it claims to be.

---

It's the gossip that was before the fact. It was internetz serious business that turned into what it claimed to be because there were people that wanted it to be, so much that thousands stood around yesterday carrying signs, wearing masks, and chanting tl-fucking-dr because youtube said to (gross simplification). I mean, that blows my mind. It's not just the site crashing--everyone admit it, given google, ten minutes, and two keywords, most of us can figure out the mechanics (or you know, just go read 4chan).

And the debates about it being a joke or a weird social movement or 4chan having a huge laugh--well, yeah. And people out there took it seriously! Someone, several someones, a hundred someone's got in on the joke, and others didn't but liked the sentiment, and some of them, like me, like a lot of us, stood back and thought, this is familiar. Why is this familiar?

It's familiar, because we see it all the time, so much it's not even a surprise. It's the internet, and we cross-meme at the speed of light and it flickers across fandom like a firestorm when the conditions are just right. Strikethrough to fandom_counts. It's invisible to us, the background noise of the internet, what we keep and what we carry, what we discard with a quick scroll, all day, every day, and we never notice.

And it took me forever to finally click on why this just hit a internet kink--google, digg, technorati, the joint snark comms of livejournal and journalfen, some of the major newsites; the local news, seriously, so seriously discussing this Anonymous with these portentous words of wisdom on hackers and teenagers and terrorists startling speed across the internet out for anarchy or blood or lulz, and I shake my head and think, this is new to you? I was up at two in the morning with eleveninches and svmadelyn following along with the Britney suicide scare like, five seconds after the cops were called and wondering why on earth the paparazzi didn't have a livefeed already; I'm only surprised when it takes too long.

(I'm not proud of this. That's why I name the two people who were refreshing ontd just as frantically as I was.)

Four weeks ago, who honestly registered the existence of Scientology in conscious thought? Now it's at the top of my head; I wrote a freaking Tom Cruise joke into a fic and didn't even notice until I edited, and I started to giggle; it's just ridiculous and amazing and familiar. I feel like somehow, we've been waiting for this moment, like the first time a single story took over a single fandom, a story wiped over several fandoms, like strikethrough shot through livejournal like a fire on too-dry kindling. Not the stuff the media starts and hopes to God we'll take; this is something native, not us, not fannish, not livejournal, but we have to claim them too. They shared their language and their lolcats, we took their acronyms and made our own, we absorbed what we liked and forgot what we didn't.

There's a joy that comes with it, this kind of glee when we watch everyone fall before it, what we've known all along could do this and wondered, just a little, what it could become. We don't know where all of what we say, write, paste, acronym comes from, but once we take it, we make it ours, and we just don't care.

The Original Anonymous Declaration of War:
Views: 2,203,083
Comments: 21,357 Favorited: 11,557 times Honors: 16 Links: 5
Video Responses: 342

And two more I found deeply interesting:

A Message to Anonymous from the Voiceless

Video Responses:

Anonymous Answer to Voiceless

Message To the CO$ & RTC/CALLING ALL CHRISTIANS with a special shout-out to Judaism and Islam.

Seriously. I have no words.



I seriously have to stop watching youtube. I just--it's totally the wrong question, is it real. I think it's more, how real do you want it to be? I think it just made pretty fucking real.

I am going to have a brownie and write porn now.

Comments

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...blah, it was supposed to mannequins. I forgot to spell-check. *smacks Safari for not having integrated spell-check*