Suddenly, spontaneously, a movement has arisen. It has no leaders. It has no authorities. This movement is self directed by each member's own moral compass, and every individual walks in the same direction because that compass points to what is right.
I would love to write a paper on what Anonymous means for information warfare and generally organizations in the future.
I mean, its' brilliant. You guys have no leaders but have orders; the orders are the leaders. It doesn't matter who posts them because we ultimately don't know who's posting them. Complete, utter decentralization.
Just like a traditional organization, too, the integrity of the group depends on people's willingness to follow orders. Whereas a typical organization would execute authority with a person, the orders only stand if people are willing to follow them.
So, it follows that the people following the orders are not being driven by someone telling them to do it; they're doing it because they believe in those orders. It's faith based initiative; No priest to keep them going, just personal motivation. And while that in and of itself is a finite resource, it still is more powerful than motivation created by any order passed down from a man who claims to be above your authority.
This, of course, creates a cohesive group whose bonds are theoretically self-reinforcing, so long as the cause as a whole does not lose steam.
tl;dr: Anon represents a new kind of organization driven and motivated by information rather than command structures and authority figures.
(well ok, there have been movements in the past that did this before, but in the context of the Internet and instant information transfer it's a totally new situation.)
Shit. I really hope Larry's reading this, because I'm flashing back to the last page of Interference and I want to know how it feels to have predicted all this.
Someone else in that thread said: "Anonymous: Socialism that works?" I dunno about that - this message of organisation works extremely well for guerilla political movements but I don't think you could run a stable society this way. And of course the Remote of the Spiral Politic are only feasible because they've got a fully automated physical economy. In fact, the methods of guerilla warfare are historically directly contrary to what you need to run a peace-time society, which is why Cuba is not a very pleasant place to live (well, that and the blockade).
