In honor of Bonfire Night AKA Guy Fawkes Day, I’m taking time to reconsider Anonymous’s role in society, the internet, and culture (if it has had one).

I want to posit that, while a future of Mr. Robot-esque hackers using technology to stick it to the system sounds alluring, Anonymous itself was a historical anomaly that will likely never happen again. While its influence wasn’t incredibly large, large corporate and institutional interests will work hard to ensure a movement like this doesn’t exist.

Before I discuss why this will likely never happen again, I want to give some background about the culture that birthed Anonymous. 4chan, and the wider network of internet forum culture in the early to mid-2000s, celebrated contrarianism and mischief.

The summer before 8th grade, a good friend, Lily, introduced me to 4chan.

It was 2008. MySpace was full of sex perverts who wanted to kidnap you, and Facebook had all the lame local people from your town you wished you didn’t live in. The social web was still in its infancy. Niche, community-run forums, AIM chats, and 4chan boards were where it was at.

Lily and I would have tons of fun eating pizza and prank calling our local GameStop. We would lead the kid working at GameStop on with a serious-sounding conversation, asking his opinion about whatever game was new. Let’s say, Final Fantasy or something. Then, when he’d least expect it, we’d ask if they sold the non-existent Battletoads game. This was a well-known prank at the time, so when the guy would yell back in a rage, we’d quickly report the results back to the 4chan thread that prompted the prank.

One of the most well-known pranks of the early days of 4chan involved a bunch of users joining a children’s MMO game, Habbo Hotel, and making identical characters featuring a Black man with an afro wearing a suit. The anons would then form a swastika formation and block other game players from entering the virtual pool. They’d spam in the chat that the pool was closed due to AIDS. I would never excuse such behavior (nor did I ever take part in any of these stunts), but I’d argue that the goal of such an incident was building community via shared naughtiness or rebellion.

Anonymous wasn’t born out of some altruistic cause.

It was a bunch of teenagers with too much time on their hands, engaging in antisocial behavior. Over time, some of these pranks evolved into more organized activism and hacktivism, targeting institutions viewed as oppressive.

I don’t know if there’s a clear turning point for when the “hacktivist” culture began, but in 2010, Anonymous gained a lot of press for defending WikiLeaks. This was in response to PayPal, Mastercard, and Amazon cutting off WikiLeaks’ funding methods after the 2010 Iraq war disclosures.

The group also took on Scientology and the Westboro Baptist Church. I would argue that Anonymous’ final major public point of cultural relevance was during the Occupy Wall Street protests in late 2011.

Chris Hedges’ Woke Imperialism essay does a fantastic job of explaining why American citizen activism became so corrupted following the Occupy Wall Street movement.

Following Occupy, major social movements that started online often lost momentum or fractured, and so did Anonymous. The group faced law enforcement crackdowns, high-profile arrests, infighting, and the dispersal of its core participants, which led to a decline in unified operations and visibility post-2012. The fragmentation of the movement mirrored a broader decline in the sustained cohesion of online-driven protest groups during this period.

Now that we have a clear understanding of the culture and context Anonymous existed in, here are a few reasons why a movement like this is highly unlikely to ever happen again, despite having had a huge influence on the internet and political and social web culture.

Decentralization is IMPOSSIBLE to make function at scale

Anonymous’ structure, lacking leaders or formal membership, became a symbol of the power and pitfalls of decentralized activism. Their impact highlighted both the resilience and vulnerability of movements without central control: decentralized, anonymous action can evade censorship and empower dissenters globally, but is also prone to infighting, infiltration, and moral inconsistency.

Very large organizations cannot function without hierarchy, whether explicit or implicit. The 1944 OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual outlines this as well as a few other pitfalls many orgs find themselves in. If you’ve ever been a part of any political org, you’ll certainly recognize many of these, lol.

To do wide-scale cybercrimes (like Anonymous), you’d need to be incredibly organized or talented. While you may not need a critical mass of people, you need a small group with rare technical expertise who can coordinate effectively without formal structure.

This creates an inherent contradiction: the decentralization that protects the movement also makes it nearly impossible to coordinate the sophisticated operations that give it teeth. Add modern surveillance infrastructure and corporate security measures, and you have a structural problem that can’t be hacked around.

Can ANY movement this large even exist now?

Today, it is far more difficult for a movement as large, diffuse, and impactful as Anonymous to reemerge. Governments and corporations have developed advanced surveillance, digital repression tools, and stricter internet regulations in response to past incidents, fragmenting spaces where collective anonymity once thrived. Modern attempts at large-scale digital protest face new challenges in maintaining unity, resisting infiltration, and avoiding the rapid burnout or splintering that characterized post-Occupy activism. While pockets of hacktivism persist, the unique moment that enabled Anonymous’ scale and notoriety has become much harder to replicate.

We also live under the splinternet, which has been deepening by the year. In the past, if you were an odd person online, there were only a few places you could congregate. Even on 4chan, there are only a few boards (and half of them are porn). This scarcity forced different types of weirdos to occupy the same spaces, creating unexpected alliances and shared culture.

The internet has fractured into countless niche communities and platforms. Everyone can find their exact echo chamber, which means large, diverse coalitions like Anonymous are far less likely to form organically.

The culture of internet anonymity has also been waning.

Since the early 2010s, various tech platforms have been moving away from a culture of user anonymity and towards incentivizing users to establish some identity associated with their name. Although platforms like Reddit are reasonably Anonymous, they’ve still built a system that promotes groupthink by rewarding users for posting consensus comments. There are benefits and drawbacks to such a design, but that’s a topic for another post.

Anyway, fame is the new gold in our new attention economy. It’s hard to imagine a world where a reasonably large collective of people would operate without someone wanting to take public ownership of some involvement in it.

So if Anonymous cannot exist in its original form anymore, where did all that disaffected energy go?

Anonymous lives on in its bastard sons: Groypers and Lone Wolf gunmen.

Were many of the members of Anonymous doing what they did because they were genuinely altruistic? Or because altruism gave them a psychological veil of protection to engage in antisocial behavior? I bet it’s a bit of both.

But what if Anonymous’s true purpose wasn’t altruism or even altruism as a cover for antisocial behavior? What if it was ✨community✨?

Anonymous may have just been an early version of what’s now a monetized industry: funneling young men’s anger and frustrations into various outlets. Anonymous gave young men an outlet for disaffection, but now they can get this outlet from various online leaders who make a lot of money doing it.

You’re angry because life feels unfair, and rent is a lot more expensive than it was 10 years ago. You’re 21, fresh out of college, and the woman, 2.5 children, and 6-figure job you were promised feels out of the question. Your dignity as a man is nonexistent.

Here are a few maladjusted options for managing this disillusionment:

• Drop out (disengage with social interactions via “irony”) and tune in (”goon” to porn and play video games)

• Blow some shit up

• Blame someone else (women and the Jews™️)

4chan culture and the wider internet culture predominantly follow the first one. There’s a tease of the 2nd and 3rd option, but it all usually follows the 1st, which is escaping into one’s head.

Groypers are an actionless COMMUNITY

Groypers inherited Anonymous’s cynicism and community without the action. Although Nick Fuentes is now the face of the movement, it’s directly descended from the “Kekistan” members of the alt-right. While there have been a few mass shooters and violent actors associated with this movement, it is by and large a social club.

If we assume Anonymous’s true purpose was community, then Groypers may operate under the assumption of “altruism” but really just want community among other disillusioned young men.

Like Anonymous, they’ve kept a sense that “the system” is rigged. But maybe “the system” feels too big, scary, and complex to actually target through pranks or hacks. Or maybe you’re just a lazy loser. Why have a cyberterrorist community build a shared project when you could just join a Discord channel, make a Little Dark Age edit, or send Nick Fuentes a superchat with the hopes that he’ll roast you?

A cyberattack means you’ll go to jail, and it’ll all be forgotten tomorrow. The big, scary trading algorithm will go on. It’s far easier just to blame the long-standing evergreen stand-in symbol for financial complexity: the Jews™️.

It’s passive consumption of rage dressed up as political engagement. The community remains, the collective identity remains, but (for better or worse) there is no real action.

Lone Wolves are community-deficient BAD ACTORS

Murder is wrong.

However, it’s undeniable that many politically motivated Lone Wolf attacks have operated under the same vein as prior Anonymous attacks. Disaffected men engage in antisocial behavior that they have convinced themselves is an offense against a wrong committed against them.

The murderer of the UnitedHealthcare CEO, Luigi Mangione, and the dozens of white nationalist killers of the past decade (Christchurch, Anders Breivik, the Charleston church shooter, etc.) have something in common: they targeted symbols of what they believed had wronged them and people like them. This is blatantly in the same ethos as Anonymous. Given that the actual Guy Fawkes was a terrorist turned neckbeard folk hero, this seems pretty fitting.

Instead of using “grey” means like cyberattacks and hacking, young disaffected men are using actual violence while following a similar principle. Murders that they genuinely believe follow the same altruistic purpose. But where Anonymous operated as a collective, these men act alone. They may lurk in online communities that radicalize them, but they don’t organize, they don’t coordinate, they don’t build anything together. They inherit Anonymous’s sense of justified retaliation against “the system,” but strip away the community that once channeled and constrained that impulse.

It is 2025, and the White House has posted a photo of the President as a character in Halo. While Anonymous, the hacktivist org, no longer exists, its spirit lives on in fragmented, darker forms.

As long as we have a collective of young, disillusioned men, I predict that antisocial behavior will only increase and may linger around longer than adolescence. The veil of altruism may remain. But the actual cause, disenfranchisement, may only rear its vulnerable head in the excuses used to justify this antisocial behavior. Or maybe it’ll just be for the lulz.

Leave a comment

Share

Subscribe now

I don’t have a Guy Fawkes mask so I opted to wear a fedora trilby instead. Happy November 5th! ^^)

I was sent the first volume of E GIRL magazine by (featuring et al) and am deeply appreciative of this effort to archive the early to mid-Internet culture of young women. With the ephemeral nature of TikTok and modern meme culture, it is unlikely that a convergence like this of internet subcultures, especially those focused on young women, will happen again.

If you were a teen girl online in the aughts through the 2010s, this zine will feel like discovering an old diary passage from a time when you were tender and maybe a bit dysfunctional.

It’s part historical document, part poetic manifesto. It doesn’t make many claims, but to those who were there, the nostalgia is powerful enough to elicit the vibes the zine was presenting.

In the social web’s history, the mere presence of girls was met with suspicion of being a "guy in real life.” If you made the mistake of disclosing your girlhood you were met with a swift “tits or get the fuck off”. Pornography was rampant across these early spaces, which inadvertently created a contradictory environment where women were simultaneously harassed and pedestalized. This strange dynamic of oscillating between hostility and worship may have unintentionally laid the groundwork for the e-girl phenomenon. As genuine female presence remained scarce in these male-dominated spaces, those women who did navigate these waters became objects of fascination, creating the perfect conditions for the parasocial relationships that would later define e-girl culture.

The magazine's timeline, spanning from 1988 to 2024, constructs a fascinating genealogy of the e-girl phenomenon. Beginning in 1988 with "Minitel Rose" (France's early digital platform for erotic content), the chronology charts the emergence of feminine digital presence through technological milestones and cultural shifts.

What strikes me most about this temporal mapping is how it resists simplistic narratives of "progress." Instead, it presents the evolution of digital femininity as nonlinear, recursive, and often contradictory. Early entries, such as 1989's "videotext dating services" and the 1993 landmark "Mosaic browser girls" (presumably referencing early web personalities), document how feminine performance online predates our contemporary understanding of internet culture.

Later entries track the acceleration through the 2000s and 2010s—from early camgirls to LiveJournal and Gaia Online, to influencer economies, and the TikTok-driven resurgence of the e-girl aesthetic in the late 2010s, culminating in whatever developments 2024 represents.

The assertion that an e-girl "exerts a gravitational pull on her orbiters" elegantly captures the parasocial dynamics of online feminine performance. Here, the e-girl becomes not a passive content, but an ✨active center of gravity✨.

The astronomical language continues with descriptions of different types of e-girl "stars": some "burn like red dwarfs...their subtle light touching only a few admirers," while others "flare briefly and brilliantly as blue giants before burning through their fuel in spectacular collapse."

What resonates with me in this cosmic framing is the acknowledgment of temporality and distance. The magazine notes that "by the time we see their flash, we're only watching an echo," positioning the viewer/follower as an astronomer observing light from long-dead stars. This inversion transforms the typical discourse. It suggests that the power dynamic between performer and audience is more complex than conventional analyses allow.

In its closing words—"a love letter to the twinkling that made us all look up"—it reminds us that critical analysis and genuine appreciation need not be mutually exclusive. Perhaps this synthesis represents the most valuable contribution of E-Girl Magazine. I’m looking forward to VOL. 2! Thank you for sending it to me and trusting me with this review <3 Go and get a copy, everyone!!!

Reddit has fallen. Economists predict that the values of Linux, Ayn Rand's estate, and fedoras have plummeted. Joking aside, the Reddit API protests are a sign of the times. While Reddit isn't the first, it's a reminder that the internet of yore is gone. We no longer have discussion-based semi-anonymous third spaces.

The internet is one of the greatest inventions in human history. The privilege to immediately transmit information across the globe is amazing. Big banks, private interest groups, and bad actors are taking that away from you. It was cool while it lasted.

The lack of money is the primary reason we see so many spaces disappearing. The censorship it brings is just an added bonus for these bad actors.

The internet is pretty lame now - IRL is the new internet. The events are cooler. I used to feel like I could only be myself on the internet. Now, it feels like IRL is the last bastion of authenticity.

One of the earliest YouTube stars was a twenty two year old Pennsylvanian woman named Margaret Lillian Adams, better known as Magibon. She rose to fame by saying a simple phrase in Japanese “Hi, I’m Magibon!” and staring oddly into the camera for sixty seconds. Magibon’s YouTube channel went viral for her eerily cute demeanor—and somehow, this ordinary American girl next door became a viral sensation in Japan.

It was no coincidence that Magibon was a huge fan of Japanese pop idol groups like Morning Musume. Like Magibon herself, idols in Japan are known for—well, being cute and appealing to fans. 

It was Magibon’s meteoric rise to famed that inspired an idea in my head. I wanted to be big in Japan for doing nothing.

In a pre-Kardashian era, “internet famous” wasn’t a thing. Sure we had Tila Tequila, Jeffrey Starr and Perez Hilton but this phenomena of MySpace selfie fiend turned mainstream sensation was still quite novel.

Not very long after Magibon’s rise to fame, a young British girl named Rebekah Cruel, also went viral in Japan for doing a dance cover. News broke of a shy 14 year old girl making it big in Japan and nerdy girls all over the world flocked to the prospects of making it big in Japan.

At 12 years old, I was one of them.

The community at the time was small and consisted of a tight knit network of Western girls dancing, vying to gain the attention of a Japanese record company. At this time it was called the “Odottemita Community” with the name soon transforming to aspiring idol to at last, Kaigai Idol.

We discussed dance routines on Tumblr. Some of it devolved into girl world relations you’d have in IRL — such and such has bad routines, her makeup is lousy, she would never make it in Japan. But most of the time these dynamics were wholesome. Girls from Edinburgh, Indianapolis and Paris were all able to bond with one another over our Hannah Montana weeaboo dreams.

Power dynamics became apparent too. Girls who spoke Japanese, had been to Japan or had the highest dancing skills gained favor. While the younger, quirkier, nerdier ones vied for the spotlight.

I was never great at dancing — Being Black and not good at dancing is a bad combination. Everyone is always disappointed.

(Me, age 15 in cosplay in front of wheat in Michigan. I performed at Chiptune shows in Ann Arbor)

Yet what set me apart was my encyclopedic knowledge(*cough* autistic) of Akihabara history and my hobby of reading cultural-anthropological papers on idol culture. I also boldly called myself an Idol — without ever having set foot in Japan. Manifestation I thought, it was criticized as being arrogant at the time but it seems now that self-describing yourself as an idol has caught on. Awesome.

The Japanese idol community in the West has changed quite dramatically over time. In the mid 2000s, there were quite a few of us that ventured to Japan.

Women like KeekiHime(Austria), Elle Tia (Canada), Kelsey(Canada), Pinkii(USA), Ally & Sally (Canada), Ari(America) all made a huge influential mark on Japan’s idol industry. From what started as a passion in their bedroom with a webcam. This really exemplifies the power of the internet, in my opinion. There was no time in history where a girl could think something as crazy as “I’m going to be an underground pop idol in Japan” and it actually come true. Amazing.

The community now has grown in the West with many performers opting to perform in their local communities. And I think it’s amazing. This is the first time in history where ordinary girls can make their wildest dreams come true. Idols like Paida, Sorb3t and others regularly perform at idol shows in the West.

Even an idol convention has sprung up around in the American Northwest with many Kaigai Idols headlining!

Are you excited to see where Kaigai idols are heading or want me to cover another net subculture? Let me know!

Subscribe now

Share

In recent internet news, a group of young women aspiring to perform as J-pop-style 'idols' have become the targets of a widespread hate campaign. Sorb3t, a group of three girls from Southern California, faced backlash simply for uploading a video on TikTok. The received 4.1million views in one day and within the weeks the girls found themselves doxed.

At first glance, the video appears innocent enough: three girls with a cheerful demeanor practicing a call-and-response chant in the style of Japanese pop idols. They are of mixed ethnicity and incorporate some Japanese phrases into their performance. This type of performance, where non-Japanese individuals, often described as nerdy women fascinated by Japan's hyper-feminine pop scene, is quite common. I can relate to this as I transitioned from making similar videos like Sorb3t's to receiving a contract from a talent agency in Japan at the age of 17, appearing on Japanese prime-time television. However, nothing could have prepared me for the deluge of hate and personal harassment I faced, largely from fellow Western girls. Although troubling, I did not experience even a fraction of the targeted harassment that Sorb3t is currently enduring.

So why is Sorb3t being harassed? The claim is cultural appropriation. However, their actions did not involve wearing Shinto religious garb disrespectfully, which would truly fall under the definition of appropriation. Their offense was pronouncing a Japanese romanized word correctly. Yet, regardless of the claims made by commenters, the real reason Sorb3t is being harassed by other young women is because they dared to stand out online and attract attention. Notably, the hate mob consists mainly of non-Japanese commenters.

Thus, the cycle of young women canibalizing themselves continues.

Contrary to popular belief, the recent online-based social justice movement that gained traction from Tumblr blogs in the late aughts is not entirely modern. Many of the ideas associated with this movement can be traced back to the academic work originating from the Frankfurt School in the mid-20th century and postmodernist thinkers. While these principles can be genuinely critiqued, they have been exploited by malicious actors who have distorted them to be largely unrecognizable from origin.

These actors, not funded by shadowy states or large corporations, are equally as terrifying. Mobs of young women armed with nothing more than smartphones possess the power to ruin the lives of their peers.

The anti-bullying movement gained momentum with the rise of social media. After a series of suicides in the late 2000s and early 2010s, our nation decided to take a stand against bullying. This was a positive development overall. However, what followed was the acceptance of socially sanctioned bullying disguised as social justice.

Technology has been instrumental in empowering women, from the advent of birth control pills to the #MeToo movement, which brought about significant progress in improving the lives of women. It is time to acknowledge that "social justice" concepts have long been used as excuses for mobs of young women to subject one another to cyber torment. Today, if a group of young girls like Sorb3t were considered nerdy in their community, they might have faced mockery from a few dozen peers. In 2023, they become fodder for abuse in viral cringe compilations, causing distress to young women as a means to blow off steam. We must recognize this behavior for what it truly is: bullying.

Support Sorb3t’s kofi!

Subscribe now

Leave a comment