Looking at the actions of Anonymous, I was reminded of the shaping of the network in Terrenova. With Anonymous, while the message changes, their express concern seems to be in the connection between the two nodes of information. What I think V for Vendetta and Anonymous both do is blur the line between sender and receiver in this network model. They show how the strength of large collective, anonymous forces. While their size and anonymity make them a difficult target for punishment, exposure, it also exposes weakness in what they think their biggest strength is: a lack of leadership. While the lack of leadership is crucial, and the group very successfully can still structure itself and its actions around modes other than hierarchy, there are still fissions in the group (the moralfags, and the LulzSec faction, etc.) While one purpose of Anonymous seems to be a moral obligation to expose all truth, good or bad, the other purpose seems to generate confusion and chaos as a means to expose something more than truth. I'm interested in what V says to Evey when he states "No Evey, this is not anarchy, this is chaos." What is the relationship between a drive for truth and a drive for reality? One man in the documentary says,
"The hacker ethos has a passion for truth. It wants what's real to be out there...reality is that with which when you stop believing in it, it refuses to go away."
By ridding oneself of a personal subjective, and giving oneself to an anonymous collective, much like Evey and the members of Anonymous, what is being exposed? Flooding the self, as well as the network much like in the denial of service protests, is used as a means to what? The sections of Anonymous that aim to subvert the freedom of the speech and the freedom of the press just to show they can are the ones I'm interested in. They are the ones that are causing the chaos, flooding the network with information meant to dismantle it's shape, bring down structure, but aren't they agents of chaos, not anarchy? I'm still grappling at V's distinction.
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