The Informant Was Already Inside the House

Twenty-six years on, Gabriella Coleman's ethnography of Anonymous reads less like a chronicle of digital rebellion and more like an autopsy report filed before the patient fully understood what was killing it. The book maps, with painstaking anthropological care, the mutation of trolling culture into political action — from the nihilistic lulz of 4chan to the earnest solidarity of Operation Tunisia, from pranking Scientology to backing WikiLeaks and Occupy Wall Street. What Coleman captured in real time was a hinge moment: the brief window when decentralized, anonymous collective action online seemed to represent a genuinely new form of power. She was right that it was new. She could not yet see how thoroughly it would be metabolized — by states, by platforms, by the very dynamics of attention she documented so carefully. The book's greatest achievement is also its deepest irony: it is the definitive account of a movement whose defining feature was its resistance to definitive accounts.

Coleman's prescience is sharpest in the chapters on surveillance and informants. The Sabu arc — the charismatic hacker turned FBI asset, steering operations from inside while his comrades trusted him — is not just a story about Anonymous. It is the template for every subsequent infiltration of decentralized movements, from encrypted chat compromises to the unmasking of pseudonymous activists in authoritarian states. The COINTELPRO parallels she draws in Chapter 7 were not decorative; they were structural predictions. The HBGary Federal hack, which exposed corporate plans to use disinformation campaigns against WikiLeaks supporters, now reads as a rough draft for the industrialized influence operations that would define the next two decades of online life. She saw the convergence of corporate intelligence, state power, and digital manipulation before most people had a vocabulary for it. What she could not anticipate was the degree to which the tools Anonymous pioneered — coordinated online action, meme warfare, doxxing, DDoS as protest — would be adopted far more effectively by the authoritarian right than by any liberatory movement. The Guy Fawkes mask ended up on a lot of faces she would not have recognized.

The book's blind spots are the blind spots of its era. Coleman treats the open internet as a durable commons, a space where anonymity and decentralization naturally favor dissent. That assumption has aged poorly. The platformization of the internet, the consolidation of infrastructure under a handful of corporations, and the rise of AI-driven content moderation have made the kind of ad hoc, IRC-based organizing she describes nearly impossible to replicate at scale. Her careful distinction between trolling-as-play and trolling-as-politics collapses in hindsight; the culture she documented on 4chan did not simply produce Anonymous — it also incubated the online far right, a lineage the book acknowledges only glancingly through figures like weev, whose later embrace of white nationalism was already legible in the text if you knew where to look. Coleman was generous with her subjects, as good ethnographers tend to be. That generosity now reads as a kind of period innocence. She believed, or wanted to believe, that the lulz and the liberation were separable. They were not.

Certain passages land with a weight Coleman could not have intended. The description of Chelsea Manning's leaks and the hacker community's agonized debate over snitching now sits in the shadow of Manning's pardon, her subsequent public life, and the broader normalization of whistleblowing discourse — alongside its continued brutal punishment. The Stratfor hack, treated in the final chapter as a culmination, looks in retrospect like one of the last acts of a particular kind of hacktivism before the legal and carceral response made the cost prohibitive for all but the most committed. Jeremy Hammond served his time. Sabu walked. The asymmetry was the point, and Coleman documented it, but the full weight of that asymmetry — replicated across dozens of countries and hundreds of cases in the years since — could only be felt later. The book is now a primary source for understanding not just what Anonymous did, but what was done to it.

Within the broader corpus of technology and politics writing, this book occupies a specific and somewhat lonely position: it is participant-observation of a phenomenon that no longer exists in the form observed, written with the rigor of an academic and the pacing of a journalist, at the exact moment when the subject was most alive and most unstable. It drew from the hacker historiography of Steven Levy and the surveillance critiques that would later crystallize around Snowden, and it gave subsequent writers — from Whitney Phillips on trolling to Yochai Benkler on networked power — a foundation of empirical detail to build on or argue with. It remains indispensable. But the question it raises now is not the one it raised then. Then, the question was whether Anonymous represented a new form of political agency. Now, after watching the same tactics of anonymity, meme propagation, and decentralized coordination deployed to spread disinformation, harass dissidents, and destabilize elections: did Anonymous teach the internet how to resist power, or did it teach power how to disguise itself as resistance?