Anonymous, hacktivism and Wikipedia Options

[Peter Damian]

This http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-16881582 was in the news a couple of days ago. (a) To what extent do the ideals of these 'anonymous' hacktivists overlap with those of orthodox Wikipedians? (b) To what extent are they one and the same people?

I'm thinking the ideals overlap a lot. The love of anonymity and secrecy when it comes to themselves. The paradoxical hatred of anonymity and secrecy when it comes to the establishment and state and any kind of government. The obsession with hackerish things and computers. The whole 'Occupy' thing.

As to whether the people are one and the same, I don't know.

[Selina]

Why not just call them conspiracy theorists? they really hate that.. most people would have no idea what you are talking about when you talk about "woo" as a noun (IMG:smilys0b23ax56/default/smile.gif)

• Why we need conspiracy theories, BBC News, 24 September 2001

According to Psychology Professor Cary Cooper we are trying to stave off fear of random violence and unpredictable death. "They do that because they can't come to terms with the fact that it could be just a few people," said Professor Cooper, who lectures at the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology. "If you think it's a rogue person or an unsophisticated group you start worrying about your daily life. If this can happen, what sense of security can you have?"

We create alternate realities because we reject the world where a single madman can bring down a president, a reckless driver can snuff out a princess... and a few men with knives can terrorise a country.

• Why People Believe in Conspiracies: A skeptic's take on the public's fascination with disinformation, By Michael Shermer, Scientific American, September 10, 2009

patternicity (the tendency to find meaningful patterns in random noise) and agenticity (the bent to believe the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents). Conspiracy theories connect the dots of random events into meaningful patterns and then infuse those patterns with intentional agency. Add to those propensities the confirmation bias (which seeks and finds confirmatory evidence for what we already believe) and the hindsight bias (which tailors after-the-fact explanations to what we already know happened), and we have the foundation for conspiratorial cognition.

Examples of these processes can be found in journalist Arthur Goldwag’s marvelous new book, Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies (Vintage, 2009), which covers everything from the Freemasons, the Illuminati and the Bilderberg Group to black helicopters and the New World Order. “When something momentous happens, everything leading up to and away from the event seems momentous, too. Even the most trivial detail seems to glow with significance,”

• The psychology of conspiracy, Dr Patrick Leman; Psychologist, Royal Holloway University of London; BBC News, 14 February 2007

My own research suggests that people think that a major or significant event must have been caused by something similarly major, significant or powerful.

However, often official accounts for events, or more mundane, everyday explanations, fail to seem big enough.

We do not feel particularly comfortable with the idea that something unpredictable or accidental like a car crash could have a big effect like the death of a Princess, or that a single mad gunman could assassinate the most powerful man in the world.

That troubles our sense of the world as being a relatively stable, safe place to live in.

Sometimes we try and cast around for an explanation that matches the magnitude of the event that we see in front of us, and conspiracy theories can provide that explanation.

[..]People are also more likely to believe in conspiracy theories if they feel powerless in the face of large social authorities or institutions, and not part of the mainstream of society.
[..]
People show other cognitive biases in how they evaluate ambiguous evidence.

For example, if someone is adamant that the moon landings were faked they will insist that there is clear evidence of this in NASA pictures - why is the flag fluttering when here is no wind on the moon? They will ignore alterative explanations that do not support a conspiracy theory - for example in a vacuum, there is no friction so it takes longer for a flag to roll up.

So if we accept a conspiracy theory to be true we are more likely to accept explanations that are consistent with a conspiracy and less likely to accept evidence that runs against a conspiracy account.[..]

• Paranoia and the Roots of Conspiracy Theories: September 11 and the psychological roots of conspiracy theories, Dr Ilan Shrira (visiting professor of social psychology at the University of Florida) and Joshua D. Foster, Psychology Today, September 11 2008

we humans have an assortment of cognitive biases that can distort our judgments and allow us to maintain beliefs despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Some of these biases include the tendency to see patterns where none exist, and to interpret new information and recall old information in ways that confirm our expectations and beliefs. However, most of the time we're unaware of these biases and overly confident that our perceptions represent the objective truth.

[..]an excellent book called Empire of Conspiracy by Tim Melley explores this issue. Melley seeks to explain why conspiracy theories and paranoia have become so pervasive in American culture in recent decades.

It's just another type of religion really, looking for a safe sense of order because the alternative is too scary for them to face.

Melley proposes that conspiracy thinking arises from a combination of two factors, when someone: 1) holds strong individualist values [..]what Melley calls agency panic, "intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy" to outside forces or regulators.[..] and 2) lacks a sense of control. [..]trait anxiety (or neuroticism) has been rising dramatically in both children and adults over this period.
[..]
people have come to hold an increasingly stronger external "locus of control"; this refers to the feeling that external forces are determining what happens to you, as opposed to an internal locus of control, the feeling that you dictate your own outcomes. psychologist Jean Twenge [..]suggests that the stronger external locus of control reflects our ever-increasing exposure to uncontrollable events
[..]
The rise in anxiety, individualism, and external locus of control may therefore underlie the rise in conspiracy thinking.
[..]
Conspiracies assure us that bad things don't just happen randomly. Conspiracies tell us that someone out there is accountable, however unwittingly or secretly or incomprehensibly, so it's possible to stop these people and punish them and in due course let everyone else re-establish control over their own lives. Conspiracies also remind us that we shouldn't blame ourselves for our predicaments; it's not our fault, it's them! In these ways, believing in conspiracies serves many of the same self-protective functions as scapegoating.[..]

It's the same deal with "tea partiers" and their fear of "big government" whilst they parade around for much more powerful corporations, who unlike governments, couldn't give a crap abut their children's health unless it gives some kind of profit boost with the shareholders always in mind...


Back on topic though, as for anonymous, well, they're both good and bad, cos they're just people, saying "anonymous" is like saying "hackers" there is no "group" or whatever - there's a lot of kids that get into breaking things for the sake of breaking things to try feel powerful sure, but really a lot of is a form of political protest where marches don't really have any effect on corporations as they do governments - as we've moved into the era where big corporations have a larger effect on social change than governments, the only way to deal with them is hit them in their pocket it seems like. Like humanity in general, a lot of bad or willing-to-go-along-with-bad-people-without-speaking-up (ala the police states of China and Iran, the people defending SOPA and ACTA in western countries) but some people are genuinely good too. *shrug*
♠♦♣♥wikipediareview.com/?showtopic=36274&view=findpost&p=296251

• theregister.co.uk/2011/10/24/anonymous_fight_child_abuse_network