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.

[Herschelkrustofsky]

I dunno... it seems natural to me that people would conspire with other people to achieve objectives that are important to them (particularly if they have the means to do so.) I do it all the time. It certainly worked for the American Revolution and any number of other revolutions. I would naturally concede that there is an abundance of bogus and incompetent conspiracy theories. I would also note that there are some real whoppers, like the Muslim Conspiracy theory (like the Jewish Conspiracy theory a hundred years ago, under similar circumstances,) that are embraced by the mainstream opinion shapers and subjected to very little skepticism.

[radek]

I dunno... it seems natural to me that people would conspire with other people to achieve objectives that are important to them (particularly if they have the means to do so.) I do it all the time. It certainly worked for the American Revolution and any number of other revolutions. I would naturally concede that there is an abundance of bogus and incompetent conspiracy theories. I would also note that there are some real whoppers, like the Muslim Conspiracy theory (like the Jewish Conspiracy theory a hundred years ago, under similar circumstances,) that are embraced by the mainstream opinion shapers and subjected to very little skepticism.

Conspiracies tend to have two problems though:
1. They don't scale up well. "Small conspiracies", like a bunch of people manipulating the local city council to pass some zoning ordinance or something might work. Taking over the world financial system secretly doesn't. Hell, even real secret underground organizations ("resistance movements", legit and not so legit, run into problems even when 98% of their members are deeply committed to the cause - the 2% who will squeal is enough to cause them problems)
2. In many situations the individual incentives conflict with the group incentives. Take a type of conspiracies that actually do often appear in real life; price fixing cartels. Even if they survive for short periods of time, without some external means of enforcing compliance by members (which usually means they ain't that secret, like OPEC) these things tend to be unstable. The individual incentive says that you want everyone else to play their part in the conspiracy but you yourself want to deviate (by cutting price and getting larger market share).

I agree on the general public being too accepting of some fashionable "conspiracies", the "Muslim Conspiracy theory" being one of them. But that's a lack of skepticism about conspiracies, not too much of it - and it sort of contradicts your initial assertion.