Anonymous Hactivism: With Gabriella Coleman

Anonymous Hactivism: With Gabriella Coleman

Thursday December 1, 7:30pm | Gabriella Coleman
NYU Department of Performance Studies, Room 105, 34 Stuyvesant Street
bring ID to get into the building

Over the last three years, Anonymous went from Internet pranking and trolling to a narrowly focused protest movement against the Church of Scientology to one that has now emerged in more general registers, attracting many geeks and hackers to its ranks, some who have entered the arena of activism for the first time. In this talk professor and author Gabriella Coleman will examine the transformations and tactics of the digitally-based protest movement Anonymous to examine various political and ethical facets of their operations, including their rhizomatic social organization, the ways they enact an ethics around their denial of service attacks, and the ways in which they are rooted in and parlay liberal commitments such as anonymity and free speech. In so doing, she will also visit a range of theorists entertaining the cultural politics of anonymity, spectacle, the commodification of dissent, and trolling in order to grasp the political and cultural significance of Anonymous.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

Gabriella Coleman is a professor in NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication and a Fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study. Her book, Coding Freedom: The Aesthetics and the Ethics of Hacking, is forthcoming with Princeton University Press and she is currently working on a new book on Anonymous and digital activism. Gabriella will speak about the revolutionary humor the hacker group Anonymous uses as one of its key tactics.