A mob is just a group of people. If we are ever going to have a free, just, and rational society then by definition the mob is going to have to support freedom, justice, and rationality.
In the same way that the Encyclopedia Britannica gained fame by endorsing the cause of rationality, and in the same way that Wikipedia gained fame by endorsing the cause of free information, so too can anonymous gain fame as a mob that supports social justice. Anonymous has a lot of the characteristics of other populist uprisings, so I wouldn't be surprised if their (mostly) harmless civil disobedience today morphed into something more interesting in ten or twenty years. I'm not saying I support them, but it's worth keeping an eye on.
Totally independent of any issues regarding Wikileaks and DDoS attacks, I was reacting to Alex3917's statement:
A mob is just a group of people. If we are ever going to have a free, just, and rational society then by definition the mob is going to have to support freedom, justice, and rationality.
That's not true. 'Mobs', specifically, are unruly assemblages and more often irrational, unjust, and freedom-destroying. A mob doesn't have to be brought around to righteous thinking for society to function; it has to be dissolved, and stop acting like a mob. Ideally this is when its smartest members wake from an angry emotional trance and choose to become other kinds of 'groups of people' that work better for rational and just aims. But sometimes it's when adults say, enough is enough, and apply hard force against the mob.
Actual mobs sweep tyrants into power, either populist tyrants, or reactionary tyrants. The framers of the US Constitution understood this, at least.
Let's not fetishize the idea of mobs as any mass action in the name of some murky form of 'social justice'.
This is getting close to being a No True Scotsman type of situation. I'm reasonably sure that mobs were present during the French revolution, for instance.
Indeed it is approaching 'No True Scotsman' hair-splitting, and that's unfortunate, but shared definitions are important for discussion. My objection is to the watering-down of 'mob' to mean any 'group of people', including those who have the noblest aims. A 'mob' is not a 'movement', nor is it a 'rebellion' or 'revolution'.
It's angry people breaking rules and doing unfocused damage with the exercise of raw bulk power. That we can cherry-pick a few examples where similar action caused (or more likely, just correlated with) beneficial change shouldn't make 'mob' a positive-connotation term for the 'group of people' that via its 'support' determines whether society is 'free, just, and rational'.
We should prefer to rely on free speech, elections, courts, legislatures, voluntary assemblies, armies and even 'well-organized militias' over angry anonymous 'mobs'.
Paypal, Mastercard, and Visa chose to, in effect, attack Wikileaks by suddenly suspending their accounts. If they want to collaborate on an economic attack against an entity that hasn't broken any laws it's isn't surprising that they find themselves also attacked.
So let me get this right: if you're not with us you're against us, if you're not supporting them you're attacking them, "collaborators" the bunch of them.
Where have we heard all of these before?
Empty, vacuous rhetoric, that's all this situation has come down to. I'm tired of hearing about WikiLeaks because it's polarized and made everyone rhetoric-spewing, logic-hating extremists. Everyone involved, and sadly to say, particularly the pro-WikiLeaks crowd, has been making grandiose, pompous speeches as if it's their last day on Earth and they're the President from the movie Independence Day.
Stop. Just stop. Julian Assange is not the messiah and you are not delivering the the gospel truth of life, the universe, and everything. There is zero need for the amount of hyperbole, rhetoric, self-aggrandization, and more weasel words than I can shake a stick at.
Is this an important issue? No doubt, but polarizing speeches like yours aren't helping anyone. When you start using loaded words like "attack" and "collaborator" you've lost any semblance of credibility with moderates, and just come off as an extremist instead.
That's a lot of words and generalizations, but doesn't seem to explain why a corporation that chooses to aid in an unlawful attack should be pitied when they fall prey to an unlawful attack in retribution.
You seem to be of the opinion that suddenly suspending the account of an organization that hasn't broken the law is a neutral, harmless action.
Au contraire, moderates are far more valuable to an extremist than extremists. As an extremist, your job is to convince the moderates. You will not do this if you appear to extreme.
We're talking about 80% of the population here at least. It's pretty diverse. Perhaps some "moderates" may be folks who simply haven't heard the right argument. Yet we saturate the airwaves and internets with arguments every day, so while historically such people may have been more significant in number, I suspect their numbers have been steadily decreasing for some time. Most moderates are moderate for basically the same reason, that being that unless you are literally burning down their homes and starving their friends and families, they don't want to get involved. They might vote if they remember that day, although you can't count on them to figure out for whom, and they certainly have opinions, but they have better things to do than reason about them or articulate them to more than a superficial degree. They may occasionally get passionate about something but then they lose interest. In short, they have to be given a concrete, not an abstract, reason to care about anything.
Most people don't fly, so they don't care about the TSA.
Most people aren't Iraqis, so they don't care about Iraqi war dead.
Most people aren't Paypal, so they don't care about Anonymous.
Most people don't have much to say, so they don't care about the First Amendment. And they don't expect that anyone wants to search their home, so they don't pay too much attention to the Fourth, either.
And they're not rich, so they don't see how tax cuts for the rich are any of their concern.
I mean, we supposedly had this great national progressive moment in America not two years ago. Well, what happened? Would you say that the so-called leader of that progressive movement, Barack Obama, has spent too much time appeasing his base, and not enough time convincing moderates? (I'm not even sure what his base is anymore but let's pretend it's the left for the sake of argument.) His entire Presidency so far has been about trying to hog the center, while the Republicans spent the last two years nurturing the fears and hatreds of their most extreme and vocal supporters, while ceding as little ground as possible to the victors of 2008. So, who won?
So no, au contraire, I don't agree that the job of the extremist is to convince the moderates. His job is to basically leave them the hell alone, and outflank his opposition so as to relieve them of their hold on the status quo. Then, replace it with one of his own. The moderates will go along because they don't give a shit either way. In this case a good start would have been to get the Fairness Doctrine reinstated in the FCC by revoking the executive order of 1987, and hit the Right where it hurts. But now we're talking tactics.
Actually, I think a lot of people take a moderate view on things because they recognise that the world is rarely black or white, but rather a full spectrum of shades of grey.
Of course, in saying this, I have to acknowledge that some people hold moderate views out of laziness (it's not black and white). Of course, there is probably an equal proportion of lazy extremists.
Perhaps not, but it is certainly interesting to study. Its a mob where all the members are anonymous, that has no leaders and yet manages to coordinate fairly sophisticated digital attacks. I'd love to grab a sociologist or two and throw in the vague direction of 4chan.
