An Anonymous member? Photo Credit: Stian Eikeland http://www.flickr.com/photos/stianeikeland/3696386615/sizes/m/in/photostream/
Anonymous, the headless vigilante hacktivist collective whose exploits sometimes come off (hacking Sony) and sometimes don’t (hacking the Mexican drug cartel Zetas, bringing down Facebook and Fox News), is the subject of a new documentary. We Are Legion: The Story of the Hacktivists explores the history of the movement, from its anarchic, fledgling days on the 4chan boards to now, when the group’s sometimes heroic deeds make excellent news cycle fodder.
Luminant Media, the company producing the documentary, released a trailer for it on November 4; the film seems to be largely populated with Guy Fawkes masks and several untitled people talking about what Anonymous means (said Lauri Apple at Gawker, “[T]hey seem knowledgeable enough!”). From the looks of the trailer, a certain amount of myth-making is going on here: They are, one be-spectacled woman claims, the “rude boys of activism”, while another T-shirted 20-something declares, “If you are going to violate the freedoms of the Internet, you certainly better watch the f*ck out.”
The documentary is currently in production and will likely be out in 2012; while not exactly eagerly anticipated, the film is generating some interest among the techie commentariat. “In general we hate narrative-free, talk-heavy ‘documentaries’ in which one person after another acts like a cheerleader for the thing being discussed, so hopefully this doc will include opposing views, historical info, and enough context to both provide a strong story line and keep us as surprised as Anonymous members do,” wrote Gawker’s Lauri Apple.
But given the fact that part of Anonymous’s point is to operate without a central authority, without even a central ethos beyond righting Internet wrongs, whatever those might be, how accurate can such a documentary be? Exactly whose side of this story are we getting? And when are we going to hear from the makers of those damned Guy Fawkes masks – who have no doubt made a pretty penny off Anonymous in recent years?
Watch and decide for yourself:
