Anonymous and Occupy

So, no longer sick, but really behind on EVERYTHING.

Here is Nathan Schneider (interview with him to be posted soon) on the influence of Anonymous on Occupy:

One of the things that amazed me during the first weeks of Occupy Wall Street was that, as the movement spread to occupations all around the country and the world, they were so similar to one another; all took direct democracy as the basic unit of political legitimacy, and prided themselves on a decentralized, horizontal structure, and discouraged credit-taking and self-aggrandizement. How did people all over the U.S. and the world know how to Occupy, and so quickly? Their preparedness can at least partly be attributed to the veterans of the global justice movement of a decade ago who flocked to the occupations. But perhaps even more significant an influence among the younger occupiers was the experience some of them had had with Anonymous and groups like it online.

Make sure to read the entire essay, which is fascinating. Here is an essay on Anonymous, which Schneider relies upon as well as an earlier essay by Schneider that puts forth the following thesis:

I see no quick-and-easy legislative, executive, or judicial patches for the problems which the movement means to confront. I’ve come to think, instead, that the movement’s lasting contribution could be something substantially more ambitious: a wholesale rethinking of political life, more akin to the promulgation of revolutionary France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen than, say, the introduction of a financial-transaction tax or the revocation of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision.