Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the connections between technique, design, and space in the formation of digital subjectification systems. It traces a genealogy of Anonymous by analyzing digital artifacts and their social, cultural, semiotic, and infrastructural connections.

Paper long abstract:

Eclectic media literacy, production of digital cultural artifacts, and the inhabiting of technological life-worlds sustain forms of communicational, cultural and political mediation. My research is an effort to trace the genealogy of one of those mediators, the Anonymous "collective", in fragmented online settings characterized by hyperactive production of multimedia artifacts, mass adoption of anonymity, and devotion to moral, technical, and semiotic brinkmanship. Anonymous can be associated with disparate social projects and behavioral blueprints, ideologies, ethic and aesthetic sensibilities, bodies of knowledge, tactical and strategic repertoires. Nonetheless, it structured itself as a position within the contemporary networks of practice and discourse, where the complex relationships that weave together meanings, cultural objects and technical artifacts - i.e. sustain the phenomenological life-world - are acted upon in acts of resistance to social control.

My research suggests that fragmented real-time communications allow rapid changes of scale and scope, stressing the importance of bridging, boundary work, and distributed scopic and control mechanisms. I also integrate the dimensions of myth, representation, and reflexivity with those of technique and media design to understand the collective production of digital subjectivities and their ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics.

The methodological apparatus, which I termed "internet archeology", focuses on the analysis of traces left by the formation of Anonymous: forgotten and/or neglected digital documents and artifacts that can be found in old or archived versions of websites. I sought to provide a situated microsociological account, integrating the material-semiotic dimensions of mediated sociability, on the genealogy of a global subjectification system.