Recently Tom Cruise unwittingly acquired an additional 15 minutes of fame with this, a video where he talks in an "inspired" way about Scientology... it found it's way onto Youtube, provoking gales of hilarity... whereupon The Church of Scientology had it pulled and threatened (as is their inclination) to sue anyone who re-posted it. End of story.
Or not. Good stories however, seldom if ever start at the beginning...Last year this appeared :: (09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5- 63-56-88-c0) an HD-DVD encryption key which was illegal to publish (under the terms of the reviled DMCA). It got published. Digg tried to censor it and it exploded. For a couple of days the front page of the news aggregation services were dominated by the key being copied thousands of times across thousands of blogs - an "I'm Spartacus" moment. It passed... but served (as a warning) to illustrate the internet's sensitivity to censorship. This key now sits proudly at the number one position of the "most dugg stories of all time" list.
The 2008 presidential primaries have gotten under way and Ron Paul has turned into a sort of mega-meme. He's effectively lost control of his on-line campaign and instead tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people (who spend so much time behind computer screens that many of them have never actually seen daylight), have decided that they want a revolution, they want it now, and the best way to achieve it is to repeatedly enter the name "Ron Paul" into every single text-box on the entire internet. People call them Ronbots. They've also managed to raise about $10 million - so slacktivism may have a little more to it than it's given credit for, but then again, maybe not.
Unfortunately, this Herculean effort of mouse-clickery doesn't appear to have a huge affect on the mainstream media, who have routinely sidelined and ignored this candidate... the response? any story that can be interpreted as "Ron Paul censored" instantly goes to the top of Digg, Reddit et al.
So of late, on the web at least, the left/right divide that characterised the last US election appears to be morphing into some sort of new tectonic. There is still a massive amount of arguing obviously, but fairly large acreages of common ground are being found eg :
- drug prohibition isn't working and needs to be ended
- we need to stop getting involved in foreign wars
- the RIAA / MPAA are evil and must be stopped
- gadgets etc are good
- censorship is bad
A weird aspect of which is that many of the outspoken who describe themselves as "True" Conservatives are actually advocating policies slightly to the left of 60s Haight Ashbury. As usual, the internet's natural libertarians are finding themselves confused by the two-party system. So anyway. There's a groundswell of politicised, highly frustrated and technically literate people out there. They're not as active as Moveon.org, not as committed as Ghandi but there are a lot of them. They're cynical, argumentative and have an attention span of about 14 seconds (most of them will have stopped reading this article already)... they control the flow of information through the news aggregation services (and much of the rest of the web) and they're pissed off.
So. Back to Tom Cruise.
A group of hackers who call themselves "Anonymous" has produced this:
Which if nothing else, is a fairly deft bit of youtube-era film-hacking. The people behind it allegedly also produced this which is somewhat less convincing... in fact it looks to me like student anarchists getting all riled up and conspiratorial... similar in some ways to the way a Whitehall official described the London Bombers... rather than being part of some large sinister terrorist network as: "I am unhappy, I have an identity problem, I have too much testosterone, I have some mates who feel the same way."
Anonymous is something that's precipitated out of a soup of discontent though, and that is why it's getting attention - and the soup is the interesting bit I think.
The Soup-of-Discontent is bathed in the blue glow of a million of Web 2.0 news-sites - it has (at this moment) managed to propel ten different stories about Scientology/Anonymous onto the various front pages at a single time. A bit like the Pirate Bay from Sweden, Anonymous look like becoming something of a cause-celebre. As the group of hackers appear to be making it something of an ongoing campaign, it will probably last longer than the HD-DVD fiasco - it will be interesting to see how this one unfolds... but something that I think is reasonably certain, if they achieve any degree of real-life success, the Soup of Discontent will see it as an indication of their coming of age as a political force to be reckoned with. Then again, they have a 14 second attention span so if Anonymous don't get results within about a week, they'll be forgotten about.
The group aiming themselves at the destruction of Scientology... something that would seem unlikely if the level advice on their website is anything to go by - eg: "Just generally bug the hell out of them", but something else they do seem to be doing is leaking highly secret Scientology documents - and that's a different kettle of fish altogether.
Scientology is built on secrecy. As you rise through the ranks (a process which allegedly costs around $300,000) you are by degrees illuminated into its secrets. These now appear to be a mere Google away, exposed for all the world to see - and that is something... if a religion/cult can fall prey to what trendwatching describes as transparency tyranny then who knows?
It's difficult to see its legal status as a religion standing up to too much attention... and one of the ironic traits of the Attention Economy is that nothing gets attention like secrecy.
Finally (tangentially), the virility of a meme is greatly enhanced by the degree to which it can become a prototype for self-expression - DIY pop-art meets the verbal tradition... and in that respect, the Tom Cruise video really is an accident looking for somewhere to happen. My favourite is this guy :
Post Script:
A week has gone by. The story has faded somewhat from the social newsnetworks, apparently with clear evidence that someone (who I wonder?) is actively down-modding all the stories.
The Anon meme has morphed into a general Robin-Hood type entity with requests that it also attack the RIAA, so there's a surprise.
The Economist, Guardian and Huffington post have picked up on it
We still don't know that this isn't just some bored kids.
