Events

Event Description

Gabriella Coleman, professor of anthropology at Harvard University, presents "How Anonymous Hackers Dodged the Cyber-Extremism Bullet."

In 2012, even as the National Security Agency portrayed the hacker collective Anonymous as a serious security threat, the group was embraced in popular culture, from Hollywood film and television to ballet. Coleman argues that this reputational immunity was secured through Anonymous's embrace of humor, fortuitous timing alongside the 2011 social movements, and, above all, the Guy Fawkes mask, which inadvertently became a powerful symbolic shield.

The talk examines how Anonymous avoided being labeled cyber-extremists despite a sustained hacking campaign involving disruption, arrests, and sabotage. Drawing on long-term anthropological fieldwork and a recursive return to that material, Coleman shows how features that once seemed incidental later proved decisive, tracing the Guy Fawkes mask's shift from treasonous villain to pop-cultural antihero and showing how its protective power arose from an accumulation of meaning across media, politics, and everyday use. More broadly, the talk highlights anthropology's capacity to reveal how cultural and symbolic forms shift and sediment, helping determine what counts as legitimate or illegitimate political activity.

Coleman is a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the author of Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton, 2013) and Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014), which received the Diana Forsythe Prize from the American Anthropological Association. She is the founder and editor of Hack_Curio, a video portal into the cultures of hacking, and writes frequently on hacker movements and cyberpolitics for outlets including the New York Times, Wired, and the Atlantic. She came to Harvard in 2021 from McGill University, where she held the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy, and earned her PhD in socio-cultural anthropology from the University of Chicago.