Events

Event Description

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

This talk examines how Anonymous—despite a sustained hacking campaign that involved disruption, arrests, and even sabotage—largely avoided being successfully labeled as cyber-extremists or terrorists. Drawing on long-term anthropological fieldwork and a recursive return to that material, Coleman shows how features that once seemed incidental later proved decisive. In 2012, even as the National Security Agency portrayed Anonymous as a serious security threat, the group was simultaneously embraced in popular culture, from Hollywood films and television to ballet. Seen recursively, this pairing raises an anthropological question about how legitimacy is produced, stabilized, and rendered recognizable over time. 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. Briefly tracing the mask’s and figure’s shift from treasonous villain to pop-cultural antihero, Coleman shows how its protective power arose from the accumulation of meaning, made visible only through recursive return across media, politics, and everyday use. More broadly, the talk highlights anthropology’s distinctive strength: its capacity to reveal how cultural and symbolic forms shift and sediment, and, in doing so, help determine what counts as legitimate or illegitimate political activity.

 

Gabriella (Biella) Coleman is a full professor of Anthropology at Harvard University and a faculty associate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, whose scholarship examines the politics, cultures, and ethics of hacking. She is the author of Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking (Princeton University Press, 2013) and Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous (Verso, 2014), which won the American Anthropological Association’s Diana Forsythe Prize. She also founded and edits Hack_Curio, a video portal into hacker cultures, and is completing a research project with Matt Goerzen on hacker professionalization and the security field, along with a book of essays on hackers and the state. A frequent public commentator, she has presented to audiences ranging from the Brookings Institution to NASA and has written for outlets including the New York Times, Wired, and the Atlantic. Before joining Harvard in 2021, she held the Wolfe Chair in Scientific and Technological Literacy at McGill University. She received her Ph.D. in Socio-cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago.  

 

This event is supported by the Arthur Coleman Tuggle Fund.