leahbobet | The Medium. The Message.

matociquala showed me the Anonymous videos this afternoon, knowing that I am interested in ARGs and odd twists on new media. If you haven't been following, someone(s) has...well, declared war on the Church of Scientology. Those two videos, plus a distributed denial-of-service attack on Scientology websites, have been the opening shot.

Watch on YouTube

(We will pause the essay for all science fiction writers in the audience to cream their pants.)

I am...so very excited.

Yeah, that's problematic. The idea-meme Anonymous is fighting against is one that I am not averse to seeing fought; I expect I might feel differently if this was a declaration of war on something I was more in sympathy with. But what excites me is...well, the tools.

We are finally learning how to use the internet.

That selfsame

matociquala told me a while back that Hill Street Blues was the beginning of the ongoing arc in television (I am too young to know about this myself, so I take her word). Before that, TV episodes began and ended a story in their forty-some-odd minutes. Stories did not carry over, and characters did not grow between episodes. The model was essentially that of serial fiction -- in which there is no greater structural unit like the season -- but on a screen instead of a page. We were using older narrative conventions -- medium-derived conventions -- on a new medium where the limits were no longer the same. Hill Street Blues discovered that greater structural unit. Story changed.

The explosion of ARGs and ARG-style entertainment in the last decade is a push in a similar direction: poking at the lines between fact and fiction on the internet. There are a couple people who comment on this journal who are in fact, fictional characters. That's not apparent to the casual observer: reality can be falsified online. That's one of the ways this tool can work. People are starting to use that to tell stories bigger and better, with more immersion and participation, which is exciting in and of itself.

This is, however, the first time I'm aware of that the same tools have been used for large-scale activism.

The earmarks of this video are all the earmarks of an ARG rabbit-hole clue: anonymized voice, odd video, distribution to soak up the maximum meme-spread attention, the kind of vague and expectant language that promise more to come. This is important. Because it means to a large segment of your internet-going population, who've heard of if not participated in The Beast or Lonelygirl15 or Year Zero or The Dark Knight Returns, this fits into a narrative pattern they know. Big things are coming down the pipe. How do you know? Your Game Control/Gamemaster just told you so. And since they're Game Control, you're gonna believe them.

Automatic credibility.

Even if this is one guy in a basement with a grudge? I suspect this might work. Because we've learned how to write fiction with ourselves as the heroes, and now we're taking those tools and using them on real life.

So...this is the internet, unveiled, in its greater glory. This is what you do with the tool, when you've got it up to eleven instead of sitting at nine because your last medium only went to nine. This is what happens when you finally get rid of those narrative conventions that don't really need to be there because you go to eleven now.

Alternate Reality is becoming Real Life.

Are you excited? I'm excited. :)