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Books

The Anonymous ghost in the machine

A review of Hacker, Hoaxer Whistleblower, Spy by Gabriella Coleman penetrates the chaotic world of the mysterious non- collective that hacked the Pentagon and the government of Tunisia for starters

22 November 2014

9:00 AM

22 November 2014

9:00 AM

Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous Gabriella Coleman

Verso, pp.452, £16.99, ISBN: 9781781685839

Why would you send an anthropologist — as this book’s author, Gabriella Coleman, is — to study Anonymous, the indescribable hacktivist phenomenon whose operations (‘ops’) and giddy, menacing, profane video-manifestos have seized the media and the public consciousness from 2006 to the present day? Because Anonymous is, above all, an anthropological phenomenon.

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Available from the Spectator Bookshop, £14.99 Tel: 08430 600033. Cory Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, activist and science-fiction writer.

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