The Anonymous and TP

[rich]

very interesting. but the problem will always remain with man/woman.
when folks start operating in groups even small groups there's always
the risk and a high risk that they will up the ante; when does all the
altruism flee? and it will eventually; and what started out as a high
noble cause becomes for lack of a better word, terrorism. I'm not
crypto-fascist. i'm not playing the mubarak card here ("I pharaoh need
to keep order") but I don't trust groups, any groups.

rich

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 11:01 AM, Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es> wrote:
>     Have you ever asked yourself what Pynchon reads or what news catches his
> eye? I'm interested in reading practices so I'm also interested in what people
> read, and that includes TP. Although I have no way to confirm or rule out my
> suspicions, there are things I see that I'm sure would interest him. That's the
> way I felt when I saw a BBC article
> (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12380987) about the group Anonymous
> attacking a private security firm.
>
>     One aspect of this that I find particularly interesting is that Anonymous,
> whether or not you agree with them and what they do, uphold the right to be
> anonymous, to be unknown so to speak. (They apparently stand in contraposition
> to certain social networks as well as the decreasing anonymity and autonomy of
> internet users.)  This is interesting to me because it seems to be a position
> shared by Pynchon. If his avoidance of the public light and his Simpson
> appearance gag (only surpassed by having Professor Irwin Corey accept the
> National Book Award prize in TP's place) are not enough to support that, then we
> also have a quote from AD that may be read as warning on the 'Wharholization' of
> a person through the popular media. Shortly after boarding the Inconvenience,
> Lew finds out about the CC and we get the following:
>
>
>     "But you boys - you're not storeybook characters." He had a thought. "Are
> you?"
>     "No more than Wyatt Earp or Nellie Bly." Randolph supposed. "Although the
> longer a fellow's name has been in the magazines, the harder it is to tell
> fiction from non-fiction."
>
>     But Pynchon is not the only one in the literary field with concerns about
> maintaining anonymity. About ten years ago a book called "Q" came out with the
> author's name given as Luther Blisset (some or many of you may be familiar with
> all this), it turned out, however, to be a pseudonym for a group. That group has
> since written other novels but now goes by the name Wu Ming, which means "no
> name". Although the identities of the group's members are known, they apparently
> avoid cameras or having their images disseminated. Sounds like someone,no?
>
>      As these writers employ strategies of absence or invisibility in order to
> maintain their anonymity and autonomy, will others start to do the same? If
> someday there is a turn against the slow erosion of the concept of the sovereign
> individual's right to be anonymous (eroding down to a 1984 like world created by
> users and voters rather than imposed by some dreadful Big Brother), will someone
> perhaps look back to TP as one of the secular saints of anonymity, a forefather
> of a creed that says, 'We choose to remain unseen, to keep our inner world
> inside, we refuse to let what is private be subsumed by that which is public?
>
> οὔτις
>
>
>
>