Gaming the System

We argue that Anonymous aspires to a condition of aesthetics without art, politics without the polis, and praxis without theory. It intervenes on the political, economic, and social domains and does so by remixing a coherent and evolving visual affinity space, often articulated through the imagery of video games. Put differently, the iconography of Anonymous does not seek to foster communities, but rather instantiate constantly shifting markers of affinity and participation through particular visual literacy. We argue Anonymous provides a new mode of political self-portraiture, one in which there is a staging of the self that is, perhaps as any self-portrait might be, an aspirational image.