I want to pick up on Joe’s discussion of anonymity and Blas’ video. We perhaps have failed to realize the dissolution of anonymity on the internet. Look at “SWATting,” which is where somebody uses proxies and burner phones to call the police and report somebody with a gun at a residence. The person who lives there is innocent, but the cops take it seriously, bash down the door, and point guns at the person and their family. Some of the targets have been game streamers, with the excitement coming from watching the police enter the streamer’s home as they stream. Internet anonymity has been relied on to be able to make these calls without being traced but nonetheless, arrests have been made for the pranksters.

Another example is the racist threats, in response to the Black Lives Matter Mizzou protesters, which were made on the “anonymous” app Yik-Yak. The student was arrested after the police subpoenaed the IP address of the person making the threat.

So, when it comes to the law, it seems like anonymity is a thing of the past on the internet. Though, Diana points out that the iPhone seems to be grounds on which the fight for privacy continues. What can we (or Deleuze or Galloway) say of this attempt by the government for control and their failure to obtain it? I would be interested to know what they (or we) think about encryption in regards to late capitalism. The FBI was able to get Farook’s unencrypted messages and data, which went out into the dispersed net and left a trace, but the encrypted data is not shared with the network, or is done so in an unintelligible manner, save for those who have the four digit code.

But, while inroads have been made for the government to rid the internet of anonymity for their purposes, there is still much anonymity between individuals (or dividuals?) in web forums. When a person I’m talking to on Reddit claims “As a black man, I believe we black people need to stop making everything about race,” I have no way of knowing if that ethos claim is accurate or not. Like Blas’ mask, representation mutates in interesting ways in web forums. Like that New Yorker cartoon “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” but taken further to “nobody can confirm or deny anything about you that you don’t yourself confirm.”

I want to leave the Reddit discussion by mentioning a crack in these ethos claims. There is a whole subreddit entitled “As A Black Man” (www.reddit.com/asablackman) where internet detectives look at the post history of those claiming to be a minority and find pictures they have posted that reveal them to be white. Of course, this is only possible when that person has been foolish enough to post a photo of themselves but there’s something to be said of the “As A Black Man” community’s drive to determine the identities of those they talk to. I don’t know what more to make of that.

I want to close by shifting gears (perhaps abruptly) to the rhizome. The Deleuzian term comes up in Galloway and ties our readings together. What I want to better understand is how power structures operate in the rhizomatic political/technologic world. I can see how the network is rhizomatic. I worked tech-support for an ISP for two years and we were constantly taking nodes down and redirecting traffic with few hiccups for the end-user. The network has no center and can adapt, like a lizard, when it loses a part. This makes sense to me. It additionally makes sense to me when Deleuze talks about late capitalism and that “it no longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services and what it wants to buy is stocks.” Stock trading is rhizomatic, is it not? A web of buying, selling, shorting of pure exchange-value.

But there’s still something I’m not getting about control. Control wants to organize and categorize and create hierarchies, does it not? The FBI wants to have sole access to you encrypted data. It doesn’t want dispersal, it wants containment. Isn’t that what Blas is talking about when we organize faces by race and gender and ability? A form of containment that tries to make sense of whatever “you” is so that you can be sorted in the correct file for the correct agency to figure out what to do with you? That seems kind of like a factory to me, but aren’t we supposed to be beyond that?