“You Wanna a Job Right?”
The “hacker group” Anonymous intends to disrupt or shutdown the Iowa Caucuses by targeting campaign offices in Des Moines with a sit-in on caucus night. Anonymous cites corporations and the complicity of both major parties driving “millions” of people into “poverty.” Anonymous, already linked to OWS, is encouraging OWS supporters to be their instrument. If Anonymous is successful in disrupting the coveted, grassroots-democratic process here in Iowa, or in fact is able to shut it down, I think a crucial transition is at hand for OWS and what would otherwise continue to develop into a more broadened public approval, yet then again such approval might bore some of us.
The second point I would make about Anonymous is that in its anarchist, anti-state pose, it will clearly position OWS in the un-American and anti-democratic category to what is otherwise a well-intentioned public (as flawed as good intentions have been historically and continue to be today.) Anonymous, in this call, already fails to differentiate itself from the capitalist bankers and corporatist miscreants in elected office who are equally arrogant and equally destructive to the integrity of the civic state. By targeting caucuses their believerism is beginning to expose itself.
Conquering Evil
The Iowa Caucuses are a democratic, grassroots process where neighbors get together and debate support for candidates. Organized by precincts and run by party volunteers caucus-goers literally stand in groups or support candidates through a voting process of a particular party, in this case the only two parties that exist with any efficacy. Caucuses are generally conducted by party activist who are usually better informed than most, again these are volunteers not bankers or corrupt politicians that appear in the grand narrative. Once support is tallied and precinct level delegates are selected they are sent to county conventions. Counties then hold said conventions where party issues or planks are discussed or changed along with other policy business. Delegates are once again selected to go to the state then national level. At the national level all state delegates converge and do a final vote. These delegates have, within their party, the authority to make a decision and support the party’s choice for nominee. This is not an election per se, this is a selection by a political party that is self-organized. The only clear link to corruption of the political process is in the amplification by the media by reporting on the process. And, clearly, the selection process of candidates may indeed be of a two party system, what precisely is the corporate link to the rights of Iowans to participate in an otherwise grassroots process of civic duties?
Put another way, I do not support a brand of “anarchists” who pose to differentiate themselves from those they may hate if only to delude themselves for a lack of difference between. And I do mean hate in the same mangling of love generally reserved for teenagers and abusive spouses that drives people to cut something apart, if not their lives, or those dependent on them to create a better world, like the world of a free child’s mind, then their own bodies in a cancerous nihilism and rage. (A type of hate magnified and played-out in the worst aesthetic sense.) What this tells me and my local wisdom is Anonymous lacks ethics right at a time when we should brave a thought of them, and that Anonymous believes they are entitled to ruin something as have corporatist crooks. Right when we may begin to think into life new ethics for democracy, expressly a type of ethics for our seemingly vivid epochal shift (yet an optical ethics of delusion) we may spoil a chance to address the contemporary lack of care and indeed a lack of literacy that capitalism results on its endless search for biotic force at the expense of human dignity and thought. Communal illiteracy is at hand. The type of force that gives power to anonymous people is the same type of get-off an inside trader may feel, no one knows your face…et cetera.
I do not think a future-politics fits into whatever Anonymous would like to see come about, as if stopping democracy that is relatively uncorrupt would somehow draw attention to their solutions—which are, exactly, what? Stopping a democratic process is desperation that is less than required, and no different than Enron, Cheney’s closed energy meetings, the Unitary Executive, extra judicial killings of American citizens, TARP bailouts, mortgage rip-offs, and so forth.
The Iowa Caucuses are indeed imperfect but are not the problem. The desire to test the OWS movement as a war instrument against grassroots democracy is a disaster in wait, at least in the short term, but I will be surprised if it actually happens. For now, Anonymous, try brand consulting.
