From 2011 onwards, a protest has taken place in London each year on November 5th now known as the Million Mask March. Having been conceived by a handful of activists who sought to playfully re-create a scene from the film V for Vendetta, by 2015 the march was attracting some ten thousand protesters from all over Britain. It is a strange cultural hybrid of the very old and the very new. A four-hundred-year old festival commemorating a failed plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament was re-inscribed as the annual gathering of those who supported ‘Anonymous’—a global hacking movement that had found fame some years earlier. Like any large-scale protest those who came voiced a variety of concerns, many of which pivoted on the structural effects of a welfare retrenchment policy that had been executed by a Conservative-led government since 2010. Yet what they shared was an air of totality, of finality, of what we might think of here as futility. It was concentrated in their feelings about the inability of the British parliamentary system to resolve these concerns. ‘No matter who’s in, there is not that much change’ was the typical view.

Political cosmology outside the BBC Headquarters in London. Credit: Lucas Somavilla-Croxatto, Creative Commons.

Nonetheless year upon year (and the tradition continues to this day in much smaller numbers) ‘Anons’—as they called themselves—gather outside the main chamber of this institution they believe has so comprehensively failed them. Why?

To begin answering this question it is worth reflecting on the procedures of the march in more detail. In fact, calling it a march is a misnomer. Each year there is no pre-determined route, no clear demand being voiced, and never a great emphasis on walking patiently and purposefully with like-minded others. All that is agreed is the time and place of assembly which is 6pm in London’s Trafalgar Square. From this gathering point participants will normally make their way down to the Houses of Parliament, but after that all movements of the crowd are spontaneous and frequently dissolve into swarms and splinter groups. Two subsequent sites are consistently targeted (not always successfully): Buckingham Palace and the headquarters of the British Broadcasting Corporation. As one Anon framed it, rather than a trade union demonstration which goes from ‘point A to point B, Anonymous isn’t structured like that. Instead you go A, B, D, E, J’. The Million Mask March is not a political march in the recognisable sense, but a series of arrivals outside some of London’s most politically charged institutions: centres of democracy, monarchy, and mass mediation.

The march from ‘point A to point B’ is a political ritual that emerged in Britain in the early nineteenth-century. Its development is inextricably linked to the teleology of modernity and its temporalities of progress, where time was conceived as a linear sequence of stages that would naturally accumulate in a positive way. A conventional march is an embodiment of this temporality because it contains the assumption that by walking together to make a claim on a particular authority, this authority will be compelled to recognise the claim and some form of change will ensue. That the Million Mask March diverged in so many ways from this historical form demonstrates their divergence too from its progressive temporality. By going from A to B to D to E to J, Anons were not embodying the march of progress but doing something else entirely. This has substantial implications when assessing their futility.

A judgement on futility is a temporal statement. For an action to be considered futile there must have been some preceding intention that it somehow failed to realise. If we accord Anons progressivist intentions which are invested in the capacity of British institutions to represent them then—yes—the Million Mask March is a futile endeavour because it has not influenced these institutions in any substantive way. But to do this would be to misunderstand their own aims. By appearing outside these institutions, Anons sought to show their understanding of a web of power—not for the benefit of the buildings’ incumbents—but for the benefit of their lay public audiences constituted both physically and virtually. Anonymous’ overarching project was to elevate this audience’s ‘awareness’ and through this to increase their own numbers and revolutionise society. It was one which became particularly vivid in their interactions with observers, whom they enjoined to ‘wake up!’ and ‘join us!’—cheering with gusto if they did. The temporality of Anons is not progressive but revelatory, involving a binary shift from being ‘asleep’ to being ‘awake’, in which the latter means becoming Anonymous.

This revelatory temporality places it, morphologically speaking, in the category of a religious movement. The discourse of consciousness that they use so pervasively borrows on the one hand from the vocabulary of evangelical Christianity (particularly its North American articulation that has long been associated with non-conformism (Fogel, 2000)), and on the other from the sprawling notions of New Ageism and its emphasis on individual enlightenment. What such discourses share is fundamental orientation around subjective insight. Unlike traditional progressive politics, where change is imagined as an advancement along an external succession of stages, Anons and their expressly religious analogues consider transformation as an a priori internal phenomenon, in which epochal epistemic shifts variously referred to as ‘awakening’, ‘awareness’ or ‘waking up’, will in their collective aggregation lead to the improvement of society as a whole.

This picture is complicated by the fact that Anonymous identifies itself so strongly against formal religion. In this sense they are at the same time an expression of the rising of secular cults and rationalist movements more generally (Engelke, 2014; Quack, 2011), which frequently draw on objectivist rather than subjectivist epistemology to enforce their particular claims. These phenomena present significant conceptual challenges to anthropologists because they disavow religion while continuing to inhabit recognisably religious modalities.

And yet instead of considering the political endeavours of those like Anonymous as futile, because they fail to fall within the narrow remit of progressive politics and its particular temporality, it may be profitable to focus on the ethnographic details of the kinds of change they actually seek to bring about. In this respect, only as their numbers began to decline did many Anons feel an actual sense of futility; although a small group of the faithful remain committed to the project of awakening, still making their way to London each November 5th.

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