"Wack Attack" - A piece of (online) Feminist History

[xulamaude]

This is a very valuable article originally published in 2008 in Bitch Magazine (yeah, I know...) about the cyber attacks, spearheaded by Anonymous, launched against women/feminist bloggers.

It's a bit long but incredibly informative. To be filed under 'the more things change, the more they stay the same'.

Then I got word that a loosely organized cybermob known as Anonymous was attempting to crash feminist sites, including Feministe, flooding comments sections with misogynist rants and threatening feminist bloggers with rape and other violence. This had happened before, but never with such organized force. No one was sure which systems would hold and which would fail; we didn't even know which site would be attacked next. Privately, we worried about our safety and strategized about how to defend our sites and ourselves. Publicly, we decried these attacks in blog after blog. We knew our attackers wanted to silence us, and we refused to give them that satisfaction.

These attacks were hardly taking place in a vacuum. They came only months after violent, gendered threats on technology writer Kathy Sierra made international headlines when they blossomed unchecked on popular and respected tech blogs, even going so far as to include her personal address and phone number, and ultimately causing her to withdraw from public speaking and shut down her blog.

In the end, it's no easier to imagine an Internet without misogyny than it is to imagine a world without misogyny. We're working on it, but it's going to take a long time to get there. In the meantime, as Borsellino puts it, "We'll just get better at fighting back."

http://bitchmagazine.org/article/from-the-archive-wack-attack