Anonymous-The Final Stop on the Search for Cool

When the subversion of the government is entangled with the question of coolness, cool becomes entangled in a debate of methods and results. In Fight Club, the actions of Project Mayhem are not very cool. Instead, the true coolness comes from the interactions between the narrator and Tyler Durden. A real-life organization that attempts to achieve goals through chaotic means is Earth First!. Earth First! is an environmentally friendly group that wishes to preserve the environment at any cost. Although one of their principal beliefs is non-violence, they have absolutely no problem disrupting the progress of businesses and governments in order to stop the destruction of the environment. Additionally, there is an offshoot group of Earth First! known as the Earth Liberation Front. The people in the ELF take their quest even further, using ecotage to destroy anything they see as a possible hinderence to their cause(please watch this). Unfortunately for Earth First!, most people do not buy into their message of environmental protection because of the strange nature of its members. Because they are so extreme, their members are not made up of normal people. Instead, the group tends to be populated with all kinds of strange folk.

A group that is on the opposite end of the spectrum of groups that attempt social change is Anonymous. This group, originating from web sites such as 4chan, is made up of a group of nameless and faceless computer users who attempt social change at their own unpredictable whim. Although there have been protests in the real world, the primary methods that Anonymous uses are virtual attacks. A very popular form of this kind of attack is a DDoS attack, which prevents people from visiting the attacked Internet site. One particular group that Anonymous attempts to disrupt on a regular basis is the Church of Scientology. Their biggest assault on Scientology came with Project Chanology, the primary goal of which was to protest Scientology with live protests, DDoS attacks, and by spreading information to people. However, not all of Anonymous's attacks come about for legitimate reasons. They have also been credited with causing a great deal of chaos on the Internet for no particular reason. When digging into the sites that house Anonymous, only one semi-true answer can be found: They did it because they thought it would be funny.

Overall, coolness has been found just about everywhere. However, coolness itself seems to be very subjective, and the question of whether or not anything is cool is a matter of perspective. For example, members of Earth First! are probably much more likely to think that the Earth Liberation Front is cool than most normal members of society. Cool is definitely an abstract concept that everyone has a unique opinion on, but by tracking the views of what groups of people think is cool over time, we can come to realize that our own perceptions of coolness were influenced by the past. Ultimately, our average ideas on what is cool and what is uncool will change over time, and our little search for cool will have its little place as cool continues to change throughout the distant future.