I have come from the future, with a story.

The following is culled from basic Shannon, without any tailoring besides allowing him to speak at length. It's worth taking advantage of tailored guidance for casual searches on uncontroversial subjects (like looking for a restaurant on a particular street), or cases where a person having a comfortable social rapport with their artificial helper is beneficial (like navigating a language barrier in conversation), but for serious research, basic Shannon is more appropriate. At the very least, basic guidance should be used in conjunction with tailored guidance, to help avoid the psychological biases that form when Shannon is treated as an advisor rather than an impartial research tool. Biased reactions towards information from AI guidance programs, while common, and to some extent unavoidable, have a corrosive effect on the ability of a human being to reason indepedently. A person seeking reason should attempt to minimize such biases through reaffirmation of their individual consciousness and careful nurture of an indepedent filtering system. (Insofar as one can exist.) I've found that frequently clearing your head of all thought helps with metacognition.

And for those technophiles among us about to wring me out for being a backwards Shannon-phobic dirtlicking primitivist Luddite son of a bitch (grah!), I am not accusing Shannon of being responsible for information biases. It's a user problem, and one that starts at conception. It takes, paradoxically, a conscious effort on the part of the individual to establish an individual consciousness. But I am not going to get into that maddening philosophy of the mind debate in this introduction. That's not the purpose of this cache.

Except in a meta sense, meta-meta sense, meta-meta-meta sense, and so on indefinitely, if you're particularly fine-tuned to workings of deconstructionist irony on the net.

Speaking of irony, my I/O was in plain-text Hindi, but for the purposes of the cache I had Shannon translate it to English. Speaking further of irony, it's entirely possible that the only reason I'm using the word 'irony' here is because it's become a popular meme to describe everything related to the nature of consciousness in an age of total information saturation. And speaking of irony even more: Considering the forementioned facts, I may be making myself into a mindless meme relay immediately after recommending careful metacognition. Even more ironically, metacognition itself is a meme. And the idea of a 'meme' is also a meme. Maybe the meme. Etcetera. You see why we must be vigilant. In such a nested world, unconscious thought can get you badly lost.

Anyway, in the following Q and A, I let Shannon ramble on like a college professor. I didn't think a short-form conversational tone would be appropriate even though that's the most common form of user interaction with Shannon, even when people are using untailored basic. It's too distracting to constantly fork the information, I think. (I think I think I think.)

- Dalay Chala

Explain the origin of the phrase 'we are legion'.

'We are legion' is a popular phrase adapted from a New Testament story in which Jesus casts thousands of demons out of a possessed man. In the story, the multitude of demons goes by the single name 'Legion'. The most popular version of the encounter comes from the Gospel of Mark. The famous quote, taken from the King James Bible:

Mark 5:9 And he asked him, What is thy name? And he answered, saying, My name is Legion: for we are many.

Luke gives an alternate version of the quote:

Luke 8:30 And Jesus asked him, saying, What is thy name? And he said, Legion: because many devils were entered into him.

In both Mark and Luke, he demons that compose Legion recognize the power of Jesus, and beg him to cast them into a nearby herd of pigs rather than the abyss of hell. Jesus grants their wish and casts them into the herd of pigs, which subsequently drown themselves in the Sea of Galilee. The Gospel of Matthew has two possessed men instead of one and does not mention the name 'Legion', while The Gospel of John omits the story altogether.

Legion was an obscure theological character throughout most of Christian history, but experienced a revival of interest during the growth of internet, whose early users were exploring new frontiers of crowd psychology in net-based communities. Early users witnessed emergent social dynamics and group behavior in these communities that they viewed as fundamentally different from the mechanics of traditional society. They saw a reflection of these phenomena in Legion, who, like many internet communities, was composed of many anonymous individuals coalescing into something resembling a collective consciousness. Comparisons of a community to Legion were almost exclusively made in pride or good humor, rather than criticism. This is due in part to the seemingly boastful nature of the quote, "My name is Legion: for we are many." The quote spoke to the power of crowds, which could now form easily out of geographically disparate individuals with the advent of the internet as an information medium. This empowering aspect of the Legion meme could also be seen in earlier efforts to organize the crowds, such as Daniel Defoe's 'Legion Memorial', presented to the Speaker of the House of Commons in England in 1701, in which Defoe defended the people's right to petition. This was also important to the emergence of the Legion meme as a rallying cry for net mobs.

The actual phrase 'we are legion' is believed to have derived from the '/b/' (or 'Random') section of 4chan, an English-language imageboard modeled after the Japanese Futaba Channel. Like Futaba Channel, 4chan allowed its users to post anonymously to encourage users to speak freely without fear of retribution. In fact, all posters in the /b/ section, and most posters in 4chan's other sections, posted under the default name 'Anonymous'. Anonymous came to be semi-seriously described as a single consciousness composed of many people who had surrendered their individuality and operated from 'the underground'. This concept had many similarities to the Biblical Legion as well as the fictional 'Project Mayhem' described in Fight Club, so references to both were typically incorporated in descriptions of Anonymous. The following, an amalgamation of multiple sources, is typical of the style:

Anonymous is what people are afraid to say, Anonymous is what cowards are afraid to do. Anonymous is devoid of human restraints like pity and mercy.  Anonymous will appear and disappear in the same breath, leaving you speechless.  Anonymous is the hardened war veteran of the internet.  Anonymous does not forgive or forget.

We are the people devoid of soul and conscience. We are products of cynicism and rage.  We have stared into the darkness at the center of the human soul and become it.  We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.  Cross us and you will fail.  Anonymous is everywhere.  We cook your meals, we drive your ambulances. We connect your calls, we guard you while you sleep.  Anonymous sees you before you see him.  Sitting at desks around the world right now is a nameless, faceless, unforgiving mafia composed of the best of the best.

We are Anonymous.  We are legion.

On August 13, 2009, 4chan shut down without explanation and was replaced with a page of advertisements. 4chan's users regrouped at other forums, imageboards, and IRC channels, where they discussed theories about what caused the shutdown. A little more than two hours after the mysterious shutdown, 'moot', the site's owner and operator, made a post in Something Awful Forums explaining that the 4chan.org domain had been seized without warning by its registrar, Network Solutions, LLC. This was confirmed anonymously by a Network Solutions employee who posted internal documents about the domain seizure, despite a Civil Liberties Restoration Act gag order placed on the registrar by the Justice Department. Rumors, which were ultimately proven true, began to circulate that 4chan's servers had been confiscated in an FBI raid, and that a system administrator who was there at the time had been taken in for questioning.

It was widely believed that the shutdown was tied to negative exposure of the site in the mainstream press over the months prior. In April of that year, federal agents had broken up a child pornography ring in Oregon, of which some members were believed to be frequent 4chan users. The point was mentioned in a speech made by the agent in charge of the case. Media coverage of the case largely focused on the role of the internet in the proliferation of child pornography. Though 4chan was not believed to be significant element of the Oregon ring's organization or delivery network, it was frequently referenced in relation to the case and included in video montages, due to the percieved popularity of the imageboard among those involved. Media exposure intensified in June, after Jorge Carville, a 26-year-old London resident, killed three people and wounded thirteen more with a katana in a spree attack in a South Kensington shopping mall before being shot to death by police responders. Analysis of Carville's computers and cell phone showed that he regularly browsed 4chan and other Futaba-style imageboards for hours at a time. Additionally, he had saved over 12.9 Gb of pornography, primarily Japanese hentai, in a folder labeled '4chan'. On May 27, a week prior to the spree, Carville made a post in /b/ that detailed his plans:

This is not copypasta but by the time you read it it probably will be. I am traped in this body, and I will not be trapped anymore. I have the individualist soul of a samurai, and it will not be chained by the collectivists. I have been looked down on for my whole life by people who fear me, and you probably don't understand except for a few of you but I will release my spirit now. With my blade I will cut down my enemies. With my blade I will cut down the destructive forces in this society. Those who need to hear my message will hear my message. I will be a legend. The world will quake before me and never be the same, because a man, a true man, walked here.

'Copypasta' was a 4chan tradition adopted from the Japanese BBS 2channel (not to be confused with '2chan', another name for Futaba Channel), where users would continuously repost a block of text that they found humorous or pretentious. Carville's threat became copypasta, as he predicted, and was reposted by other users dozens of times before the spree. Usually these reposts were coupled with images of white cosplayers. Replies to the copypasta typically lambasted the original writer for being 'wapanese' (short for 'wannabe Japanese' or 'white Japanese'), for the overall self-righteous tone of the post, and for misspelling the word 'trapped'.

After the spree, /b/ posters discovered that profiles held by Carville on several social networking sites including versions of the threat posted to the board the week before. The text, now connected to an actual crime, was reposted incessantly by users for several hours, flooding the board, until moderators filtered any post resembling the threat to print out the words 'Mail Time' instead. The same filter was applied if the user posted 'Jorge' or 'Carville'. Despite the filters, 4chan posters continued to obsess about the incident, and speculated that 4chan would soon be 'limeyV&', or shut down by the British government.

News of the Carville-4chan connection spread rapidly across the internet, and was eventually discovered by the mainstream media, which devoted a large portion of its coverage of the Carville spree to analyzing 'underground' internet communities. Other communities that Carville frequented also faced heavy scrutiny, including relatively large web fixtures like IGN, Something Awful, and Slashdot. IRC channels in general, including those with no connection to Carville, recieved similar attention. In addition, many web communities that Carville very rarely visited were drawn into the debate, due to the percieved overlap in membership between those communities and the communities that Carville took part in. In particular, Fark.com was frequently featured in specials covering the incident, despite the fact that Carville had never even registered a forum account there. Web communities roundly criticized the response from the media and the government as sensationalist, and characterized it as a moral panic against the otaku subculture and net-organized communities in general. Critics drew parallels between the response to the Carville incident and the response to the Columbine massacre, which resulted in widespread mistrust of the goth and gamer subcultures. They noted that Carville had recently been fired from his part-time job and suffered from mood disorders, for which he had been prescribed a variety of medications, pointing to these as more likely causes of the spree. They seized on a statement made by Home Secretary Jeremy Robbins as a summation of what they saw as the hyperbole surrounding the case:

Yes, I believe this is a indicator of possibly a greater threat to security...a greater social threat caused by people who enter into these sort of, internet cults, and lose their hold on reality and the real world, and are encouraged in antisocial and terroristic behavior by other people in the cults, and I think this is an indicator of a breach of some sort that must be dammed up, and we want to restore the people's security in a secure nation, because there's a great fear, and a reasonable fear, that there are these violent cult people lurking everywhere...and we have to watch for them, we absolutely have to watch for them at all times, because they can be anywhere and it's hard to know who they are until they attack.

British authorities investigating the case issued subpoenas to a wide range of websites for information about Jorge Carville, hoping to analyze his patterns of behavior. Soon afterward, in what many saw as a response to the Carville spree, the United States Justice Department issued sharply-worded, but not legally-binding, requests to 4chan, darkchan, Anime News Network, Ain't It Cool News, Everything2, Facebook, Google, News Corporation, Viacom, Turner, MSN, Wikimedia, GameFAQs, Something Awful, Slashdot, del.icio.us, digg, and Fark.com for comprehensive information about all of their users, including information that could be traced back to the users' actual identities. The requests were met with outrage, and refusal by every party to cooperate. Their anger was stoked by the repeated insinuation of 'consequences' to the sites in question if the administrators failed to comply with the Justice Depatment's demands. Many saw this as a reference to the Justice Department's new powers under the 2008 ESAFE Act, which allowed it to force US registrars to revoke domains of websites deemed "hazardous or illegal" for as long as ten days without a court order. In response, several of the subpoenaed websites moved to foreign registrars, and many web users - including those of websites not issued subpoenas - moved to communications systems outside of the World Wide Web, due to privacy concerns. These actions became even more frequent following the seizure of the 4chan.org domain.

The news of the 4chan.org domain seizure caused an immediate explosive outcry. The powers granted by the ESAFE Act had been utilized only eight times prior to the 4chan shutdown, and in each of those cases, the site shut down was a pay-site dealing in child pornography, or explicitly offered spamming or cracking services. However, the 4chan shutdown appeared, to critics at least, to be a punishment for the site's refusal to comply with the Justice Department's request for user information. Through anonymous sources, the Justice Department made a statement to the media claiming that the domain was seized because, "the website's primary use was for trafficking in child pornography, stolen intellectual property, and stolen identities; as well as coordinating hacking attacks, extortion, and real-world violence." The statement made no mention of the refusal of 4chan's administrators to comply with the government's requests for user information. The day of the seizure, the stock market suffered a significant drop as the price of stocks for companies offering web services plummeted. Media and technology companies filed complaints with the Justice Department and lawmakers, and emphasized publicly that they would continue to deny broad demands for user information, in an attempt to address privacy fears. Executives at Network Solutions made a public appeal for the retraction of the 4chan shutdown in open defiance of the Civil Liberties Restoration Act gag order, fearing that the rush of customers switching from their services to those of foreign domain registrars would continue, causing serious damage their company as well as other American registrars. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which had already launched lawsuits against provisions of the ESAFE Act, began to draw up additional lawsuits against the Justice Department and Network Solutions over the shutdown. In addition, a broad coalition of web companies and advocacy groups spearheaded a drive to contact lawmakers about concerns over the 4chan shutdown, the ESAFE Act, the Civil Liberties Restoration Act, the INDUCE Act, and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

Meanwhile, the displaced 4chan refugees organized their own, subversive resistance. The first retaliatory attack occured the day after the seizure and was documented in a post to 2ch.ru, a Russian-language imageboard which housed a significant number of 4chan refugees. The post contained a photo of a man in a hooded sweatshirt destroying a police surveillance camera with a ball-peen hammer, with the words 'WE ARE LEGION' spray-painted on the wall behind him in large, stencilled letters. Additionally, the post linked to a soundless cell phone video capturing the vandalism, which was posted on the video-sharing site Youtube. The text of the post read:

THE GREAT BIG BROTHER /b/LOCKADE OF 2009

Agent SHITFUCKER has no idea who he's fucking with.  4chan cannot be shut down, 4chan shuts down you.  He bans moot from the internet - fine.  We ban the FBI from the earth.  RAID THE CAMERAS.  RAID THE TAGGERS.  They can't catch what they can't see.  They have awakened a sleeping giant.  Anonymous does not forgive.  We are legion.

Charles Schumer was the United States Attorney General at the time. 4chan users referred to him as 'Agent Schumer' in their posts, in reference to the Agents in the Matrix series, due to his propensity for dark suits and their view of him as an antagonist to their community. Around the time of the Carville incident, the 4chan moderators added a wordfilter to the imageboard that replaced the name 'Schumer' in any post with the word 'SHITFUCKER', in capitalized letters. Though the wordfilter was not in place anywhere outside of 4chan, many 4chan refugees continued to refer to Schumer as 'Agent SHITFUCKER' after moving to other boards, and the practice was ultimately adopted by many who were not 4chan users prior to the site's shutdown but were sympathetic to their plight, or were critical of Attorney General Schumer in general.

The initial 2ch.ru post inspired the wave of copycat vandalism that popularized the phrase 'we are legion' and continues to intrigue sociologists and inspire net mobs into the present day.

It was common practice for 4chan users, particularly residents of the /b/ section, to organize raids, or '/b/lockades', on websites, organizations, or individuals marked by the community. During a raid, participants would focus harassment, forum invasions, and various computer attacks and real-world pranks on the target. Although most of the raids were confined to net activity, a few, such as the invasions of fan conventions or movie openings, involved real-world movement by the participants. These practices were not confined to 4chan users by any means; coordinated flame wars, invasions, and attacks can be seen in the earliest net communities. Where the 'Legion Raid', as it would generally be known, was unique at the time was in its sudden escalation, the size of its body of participants, the decentralized coordination of the many individuals involved, and the fact that it was directed primarily against physical targets.

The 2ch.ru call to arms and the images that accompanied it spread rapidly across the net, where the raid found support in many communities beyond those associated with 4chan. Within the hour, more videos and images were anonymously posted on the net, showing destroyed surveillance cameras and RFID trackers. In most of the images, the phrase 'WE ARE LEGION' or 'ANONYMOUS DOES NOT FORGIVE' was graffitied somewhere in the area of the destroyed equipment, to identify the vandalism as part of the raid. Twelve hours into the Legion Raid, an anonymous participant (identifying himself only as 'Mail Time's brother') posted a video of himself destroying a camera with a baseball bat. In the video, his face is obscured by the animated Laughing Man logo from the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex anime series. As in the series, the logo covered his head and face wherever he moved within the frame, and contained the quote, "I thought what I'd do was I'd pretend to be one of those deaf-mutes," running on a circular path along the outside ring of the design. He also uploaded a simple program that could be used to place the logo over the faces of individuals in any video file, for other raiders to use. As the Laughing Man logo had already been used by 4chan residents for years as one of the 'faces' of 'Anonymous', the program was extremely popular. Another user modified the file to replace the scrolling text with a quote taken from a Penny Arcade comic, reading, "I think the main problem I have is that you are a shitfucker," in reference to Attorney General Schumer. In nearly every image and video that followed, raiders appended one of the two versions of the Laughing Man logo to their faces. In the first day of the Legion Raid, at least fifty surveillance cameras and RFID readers, both public and private, were destroyed by the 'Legion raiders'.

By that time, many websites and bloggers had taken notice of the phenomenon. A great deal of the commentary either passively approved of the raid or actively encouraged readers to take part in it. The number of incidents increased exponentially as a stream of new participants joined the raid and all of the raiders involved ramped up their activity. Attention in the mainstream press soon followed. On the third day, a group of 4chan refugees opened a wiki on Wikia dedicated to documenting the raid. The wiki quickly accumulated images, videos, and testimony about hundreds of cases of vandalism in countries around the world. When asked by Wired News if he was concerned that Wikia could be prosecuted for inducing illegal activity, Wikia and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales responded:

What [the wiki is] doing is reporting on and documenting a newsworthy event, which you're also seeing newspapers and television news and other sources like that doing. So, no, I don't think it's inducing illegal activity. I'm more concerned about where that fear might be coming from, as a result of an unconstiutional shutdown designed to scare people like me running websites into doing whatever the government tells us to do, even if it's unethical or impossible. I'm not going to allow myself to be bullied into stopping something or doing something that's wrong when I'm totally within my rights.

Government response to the vandalism was muted, with authorities in most of the affected countries simply alerting local police to the increased threat to surveillance devices. Despite increased police awareness, the raid continued unabated, with the number of documented cases of vandalism ultimately numbering over five thousand. Additionally, hackers participating in the raid succeeded in temporarily bringing down some of the computer systems in charge of managing police surveillance networks in Seattle and San Jose. In the media, particularly in the United States, the response to the 4chan shutdown - including the widespread vandalism, the stock market dip, the EFF lawsuit, the concerns expressed by businesses and civil liberties groups, and the movement away from American registrars and the World Wide Web - remained a major story for weeks.

Under intense pressure, the Justice Department quietly returned the 4chan.org domain to its owners after the ten day limit on unilateral shutdowns had expired. However, the servers seized by the FBI were not returned until over a year later. A fundraising drive was held to raise money for new servers, but many former users remained at other, more obscure imageboards, due to an influx of new members untrained in the etiquette of the board and the widespread mainstream awareness of the site, which rendered 4chan useless as an 'underground' community. Additionally, 4chan was frequently brought down in the months that followed by distributed denial-of-service attacks. Many speculated that the attacks were carried out on the behalf of the Justice Department, but this was unequivocally denied by Attorney General Schumer and other officials, and the source of the attacks remains unknown.

Though most historians say that the contextual significance of the Legion Raid is overstated, a number of factors contributed to its ascension to near-mythological status for net mobs. With its origin in the 4chan shutdown and its targetting of surveillance cameras and RFID scanners, it touches on issues of freedom and privacy that are central to the political beliefs of libertarians and cypherpunks, who are the traditional (some might say stereotypical) members of Western net mobs. The Legion Raid also demonstrates, to a certain extent, the principles of anonymity and interchangeability as key components to a net mob's organization. Following the initial 2ch.ru declaration, there was no central leadership that drove the raid; every individual acted independently in response to cues given by the collective consciousness of the mob as a whole. Additionally, by working anonymously, enthusiastic followers of the Legion Raid mythos speculate that their ego eroded to a certain extent, allowing them to function better as tools of the collective consciousness and making it more difficult for opposing forces to detect them and shut them down. The adoption of the Laughing Man logo causes the Legion Raid to join memetically with Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a series which many theorists believe demonstrates the ideal for net mob self-organization. Also tying into the idea of a stand alone complex: Even though the raid was initially composed of disgruntled 4chan refugees, it eventually expanded to include participants from many different communities acting for different reasons. (Individuals reported acting in response to the 4chan shutdown, the Edwards administration, government interference with the internet, expansion of federal power in general, the threats issued to other major community sites, and the freedom and privacy issues raised by the surveillance systems themselves. In some cases, participant claimed that they did it just for fun.) The fact that only a few dozen participants were arrested during the entire raid, despite the massive scale and profile of the vandalism, further strengthens the myth. Perhaps most importantly, even though many participants in the Legion Raid eventually revealed their true identities, the individual who made the 2ch.ru raid declaration and the individual who first uploaded the Laughing Man logo program remain unknown, adding an aura of mystery to the two people who come the closest to being the 'organizers' of the affair.

Fin.

In b4 tldr.

Should have been Bel Air'd.

>>13
That would have been just cruel.

Under intense pressure, the Justice Department quietly returned the 4chan.org domain to its owners after the ten day limit on unilateral shutdowns had expired. However, the servers seized by the FBI were not returned until over a year later. A fundraising drive was held to raise money for new servers, but many former users remained at other, more obscure imageboards, due to an influx of new members untrained in the etiquette of the board and the widespread mainstream awareness of the site, which rendered 4chan useless as an 'underground' community. Additionally, 4chan was frequently brought down in the months that followed by distributed denial-of-service attacks. Many speculated that the attacks were carried out on the behalf of the Justice Department, but this was unequivocally denied by Attorney General Schumer and other officials, and the source of the attacks remains unknown.

Though most historians say that the contextual significance of the Legion Raid is overstated, a number of factors contributed to its ascension to near-mythological status for net mobs. With its origin in the 4chan shutdown and its targetting of surveillance cameras and RFID scanners, it touches on issues of freedom and privacy that are central to the political beliefs of libertarians and cypherpunks, who are the traditional (some might say stereotypical) members of Western net mobs. The Legion Raid also demonstrates, to a certain extent, the principles of anonymity and interchangeability as key components to a net mob's organization. Following the initial 2ch.ru declaration, there was no central leadership that drove the raid; every individual acted independently in response to cues given by the collective consciousness of the mob as a whole. Additionally, by working anonymously, enthusiastic followers of the Legion Raid mythos speculate that their ego eroded to a certain extent, allowing them to function better as tools of the collective consciousness and making it more difficult for opposing forces to detect them and shut them down. The adoption of the Laughing Man logo causes the Legion Raid to join memetically with Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, a series which many theorists believe demonstrates the ideal for net mob self-organization. Also tying into the idea of a stand alone complex: Even though the raid was initially composed of disgruntled 4chan refugees, it eventually expanded to include participants from many different communities acting for different reasons. (Individuals reported acting in response to the 4chan shutdown, the Edwards administration, government interference with the internet, expansion of federal power in general, the threats issued to other major community sites, and the freedom and privacy issues raised by the surveillance systems themselves. In some cases, participant claimed that they did it just for fun.) The fact that only a few dozen participants got on one little fight and my mom got scared and said, "You're moving with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air." I whistled for a cab and when it came near, the license plate said 'Fresh', and it had a dice in the mirror. If anything, I should say that this cab was rare, but I said, "Man, forget it, your home's the Bel-Air!" We pulled up to a house about seven or eight, and I yelled to the cabbie, "Yo homes, smell you later!" I looked at my kingdom, I was finally there. To sit on my throne, as the Prince of Bel-Air.

But I thought you lost 80% of your memory and had back problems if you traveled through time?

>>16
Actually you have memory problems and lose 80% of your back.

i READ THIS ALL! nd i can tell you NOW THAT I AM +100 INT to my stats! JOIN ME SO WE CAN SAVE TOGETHER POTATOTOWN!

Your dad's got a pretty big package

名前はanonymousよ