Legion

Anonymous has declared digital war on ISIS. The plan: hack their Facebook profiles, blow up their Twitter accounts, banish their websites to whatever void the internet reserves for things that deserve to disappear—all in service of dismantling the propaganda machine that recruits susceptible kids from across the world by making medieval death cult membership look like an adventure. The collective released a statement in their usual style: Guy Fawkes mask, processed voice, the whole aesthetic.

There’s something almost poetic about it. A stateless, leaderless swarm of internet people going after a stateless, apocalyptic swarm of internet-savvy murderers. Whether Anonymous can do lasting damage to ISIS’s online infrastructure is a different question—these things tend to be whack-a-mole at best—but the image of reality-divorced medieval fantasists getting roughed up by keyboard kids carries its own satisfaction. The ideology of the 7th century versus the pranksters of the internet. Somehow that’s where we are.