Reply #16: OK, point by point...

[Leftist Agitator]

"There's no leadership"

You are 100% correct. But that is what makes Anonymous particularly intractable, and utterly beyond the control of any entity that would try to oppose it. I assume you're familiar with the myth of the Hydra; each head that was severed would spawn two more, thus making the Hydra an especially daunting foe. But what about a metaphorical Hydra that has no head? How do you even begin to destroy something if there is no overt target to destroy?

"there's no consensus."

Ah, perhaps not in the long term, however, there is consensus in the short term sufficient to produce some fairly amazing results. Think of Anonymous like a flock of birds. Each bird is just a bird, it's not as if any bird leads the rest, or that any bird is necessarily what defines the flock as a whole. They're only a flock as long as they're flying in the same direction. Birds may peel off, birds may join, some may get eaten by predators, etc. But as long as there is a critical mass of birds flying in the same direction, moving in unison, we would look at that collective and call it a flock.

That is precisely the way that Anonymous works. They are a flock of very angst-ridden, incredibly intelligent and talented, and currently very pissed off people who spontaneously make common cause, and use their collective power to accomplish what they set out to accomplish. Sometimes they try to engender social change, e.g. Wikileaks or Scientology, sometimes they just do it for the lulz, e.g. Jessi Slaughter or other examples too numerous to list. But regardless, I would hardly call their ethos anarchic. The absence of a cohesive system of belief or philosophy doesn't make the movement anarchic, per se, but it does make it impossible to predict with any accuracy what issues will cause Anonymous to make common cause and fuck shit up.