Digital Initiation Rites: Joining Anonymous in Britain (Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge) - Softcover

Vita Peacock

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1501784455 ISBN 13: 9781501784453

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2025

Synopsis

Digital Initiation Rites is an ethnography of Anonymous in Britain between 2014 and 2017, in the context of government austerity. Drawing on testimonies of dozens of participants, for whom digital technologies enabled and articulated a political transformation from being "asleep" to being "awake," Vita Peacock narrates the process through which these technologies have become implicated in profound subjective changes. The book joins a wider return of the comparative method in anthropology by placing these accounts in direct conversation with studies of traditional initiation rites - ritual sequences of symbolic death and rebirth - that charge the initiand with knowledge about a society to produce a moral responsibility for it. Through this juxtaposition, Peacock conceptualizes the historically novel form of digital initiation rites, in which digital communication and information technologies play a substantive role in these sequences. Digital Initiation Rites presents another angle to contemporary debates around "conspiracy theorizing" and shows how the consumption of digital media connects to the deep history of humankind.

About this title

About the Author

Vita Peacock is Principal Investigator of the ERC project Surveillance and Moral Community: Anthropologies of Monitoring in Germany and Britain, at King's College London. Her research focuses on hierarchy, surveillance, anonymity, and privacy. She is cofounder of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR).

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1501784455
• ISBN 13: 9781501784453
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 234