Just down the road from the boomtown of Karratha is Roebourne, home to an impoverished Aboriginal community.

It’s 11am on a Saturday and Sholl Street, Roebourne, shows few signs of life, aside from scores of empty beer bottles that have festooned the fence of a boarded-up shack. A man taps me on the shoulder. “Can’t go in there, love,” he warns, clutching a stubbie. He points to the dwelling’s dilapidated extension and mouths: “asbestos”. The symbolism of mineral contamination is remarkably convenient for Roebourne, a pocket of abject poverty nestled amid some of Western Australia’s wealthiest mining townships.

At the heart of Australia’s boom is the Pilbara, a region spanning 502,000 sq km, where jagged cliff tops and gorges flank the engine room of theAustralian economy. More than $237bn was poured into mining projects this year with the expectation of increased export growth.

Many commentators fear this economic growth is lopsided, deepening the chasm between the mining sector and the rest of the economy. It seems especially apparent in remote communities such as Roebourne, home not even to two-speed growth, but of development stuck in reverse.

Bedevilled by alcohol-related violence, high truancy rates and poverty, Roebourne’s plight seems anomalous in a region where severe labour shortages have driven up average wages to more than $110,000 per year, notably in mining towns such as Karratha and Dampier.

Roebourne flourished in the gold boom from 1890 to 1912. An influx of European migrants made the settlement the largest between Darwin and Perth, but it also led to the swift dispossession and displacement of the town’s indigenous community, who were subject to curfews and relegated to outlying camps. It was not until the 60s – when the discovery of iron ore created the towns of Karratha and Dampier, which drained workers from Roebourne – that Aborigines returned.

Today, the population of 1,000 is 75% Aborigine, home mostly to theNgarluma people, but also to the Banyijima and Yindjibarndi communities. It has one school, a swimming pool and a youth centre. Healthcare and the community services sector are integral to the economy, although most workers live in larger settlements such as Karratha, some 40km away, and neighbouring Wickham.

The Roebourne report, released by the department of indigenous affairs last year, paint a stark picture of the town’s problems: alcohol consumption three times the national average; a 12% high school completion rate; and some dwellings housing 15 to 20 people.

Rosie Clements, an outreach nurse who lives in Karratha, believes the solution lies in maintaining social services, although even that is fraught with difficulties. “Costs have gone through the roof,” she says, referring to rents that have topped $2,000 per week and utilities costs of up to $1,000 a quarter. “It’s hard for not-for-profits to retain staff, when mining companies are offering dream wages.”

Some in the Aboriginal community, such as West Australian of the Year Mark Bin Bakar, blame political complacency. “There’s no consideration for investment into Roebourne,” he told the West Australian newspaper. “Roebourne is the blackfellas’ town and Karratha is where the mainstream live”.

Disputes over land access foster further resentment. The Fortescue Metals Group, which has acquired a limited right to mine in Yindjibarndi country, told the community they had to request permission to enter cultural sites. The company said it would photograph and video Yindjibarndi sites, as well as people performing rituals and paying their respects to the land. Michael Woodley, CEO of the Yindjibarndi Aboriginal Corporation, described these rules as “apartheid-like”. “We have come here to record our heritage, check on the safety of and purify our ancestral burials, and talk to the country,” he said. “It was laws like this that tried to break the connections of our people to country and the rituals that are the foundations of our religious beliefs and language.”

But others, such as head of the Ngarluma and Yindjibarndi Foundation, Evan Maloney, retain a guarded optimism. “Roebourne is helping itself as best it can without much help from the outside,” Maloney says, referring to community-driven initiatives on the restriction of alcohol, educating the community about child abuse and the engagement of a burgeoning artistic community as examples of self-determination.

There are other signs that hint at a turning tide. The state government has set up a Royalties for Regions project that invests 25% of mining royalties in regional areas. This has funded projects this year, including a 380-lot residential development for indigenous people, a youth centre and an arts studio.

Nonetheless, the cultural and geographical distance between Roebourne and the state’s decision-makers is large. But Clements remains quietly hopeful. The policy is, at least, a “tentative step in the right direction. The last thing the community needs is a quick fix.”

I learned about 4chan the hard way. Many moons ago, a friend of mine emailed me while on vacation in Tripoli, saying that he’d attached a photo that I might enjoy. And lo and behold: the photo, innocuously titled maindrag.jpg, was not of a bustling street, but of an elderly man coming to grips with his distended anus. I had just been Goatse’d. In a follow-up email, my friend explained that he’d been spending time on an internet imageboard called 4chan that had fanned the flames of his desire for casual trolling, as the reactions from unwitting suspects tended to be hilarious. On 4chan’s /b/ forum, he said, the ‘bait and switch’ routine is a common trolling mechanism. ‘Rickrolling’ (sending people links of Rick Astley singing ‘Never Gonna Give You Up’) is probably the best known (and most benign) example.

Self-proclaimed moral compass of the magazine world, Time, called 4chan – particularly the ‘random’ (/b/) forum – a ‘wretched hive of scum and villainy’. Personally, I prefer Encyclopedia Dramatica’s description of ‘asshole of the internet’, for reasons that may already be obvious. Other media outlets have tended to steer towards hysterical proclamations, unsure what to make of a site that encourages one’s social filter to be switched off and social mores transgressed to the point of absurdity. But if you strip away any predictable moral conceit, 4chan seems like a constantly unfurling guide to the young white male hive-mind mentality, updated in real-time.

For that reason, it is unsurprising to note that much of the /b/ forum is dominated by crude sexual innuendo, free porn, homophobic and misogynistic sentiment, posts promising photos of personal degradation in exchange for porn and posters sarcastically asking for advice on romance. Offensiveness is encouraged; leave your inhibitions for Twitter. On 4chan – particularly /b/ – there’s no shame or accountability for the unabashed dick-fussing or offensive remarks because each poster is anonymous. The site certainly has an undesirable element to it, yet this also functions as its primary appeal.

Like all online narratives, 4chan can be mentally exhausting. As with Facebook’s aggregated news feed, one is constantly and arbitrarily bombarded with visual stimuli. If you’re looking for a linear, expository narrative among 4chan’s assortment of jewels and junk, it can be difficult. Some of the posts seem utterly nonsensical, even anachronistic – I suppose that’s to be expected on the ‘random’ imageboard – but the most rewarding aspect is seeing memes generated and regenerated, with numerous forum members adding to the dialogue with images and text, trying to garner the most laughs and appreciation from their peers. As such, the results can often be brilliant, shocking, intelligent, absurd and/or chronically inappropriate – much like the male youth which make up the majority of its audience.

Indeed, the instantaneous pace of any social networking site means that the hardest part is keeping up. And to keep on top of memes in 4chan – which has no archives of past posts – can be tiring. The endeavour requires constant visits, in the same way that any social networking site trades off and depends upon repeated stimulation for its success.

But 4chan sits well outside of this social networking war, despite that fact that its influence on culture is as broad as the mainstream players’. 4chan and Canvas (as well as new imageboard sites like dump.fm) are unique in that they thrive on the anonymity of their members. Anonymity ensures that it is the content, not the creators, that reigns supreme. The act of collaboration between members trumps the efforts of the individual every time.

One may be reluctant to declare 4chan an arbiter of taste, but there’s no denying its indelible imprint on internet and popular culture. It has a mythology, a culture and an argot that is distinctly and uniquely its own. Of course, some of the most memorable and vibrant cultural produce is spawned from the ghettos, which are often antagonised by or actively antagonise the mainstream. 4chan has been untouched by the gentrification process – the imageboards are as wildly inappropriate as they ever were – but markers of its cultural legacy can be found everywhere. Liberated from the meticulous posturing that bedevils other social networking sites, 4chan is able to achieve cultural resonance by titillating those impulses that are often left unspoken. Sometimes, the illicit thrill of the forbidden is just too tempting.

Recently Anonymous, a decentralised collective of hackers and activists, has been everywhere – getting headlines for crashing the websites of governments and corporations alike – but alsonowhere. Like an insouciant wart on the foot of institutional power, Anonymous can be irritating, occasionally painful and primed for repeat visits. Their origins are similarly dubious. But we know that Anonymous is a loose coalition of members spawned from the swamps of4chan: a cluster of bulletin boards where images are regularly uploaded, edited and re-edited by users, all of whom are anonymous. It is the Freudian Id on crack. It’s the place where memes – ideas in the form of a photo, video website, hashtag or phrase that evolve over time and are disseminated via the internet – are made, social mores are transgressed and brains are broken for the ‘lulz’. A corruption of LOL, lulz is the pure, unadulterated joy that comes from knowing that someone somewhere will be mortified by what you’ve uploaded. A hilarious post will unleash a torrent of replies, each one a show of brinkmanship. This is not unexpected: what is the point of social networking if not to constantly establish and re-establish one’s rank?

It was from this morass that Anonymous was spawned: an online community with no defined geographic centre and no formal command structure, although there are less than a handful of members who comprise the decision-making cabal. While Anonymous shares some similarities with 4chan – namely its focus on providing irreverent entertainment – it is increasingly associated with involvement in political and social movements. I wonder what is more astonishing: the fact that this army of trolls has transformed into a demimonde hacktivist movement, or that the movement has the capacity to redefine conventional models of activism.

As Anonymous does the majority of its protesting online, it’s assumed the majority of Anonymous supporters are teenagers and IT professionals with a lot of leisure time. Given the illegal nature of hacktivism, even my close Anon friends are unwilling to reveal too much. The reality is that anybody can count themselves among Anonymous’ rank-and-file, as long as you are in agreement with the objectives determined by the group’s hive mind.

I’ve found this hive mind mentality fascinating and repulsive in equal measure. In 4chan, it can generate fleeting cultural phenomena – Rickrolling, cat pictures, for example – and reveal a lot about human behaviour (casual perpetuations of homophobia and misogyny are rife). But in Anonymous, the group mentality mirrors that of real-life activist groups: it is politically idealistic but capable of being focused; its livelihood under siege from constant infighting. But there are some significant differences. For instance, hacktivism requires scant physical effort or genuine political engagement. It’s a bit like tweeting about Q&A.

That said, what intrigues me the most about Anonymous is how quickly the mood vacillates between anarchy and order. Enter the Anonymous internet relay chat channel and you can witness – in real time – the capacity of the hive mind to coalesce fruitfully. This tends to happen when Anons are planning a massive-scale DDoS attack distributed denial-of-service attacks. Often, there’s a lot of juvenile name-calling – but there have also been coups and counter-coups by Anons disenfranchised by the decision-making process. When disorder threatens to derail operations, members are reminded of the two unifying concepts that give Anonymous its potency: unwavering belief in the freedom of expression and the freedom to exchange information. In a world where decisions are routinely made on the basis of information and misinformation, where moral hazard cordons off the truly powerful from the rest of us saps, information is king.

But online, everyone in theory can be a commentator; no one is quite who they say they are and the rules are constantly in flux. It’s a virtual free-for-all for information. And that’s exactly how Anonymous wants it to stay. It’s as simple as wanting to ensure the freedoms we enjoy online are replicated in the real world.

Given Anonymous’ humble history, this explicitly political turn is all the more fascinating – and not necessarily a natural trajectory. Let us reconsider where Anonymous came from: 4chan, where 10.2 million visitors traverse its unwieldy terrain each month, where 550 posts per minute are uploaded without fear, favour or moderation – kiddie porn excepted. The most popular of the 4chan imageboards is /b/, the ‘random’ board where you’re likely to encounter puppies wearing wigs, a video of a man shafting a glass jar up his anus or nearnaked pictures of girls who veer precariously on the edge of legality. Every user is anonymous in 4chan, where there are no archives of posts, no accountability and no rules. There is, however, a guiding doctrine: ‘1. You do not talk about /b/. 2. You do not talk about /b/. 3. If it exists, there is porn about it. No exceptions.’

Only in these times could one forge a connection between forums for discussing spider rape and forums encouraging political activism, but these are strange times. Certainly, these parvenu origins are central to Anonymous’ modus operandi, where a culture of controlled anarchy and irreverence flourishes amid the group’s unique social structure, which resembles a sort of socialist utopia that Communist dictators would kill for. Quoth its somewhat mawkish manifesto: ‘Anonymous is a panopticon in reverse. A group where everyone is invisible and appears to speak from the center.’

Anonymous was previously renowned for its mockery of egregious displays of political correctness, hypocrisy and social conservatism. My interest in Anonymous was piqued by their trolling of Oprah last year, where the talk-show host – subsumed by a sensational fit of histrionics – informed the daytime sofa-set that a known paedophile network called Pedobear was raping children with ‘over 9,000 penises’. Before that, there was the group’s persistent targeting of the Church of Scientology over its status as a recognised, tax-exempt religion – where (DDoS) brought down Scientology websites – in addition to old-fashioned protesting outside Scientology headquarters. The protestors donned their Guy Fawkes masks, jived gamely to techno and brandished placards with six words bound to instil fear in those grappling with new technology: ‘DON’T WORRY, WE’RE FROM THE INTERNET.’

Nowadays, the group has sidelined its hallmark prankery in favour of pursuing explicitly political causes. So far, Anonymous has conducted DDoS attacks on the government websites of Tunisia, Egypt and Libya during their respective revolts against government repression; they attacked the website of Ireland’s main opposition party and they also defaced the official site of Zimbabwe’s government, after President Mugabe’s wife sued a newspaper for publishing a WikiLeaks report revealing her involvement in the illicit diamond trade.

Anonymous’ actions have briefly affected Australians, too. Closer to home, Federal Communications Minister Stephen Conroy was left to weather an Anonymous-driven deluge of pornographic emails, spam, black faxes and prank calls as part of Operation Titstorm on 10 February 2010. The operation was a rousing reveille for Anonymous loyalists to partake in a DDoS of Australian government servers in protest against the government’s mandatory internet-filtering legislation. The directive from Anonymous also specified that where possible, porn used in the attacks should feature small-breasted women, cartoon porn and female ejaculation – the three tropes that were frequently banned by the Australian Classification Board. Once again, the legitimacy of Anonymous’ actions was called into question – not only by the Australian Government but by anti-censorship groups in Australia. Nicholas Perkins, the co-founder of Stop Internet Censorship, believed Anonymous was inadvertently maiming the movement, telling the Sydney Morning Herald that ‘it would be much more helpful for [Anonymous] to put their efforts behind legitimate action’.

Indeed, Anonymous’ methodology continues to divide observers within and outside of the hacker community. DDoS attacks are useful for garnering media attention to certain political causes, but they can also be interpreted as an ironic attack on an opponent’s right to free speech. The persuasiveness of this argument depends on the size and character of Anonymous’ targets. Multinational corporations and governments may seem fair game, but what about the activities of private citizens? Are critics right to suggest Anonymous is eroding an already blurry distinction between public and private spheres?

Of course, similar criticisms were levelled at Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, who has been affectionately dubbed by Anonymous as ‘the most successful international troll of all time’. Assange has neither explicitly condemned nor endorsed Anonymous’ actions, but he did tell his supporters to uphold Wikileaks from the ‘instruments of US foreign policy’: PayPal, Mastercard and Visa. Anonymous showed their support by conducting Operation Payback, a string of DDoS attacks on those three companies, which Wikileaks needed to stay afloat. In any case, an article written by Assange in 2006 titled ‘The Curious Origins of Political Activism’ in Counterpunch – where he fondly recalls the anti-nuclear Worm Against Nuclear Killers (WANK) that penetrated NASA and Department of Energy servers in 1989 – suggests he would probably approve of Anonymous’ efforts to serve up politically-conscious hacking with a dash of irreverence.

Although the underlying ideologies behind Wikileaks and Anonymous are far from cogent, both outfits are primarily interested in the freedom of information and the exchange of that information; they both have the capacity to function as a check against abuses of institutional power. It’s an ethos which is fairly universal and grand in scope, and with a significant spike in Anonymous’ membership peaking in December last year (an additional 50,000 armchair activists, script kiddies and political agitators participated in bolstering Anonymous’ raison d’être), it appears to have struck a chord with disenfranchised online citizens all over the world.

In an era where taking to the streets has all but atrophied, one wonders if Anonymous’ brand of online activism signals an ineluctable trajectory for civil disobedience movements. Generally speaking, this is an organisation without a formal leadership structure that has channelled global forces of civil disobedience and achieved tangible outcomes. But the end-goal for Anonymous isn’t just to grind servers down to a stutter but to forcefully implement institutional change through cyber-intimidation and illegal acts. To do so, they’ll have to convince mainstream actors of their serious and genuine intentions.

For the most part, the media remains bewildered by Anonymous, not knowing quite what to make of the group’s mélange of illegal activity, political motivations and sardonic sense of humour. As the group does not visibly toil on any ideological coalface, mainstream media outlets have tended to portray Anonymous as a loose coalition of hackers with nebulous but sinister intent. Popular culture’s portrayal of The Hacker – a pasty, ungainly neckbeard with a penchant for massively multi-player online role-playing game (MMORPG) – seems predominant. As such, the brand of activism practised by Anonymous is still seen as something of a novelty. There are no bodies on streets or blood: nothing that makes for an easy, linear media narrative.

Electronic subterfuge is a comparatively bloodless pursuit; the scalps have been far and few between. (It is apt that Anonymous’ logo is a headless man in a tuxedo.) Nevertheless, authorities in the US and Europe are stepping up their game. A 16-year-old Dutch teenager was arrested for his involvement in Operation Payback, along with five other men from the UK. DDoS attacks have now been declared a major felony by the FBI, which has warned that Anonymous hackers could be liable for the maximum penalty of 10 years imprisonment.

Yet Anons are, for the most part, unfazed by the threat of incarceration. In an interview with the BBC, self-proclaimed spokesperson for the group, Coldblood, indicated that fellow Anons know that DDoS attacks are illegal but are compelled to participate if the cause is ‘worthy … and the possible outcome outweighs the risk’. Perhaps Anonymous’ intrinsic appeal is that it has the cachet of a select coterie of skilled-up script kiddies and internet activists, but is actually fairly accessible provided your politics – and your disdain for legality – are a good fit. Undoubtedly, the shield that anonymity affords its followers is probably a fundamental part of Anonymous’ appeal. Armchair activism is a relatively low-risk proposition. And yet one cannot help but think that the ‘smoke and mirror’ show surrounding Anonymous does it a disservice, particularly in the eyes of a sceptical mainstream audience. Rather than demystifying the call to activism, Anonymous’ mystique serves only to obscure it.

Funnily enough, things are most simplistic on the technology front. Anyone with moderate computer literacy can become Anonymous. Members of Anonymous partake in DDoS attacks by downloading an open source network attack application called Low Orbit Ion Cannon. Once downloaded, the application enrols your computer in a voluntary botnet, which culminates denial-of-service attacks from, say, tens of thousands of other users who have also installed the program on their computers. These attacks take a variety of forms: disruption of servers and routing information, consumption of bandwidth and so on. The result: they cause the website to crash. As far as methods of hacking go, DDoS is pretty primitive – but what it lacks in sophistication it makes up for in efficacy. Operation Payback crashed the Mastercard website for two days – just long enough to garner worldwide media attention and freak out corporate bigwigs.

Big business is certainly near the top of Anonymous’ hit list, in addition to governments – whether they are autocratic, democratic, left, centrist or right-wing. Given that Anonymous is a decentralized online community, it is probably unhelpful to pick a unifying political persuasion. As a member explained to the Baltimore City Paper: ‘We all have this agenda that we all agree on and we all coordinate and act, but all act independently toward it.’ A fairly anodyne description of the group’s politics, to say the least. Their brand of civil disobedience is a stark contrast to the centralised, ‘real-life’ social movements of the past, which generally had an identifiable leader and formal, hierarchical order. Theoretically, anyone can become a member, as long as they profess a loose identification with the group’s objectives. Coldblood, in conversation with the BBC, elaborated just how elastic this identification can be, suggesting that Anonymous is in fact an ‘online living consciousness, comprised of different individuals with, at times, coinciding ideals and goals’.

Indeed, a visit to Anonymous’ chat rooms reveals that these ‘coinciding ideals and goals’ emanate from a strong ‘hive mind’ mentality, which determines a sort-of order amidst the fractiousness. Anonymous members know each other by their pseudonyms, but are able to build relationships and trust over time in Internet Relay Chat conversations. To witness these IRC conversations is akin to experiencing the virtual unfolding of democracy, the way our Greek forebears intended it. Any member can suggest a target site. Vociferous debate often follows. And, much like any other real-life democracy, misinformation spreads swiftly. At any given time, 10 or so OPs can initiate DDoS attacks; if any OP is seen to be abusing his/her power, they are temporarily banned from the chat room. Abuses of power can occur when an OP tries to implement an attack that goes against the greater will of members, who can register their disapproval for a target site by pulling their computers out of the voluntary botnet. Numbers are crucial not only because they determine an attack’s effectiveness, but also its legitimacy.

After I wrote an article in The Atlantic about Anonymous’ evolution from pranksters to political activists, Andrew Naslund, a spokesperson from UnitedForIran.org, contacted me in a matter of minutes to express his views on whether one could justify Anonymous’ brand of hacktivism. UnitedForIran.org was given a lot of exposure by Anonymous, who were keen to promote the work of other online activists that focused on the protection of civil liberties. He says that although Anonymous ‘occasionally brings guns to the knife fight … their hearts usually have a good chance of being in the right spot – either intentionally or otherwise’. The group’s inclinations towards nasty retaliation may taint their legitimacy in the eyes of observers – not to mention the illegality of their actions – but it is increasingly difficult to dismiss them as the scalps accumulate. ‘I think Anonymous increasingly benefits from “momentum”,’ Naslund adds. ‘As they chalk up wins around the world, they seem more like a viable movement, and the more viable they seem, the more wins they chalk up.’

But the battle, of course, is far from over. DDoS attacks can be an effective form of registering dissent, but they are fairly provincial weaponry in today’s cyber war. Slate columnist Farhad Manjoo likened DDoS to a ‘Mean Girls-esque trick of having your friends prank-call your loser enemy all night long to tie up her phone’. Moreover, it’s unlikely that actual social and policy changes will be enacted as a result of Anonymous’ actions. Nevertheless, this shouldn’t diminish the genuine value of hacktivism to democracy – which lies in their capacity to call out gross misuses of institutional power.

It does seem like Wendell Phillips was onto something all those years ago, when he said the price of liberty was eternal vigilance. He was speaking in 1852 before the Massachusetts Antislavery Society, but his words retain their relevance. For now, it’s a cost those Anonymous brigadiers are willing to bear. After Operation Payback, the group took to Twitter and crowed mercilessly: ‘Freedom of expression is priceless. For everything else, there’s Mastercard.’

MILTON FRIEDMAN famously called for the abolition of the Federal Reserve, which he thought ought to be replaced by an automated system which would increase the money supply at a steady, predetermined rate. This, he argued, would put a lid on inflation, setting spending and investment decisions on a surer footing. Now, Friedman’s dream has finally been realised—albeit not by a real-world central bank.

BitCoin, the world’s “first decentralised digital currency”, was devised in 2009 by programmer Satoshi Nakomoto (thought not to be his—or her—real name). Unlike other virtual monies—like Second Life’s Linden dollars, for instance—it does not have a central clearing house run by a single company or organisation. Nor is it pegged to any real-world currency, which it resembles in that it can be used to purchase real-world goods and services, not just virtual ones. However, rather than rely on a central monetary authority to monitor, verify and approve transactions, and manage the money supply, BitCoin is underwritten by a peer-to-peer network akin to file-sharing services like BitTorrent.

The easiest way to store BitCoins is to sign up to an online wallet service through which all transactions are carried out. This, of course, means trusting the provider of that service not to cheat, or go out of business, taking clients’ savings with it. Warier users can install a personal digital wallet on their own computers. They must then, however, keep it safe from viruses or physical damage. If a laptop went up in smoke, so would the virtual coins stored on its hard drive. (Keeping back-up copies would do the trick.)

All transactions are secured using public-key encryption, a technique which underpins many online dealings. It works by generating two mathematically related keys in such a way that the encrypting key cannot be used to decrypt a message and vice versa. One of these, the private key, is retained by a single individual. The other key is made public. In the case of BitCoin transactions, the intended recipient’s public key is used to encode payments, which can then only be retrieved with the help of the associated private key. The payer, meanwhile, uses his own private key to approve any transfers to a recipient’s account.

This provides a degree of security against theft. But it does not prevent an owner of BitCoins from spending his BitCoins twice—the virtual analogue of counterfeiting. In a centralised system, this is done by clearing all transactions through a single database. A transaction in which the same user tries to spend the same money a second time (without having first got it back through another transaction) can then be rejected as invalid.

The whole premise of BitCoin is to do away with a centralised system. But tracking transactions in a sprawling, dispersed network is tricky. Indeed, many software developers long thought it was impossible. It is the problem that plagued earlier attempts to establish virtual currencies; the only way to prevent double spending was to create a central authority. And if that is needed, people might as well stick with the government devil they know.

To get around this problem, BitCoins do not resemble banknotes with unique serial numbers. There are no virtual banknote files with an immutable digital identity flitting around the system. Instead, there is a list of all transactions approved to date. These transactions come in two varieties. In some, currency is created; in others, nominal amounts of currency are transferred between parties.

In the very first transaction the creator’s computer forged 50 units of the currency. The next transaction would have involved subtracting some amount from the creator’s account and crediting it to a recipient’s. These actions, and any subsequent ones, were automatically broadcast to the entire network. At first, when the network was small and transactions few and far between, verifying them was been straightforward. The first person to confirm the new transactions would offer his updated log as the one against which any future transactions ought to be judged. Once everyone else agreed that this candidate register was indeed accurate, it would be adopted and the new transactions included in it confirmed. If anyone tried to game the system by erasing an old transaction (so he could re-use the same money again) or adding an unwarranted new one (transferring the same money as before, say), he would be promptly found out, his proposed log discarded, and the transactions rejected as invalid.

However, as the network expands from dozens of users to thousands, and transaction volume grows, so does the number of logs vying for the official crown. Getting everybody to scrutinise the first proposal aired across the network for inconsistencies soon becomes impractical; the whole system grinds to a halt. Some way is therefore needed to ensure that the official register can be updated and agreed on in real time (or nearly), while preventing individuals from tampering with it. Mr (or Ms) Nakomoto’s ingenious solution involves two related cryptographic techniques: hashing and forced work.

A hashing algorithm converts a message into a number called a hash value, or a digest. If this number is big enough, it provides a unique representation of the original (since the same algorithm could not conceivably yield identical hash values for different messages). Moreover, it is impossible to reconstruct the original on the basis of the digest alone. Nor is it possible to predict what the digest would be for even a slightly tweaked version of the original message; fiddling with a single letter will produce a completely different digest. In that regard, digests appear to be generated at random. As a result, hashing is what computer scientists call an irreversible process.

Consider a hashing algorithm which converts anything fed into it to a whole number between one and 1,000. For random sets of data, the algorithm would spit out a value below 11, say, once in every 100 tries, on average. Now suppose some data are given in advance. How does one find a number that needs to be appended to these given data to produce a hash value below 11? Because hashing is irreversible, and digests are essentially random, the only way to do this is through trial and error: by splicing different numbers onto the old data and hashing the whole lot until the desired result pops out. On average, this will require 100 tries. However, once the answer is found, everyone else can verify whether the problem has indeed been solved by running the hashing algorithm just once, with the proposed solution. This type of puzzle can only be cracked using brute force, which is why it is dubbed forced work.

With BitCoin, all new transactions are automatically broadcast across the entire network and analysed in portions, called blocks. Besides any new as-yet-unconfirmed transactions, each block contains the digest for the last block to have got the nod from the network. That last block will always come from tip of the longest chain of blocks currently on the network. This chain is, in effect, the official log—confirmation that all the previous blocks tot up.

For a new block to be deemed valid, some computer on the network must create a transaction log for it that dovetails with the previous blocks. To prevent acceptance of bogus logs, giving it a seal of approval has to be prohibitively costly to any individual user, but relatively cheap for the network as a whole. This is done by making it into a forced-work task, which involves using the valid blocks and the new transactions to generate a digest consisting of 256 bits (ie, any number between 0 and 2²⁵⁶). The task is complete when the system’s algorithm spits out a hash value below a preset target (like 11 in the example above). The target is set so that the puzzle is solved by someone on the network, and a new block approved, every 10 minutes. To keep this rate constant as the network’s ranks swell and its combined computing power grows, the target is lowered in order to make generating a value below it harder. (Conversely, if the network were to shrink, it would get easier again.)

Creating the doctored block and having it validated and attached to the official log would thus require outpacing the network’s combined computing power. This can only happen if a fraudster controls more than half of the network’s total number-crunching capacity, which is possible, but extremely expensive for any one person.

The system can thus rely on users to police it. As a reward for giving up some computing power to that end, the first user to crack the forced-work task gets 50 coins for the effort. This is done by always making the first new transaction in each block the conjuring up of 50 coins out of nothing. When other participants agree to append the new block to the official chain, they also validate the creation of the new money (they would, of course, reject it if someone tried to game the system by minting more than 50 coins).

This is also how BitCoin niftily gets around the problem of increasing the money supply without a central mint. Since blocks are created at a constant average rate, and there is a set number of coins minted per block, the total money supply, too, increases at a steady clip. For now, this is 300 coins every hour on average. Every four years, though, the minting rate is set to fall by a half. It will drop to 25 coins per block in 2013, to 12.5 coins in 2017, and so on, until the total supply plateaus at 21m or so around 2030.

The idea is to mimic the extraction of minerals (the transaction-validating software is called the BitCoin miner). As the most readily accessible resources are exhausted, the supply dwindles. Unlike real resources, however, there is no as-yet-undiscovered, hidden lode a fortunate prospector can strike to disrupt the money supply. Should a powerful new computer be introduced to the network, the difficulty of the forced-work challenge would soar, keeping the rate at which blocks are approved—and new money created—unchanged.

In theory, then, the system ought to keep a lid on inflation—making it attractive to critics of interventionist monetary policy of the sort practised since 2008 by America’s Federal Reserve under the label quantitative easing. (The mineral analogy, in particular, appeals to proponents of a return to a gold standard.) It offers other apparent benefits, too. The currency can be used by anyone (unlike credit cards, for instance), anywhere. Transaction costs are also likely to be lower than those for traditional payment systems, though these are not in fact zero. Some are reflected in the hardware and energy used to police the system. Some surely creep in whenever those who have no wish to mine BitCoins themselves purchase them for dollars, euros and several other currencies at specialised sites like Mt. Gox.

Legally, BitCoin exchanges are subject to the same regulations as ones trading commodities. For example, an exchange must report any transaction above $15,000, a policy meant to stem money laundering. For the purposes of taxation, meanwhile, reimbursing somebody for a product or service in BitCoins is treated as barter. The tax code makes provisions for such practices, though, admittedly, they can be tough to enforce.

This has not stopped some American politicians from expressing grave concern about the virtual currency. Charles Schumer, a prominent Democratic senator, has inveighed against it, claiming it is just what drug dealers have been waiting for. All the clever cryptography means BitCoin dealings are difficult to trace. But not impossible. According to BitCoin’s defenders, its users may be more difficult for a government agency to pinpoint than someone paying with a credit card. But they are easier to catch than those using cash. Moreover, any drug trade involves sending physical products to recipients. Authorities already track many packages sent by groups under investigation. When it comes to physical delivery, the method of payment is irrelevant. Another worry, for the authorities at least, is that, in theory, a BitCoin account cannot be frozen. But, like cash, Bitcoins can be nabbed by seizing the computer on which they are stored.

Ordinary folk, meanwhile, have different concerns. They fear being bilked by a cabal of clever boffins, who can insidiously fiddle with the system’s software to take advantage of less geeky types. This queasiness, though understandable, may be misplaced. As an open-source project, the computer code which undergirds BitCoin can be viewed, and modified, by anyone. As with all such ventures, however, if a change is introduced that most participants do not accept, they will simply refuse to download that version of the software. Since the self-professed geeks who make up the web’s open-source communities often delight in (and excel at) scrutinising seemingly impenetrable lines of computer language, it is highly unlikely that someone could get away with surreptitiously inserting a command to create excess BitCoins and siphon them off to his account, for instance. For the same reason, the open-source nature of the project is also a bulwark against hackers or malware. Indeed, as cybercrime goes, BitCoin may be safer than traditional financial institutions, which are often on the receiving end of such attacks.

And then there are the currency’s economics. These have engendered a surprisingly lively debate. One particular bone of contention is whether it makes sense to decrease the rate of money creation with time. Some people think this will entail disastrous deflation if the demand for BitCoins grows at a faster rate than new coins are minted. As recent wild swings in their dollar price amply demonstrated, they are not the most predictable of vehicles. The volatility is largely down to the fact that the currency remains illiquid—only 6.5m currency units (divisible to eight decimal places) are currently in circulation among some 10,000 users (including several hundred merchants who accept payment in BitCoins). This seems unlikely to change in the foreseeable future, as even BitCoin’s most ardent supporters admit. That is not because people are queasy about intangibles. After all, much of modern pecuniary activity already involves bits rather than bob and consumers have embraced credit cards, electronic transfers and the like.

The difference is that established fiat currencies—ones where the bills and coins, or their digital versions, get their value by dint of regulation or law—are underwritten by the state which is, in principle at least, answerable to its citizens. BitCoin, on the other hand, is a community currency. It requires self-policing on the part of its users. To some, this is a feature, not a bug. But, in the grand scheme of things, the necessary open-source engagement remains a niche pursuit. Most people would rather devolve this sort of responsibility to the authorities. Until this mindset changes, BitCoin will be no rival to real-world dosh.

The government is talking up the country’s nuclear future, but progress may be hamstrung by characteristic indecision.

Japan has raised the level of its nuclear crisis to the same as Chernobyl 25 years ago.

Yet the reverberations of the crises at Fukushima have scarcely cast a ripple in Indonesia‘s political quarters. Two weeks after Japan’s nuclear crisis, the Indonesian government stated that it will continue to pursue an ambitious nuclear power programme of its own that will triple the country’s electricity output by 2025.

The most significant proposal is the planned construction of two nuclear power plants comprised of four nuclear reactors by 2022. The two plants would have a cumulative capacity of 18GW. The majority of officials have settled on a preferred location – Bangka – which sits between the islands of Sumatra and Borneo. Supporters of Indonesia’s nuclear bid are adamant that Bangka is far from active fault lines, thus minimising the potential for a Fukushima-style crisis. They emphasise that the technology used by Indonesia will be much more advanced than the 40-year-old reactors in Fukushima.

Last week, Sri Setiawati , a deputy to the minister for technology and research, gave her assurances that out of the 10 Asean nations, Indonesia “is the most ready to build a nuclear power plant”. Ferhat Aziz, a spokesman from the country’s national nuclear agency, BATAN , saysthat Indonesia has the requisite expertise to go nuclear, with “many experts who have been prepared [for a nuclear plant] for decades” and numerous tests conducted at three research reactors in Bandung, Central Java and Banten.

But a significant proportion of the Indonesia public, it seems, isn’t as convinced. Plans to build a nuclear power plant in Muria in Central Java – nestled next to an inactive volcano – were eventually sidelined after vociferous protests by the local community. There has also been strident resistance from NGOs and environmentalist groups such as Greenpeace, who have consistently voiced their concerns over Indonesia’s geological vulnerability – such as its ill-fated position atop the “ring of fire” – in addition to Indonesia’s history of inefficiently coordinated responses to disaster. While Japan has demonstrated its extraordinary capacity for order and efficiency in a crisis,Indonesia’s capacity to mobilise resources in an emergency is usually cuckolded by a well-entrenched preference for bureaucratic buck-passing.

Then there’s the pervasive culture of corruption in Indonesia. Nothing less than utmost stringency is required where nuclear power is concerned, but opponents fear a penchant for cutting corners could eclipse safety concerns. These fears are felt among some members of the country’s National Energy Council (NEC), the advisory body that maps out power infrastructure in Indonesia, which has led to some members calling for the exploration of geothermal sources, hydroelectricity and biofuels before resorting to nuclear power.

To its credit, the Indonesian government has recognised – with increasing urgency – the need for reform. The depletion of fossil fuels and ever-increasing oil prices means that initiatives promoting renewable energy are a necessity. Currently, ensuring a stable power supply is of foremost importance: only 65% of Indonesians have access to electricity; the government aims to increase this figure to 91% by 2019. Furthermore, blackouts in the nation’s overburdened capital, Jakarta, occur with chronic frequency.

This is compounded by the hucksterism of Indonesia’s coal producers, who would prefer to export their product for a higher selling price to foreign markets instead of selling locally for a lower price to the state-owned electricity utility, PLN. At the heart of the problem is that the government continues to undervalue the price of electricity, which has subsequent ramifications for incentives for firms to invest in electricity infrastructure. It’s a quandary that plagues many emerging economies: how does the government determine a price that ensures affordability of electricity to consumers while encouraging much-needed investment in the industry?

It’s not surprising, then, that advocates of nuclear power have found support in the Indonesian government, which is well aware that the only way electricity output can be stabilised and increased is if the country is self-sufficient in energy production; that is, it is no longer dependent on fossil fuels.

Certainly, Indonesia is not the only developing nation with designs on developing nuclear power plants – although after Fukushima, it is certainly part of a select club. While the Philippines, Malaysia and China have temporarily halted their nuclear power plans, Vietnam – also bedeviled by the cumulative forces of increasing prosperity and unsustainable urban growth rates – is also to build a nuclear power plant. Both countries have been offered financial support from Russia to pursue nuclear power projects: Vietnam has already signed a deal with Russia to have a nuclear power plant ready by 2020. Indonesia has been more coy about committing to anything on paper, but will receive roughly $1.5m from Russia per year to jointly finance renewable energy initiatives.

However, it is just as likely that all the talk of nuclear power in Indonesia will be simply that – talk. A cursory glance at Indonesia’s chequered history of infrastructure projects suggests that significant movement on big capital and time-intensive proposals tends to be hamstrung by characteristically protracted decision-making processes. Indonesia is already on track to miss a target set by the government to have nuclear power online between 2015 and 2019. One member of the NEC, Herman Agustiwan, said that with a population of 240 million, nuclear option is a necessity for Indonesia as it has to “consider [its] energy supply in the long-term …[we] have no choice”. He may be right – but either way, one just hopes Indonesia’s plans for a sustainable energy future aren’t paralysed by governmental indecision.

Published in The Atlantic, 21 March 2011

When 23-year-old Christopher “moot” Poole revealed Canvas at SXSW last week, he was not afraid to fire a none-too-subtle salvo at the overarching dominance of identity-driven social media. To borrow from the patois of Poole’s first cultural phenomenon, 4chan, he was adamant that Facebook and Twitter were doing it wrong. He singled out Mark Zuckerberg for being “totally wrong” about the corollary between fixed online identity and authenticity, with Poole arguing that causality between the two concepts was fallacious. Instead, he argued the opposite was true. “Anonymity is authenticity” was Poole’s catch-cry, and Canvas his platform for a public push towards embracing a culture of anonymity.

In a similar way to 4chan, Canvas is an imageboard where members post pictures and take part in the dynamic and unpredictable world of meme creation. A preliminary poking-around of Canvas suggests it is more benign but just as irreverent as its predecessor: One popular thread shows a picture of Justin Bieber being transformed by users into a piggish caricature, complete with a double chin. Poole’s description of the site is quite holistic, suggesting that its value is derived from the simplicity of a “shared experience.” He argued the idea that “knowing that you and several other people are experiencing this and participating in helping something unfold in this moment” forges a strong sense of belonging in an online community, a quality that has been integral in the success of 4chan. And unlike Facebook, which can sometimes resemble an advertisement of one’s mundane existence, imageboards like 4chan and Canvas are, quite simply, places to hang out and create memes with others online. It may sound like a fairly arcane concept, but it’s also an extraordinary cultural phenomenon: 10.2 million to 12 million visitors a month are compelled to loiter compulsively on Poole’s myriad imageboards.

Canvas is still in beta mode, but Poole has been quick to posit Canvas as an entirely separate entity from 4chan. Certainly, Canvas has some crucial distinguishing features. For instance, it has attracted the largesse of prominent venture capitalists to the tune of $625,000. Investors included founder of the Huffington Post, Kenneth Lerer; Google investor Ron Conway; and Joshua Schachter, the creator of Delicious. Financial backing of this magnitude suggests it is a markedly more ambitious undertaking, and highlights growing recognition of an alternative to personality-focused social media. After years of being portrayed as an online ghetto for miscreants, 4chan has been co-opted into mainstream Internet culture, which surely bodes well for Canvas.

Certainly, this pull towards the mainstream is much more evident in the ambitions Poole has for Canvas, which contrast stridently with 4chan’s devil-may-care attitude. Despite huge visitor traffic, 4chan makes little money, probably because the only advertising on the site is for adult services. But as Canvas is Poole’s heavily bankrolled pet project, it has the potential to attract similar amounts of traffic, making it a potential cash cow for advertisers. But considering the amount of investment in the project, one assumes Canvas is as much of a business enterprise as it is a cultural one. Therefore, it probably needs to be more sensitive with content, so as not to scare off prospective advertisers. Perhaps this is why Poole has forgone absolute anonymity in the beta version of Canvas, which requires all users — who still appear anonymous to each other — to log-in via Facebook Connect.

Nevertheless, anonymity remains central to Poole’s vision because it liberates users — or content-makers — from the pressure of creating something hilarious. Anonymity enables users to express uninhibited creativity in a “completely unvarnished, unfiltered way,” as Poole puts it, free from the hulking albatross of failure. When unsuccessful attempts at wit surface in 4chan and Canvas, they tend to disappear fairly quickly because the momentum that drives memes is fast-paced and instantaneous. But when there’s no name, there’s no shame. After all, there’s no time to dwell on past failures when memes are in a constant process of regeneration.

In any case, the anonymous nature of these forums — and the absence of archived posts — means that such sins are quickly absolved. But most importantly, anonymity ensures that it is the content, not the creators, that reigns supreme. The act of collaboration between members trumps the efforts of the individual every time, an outcome unique to 4chan and Canvas. In comparison, the collaborative opportunities proffered by Twitter and Facebook are slim; the currency of personal status updates and tweets is constrained by a user’s social clout. A real identity carries with it the burdens of accountability and responsibility, as well as the desire to deliberately cultivate a desirable online persona, which clearly impinges upon Poole’s insistence on a no-holds-barred approach to content creation. While many would be hesitant to declare 4chan as an arbiter of taste, it would be hard to deny that it has spawned a unique mythology, culture and vernacular that has left an indelible imprint on mainstream Internet and popular culture — a legacy that Poole surely hopes to build upon with Canvas.

Typically, Poole’s critics view the Internet as a hotbed for anarchy, and thus place a high premium on establishing fixed identities as a necessary regulatory measure. Many are quick to point to 4chan’s seedier side as an argument against anonymity on the web: the culture of bullying; the unbridled transgression of society’s moral codes; the casual perpetuation of homophobia and misogyny — all of which can be seen in the often-vitriolic comments section of most newspaper websites. Julian Dibbellhas referred to anonymity in Internet culture as an embodiment of societal id: the one place where one can indulge, guilt-free, in what most would consider to be chronically inappropriate and base impulses.

Which brings us back to that bugbear of authenticity. Zuckerberg contends that anonymity breeds cowardice, that the value of online comments and dialogue is at a maximum when online identities are attached to real ones. His criticisms of anonymous online culture may have some validity, but they tie into an uncritical assumption that one’s online self is a direct replica of one’s self in the real world. Rather, it is anonymity that reveals most about human behavior: how people are inclined to act when there is no need to mask your opinions because there are no consequences. Anonymity negates the need for the meticulous posturing that bedevils an individual’s need to conform to social mores. Sometimes, the results aren’t going to be pretty, but surely its capacity to showcase a comprehensive gamut of opinions and cultural norms — offensive or otherwise — speaks to the definition of an authentic, online culture.

Published in The Atlantic, 4 March 2011

It wasn’t so long ago that Anonymous staked its identity on relentlessly subverting culture for the lulz. The group became renowned for its mockery of egregious displays of political correctness, hypocrisy, social conservatism and lameness by way of constructing humorous memes, or by mythologizing these flaws in their satirical wiki, Encyclopedia Dramatica. Needless to say, their work had narrow appeal – appreciated mainly by members of the group’s forums. It took the inimitable trolling of Oprah – which led to herhysterical announcement to middle America that a known pedophile network by the name of Pedobear was equipped with “over 9,000 penises that were all raping children” – to garner the group significant time in the media spotlight.

These days, the narrative could not be more different. Over the past few months, Anonymous has constantly been in the headlines, but for reasons that are political rather than “lulzy.” It seems the group has squarely concentrated its efforts on promoting freedom of information and speech by way of illegal, distributed denial-of-service attacks to crash the websites of authoritarian regimes in Africa and bolster the group’s campaign for unfettered freedom of expression worldwide.

For the most part, the mainstream media remains befuddled by Anonymous, not knowing quite what to make of the group’s mélange of illegal activity, political motivations and sardonic sense of humor. Moreover, as the group does not visibly toil on any ideological coalface, media outlets have been tempted to portray Anonymous as a group of lonesome hackers with nebulous but shadowy intent. Mass rallies – like the ones in Wisconsin – make for an easy, linear media narrative. But electronic subterfuge and virtual activism are often depicted as a bloodless sport – the least compelling kind.

But now, things are getting bloody – especially in the United States where Anonymous has gained considerable clout. This week, the group’s actions spectacularly forced the resignation of beleaguered HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr after it was revealed that HBGary – in tandem with Palantir Technologies, Berico Securities and Hunton and Williams – were planning to initiate a disinformation campaign against pro-union organizers and opponents of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. The group uncovered the astonishing lengths the three firms would go to in order to discredit their enemies: They planned to set up fake personas on social network sites to damage their opponents and contemplated using malware to steal private information. This has now prompted the Democrats to push for a Congressional investigation. (Being Anonymous, they also brandished their signature irreverence by hacking Barr’s twitter account and announcing that he was a “sweaty ballsack of caterpillars.”)

But certain aspects of Anonymous’ methodology continue to divide those outside and inside the hacker community. DDoS attacks are useful for garnering media attention to certain political causes, but they can also be interpreted as an ironic attack on the opposing side’s right to free speech. The persuasiveness of this argument depends on the size and character of Anonymous’ targets. Multinational corporations and governments may seem fair game, but what about private citizens? Are critics right to suggest Anonymous is eroding an already blurry distinction between public and private spheres?

Pinning down a cogent ideology of the group is difficult, too. We can surmise a few things with confidence: Anonymous is a zealous defender of freedom of information; the free exchange of information; the right to be irreverent; and the necessity of calling out gross abuses of power. But how committed are they to, say, social justice? This excerpt of a recent missive against the Koch brothers goes as far to imply some level of solidarity with America’s working classes and union movement, but it is hard to tell if the group’s motives are genuine:

“Anonymous hears the voice of the downtrodden American people, whose rights and liberties are being systematically removed one by one … we are calling for all supporters of true Democracy, and Freedom of The People, to boycott all Koch Industries’ paper products. We welcome unions across the globe to join us in this boycott to show that you will not allow big business to dictate your freedom.”

Generally speaking, as Anonymous is a decentralized, online community of individuals, it is probably misguided to slap a political label on the group. As a member explained to a newspaper in Baltimore: “We all have this agenda that we all agree on and we all coordinate and act, but all act independently toward it.” It’s a fairly vague description of the group’s politics, to say the least. This brand of civil disobedience is a stark contrast to the centralized, “real-life” social movements of the past, which generally had an identifiable leader and hierarchical order. Theoretically, anyone can become a member, as long as they profess a loose identification with the group’s objectives. Coldblood, a spokesperson for the group illustrates just how elastic this identification can be, suggesting that Anonymous is in fact an “online living consciousness, comprised of different individuals with, at times, coinciding ideals and goals.”

So what happens when these ideals and goals fail to coincide, as was the case when Anonymous threw its support behind WikiLeaks? Well, the results could be kind of anarchic. In the WikiLeaks scenario, disagreement arose over how Anonymous should show its support. Agreeing on the duration of DDoS attacks on Visa, Mastercard and PayPal – as well as agreeing on the attacks themselves – proved a point of contention. The group splintered off into factions – Operation Leakspin, Operation Payback and Operation Avenge Assange – each outlining different tactics to demonstrate their support. Anonymous even published a press release addressing “perceived dissent” within its membership.

For better or worse, Anonymous is a by-product of the political freedoms we often take for granted. The group’s ability to induce actual changes in social and political policy may be limited, but their ultimate value to democracy lies in their capacity to perform vital checks on institutional power. Their methods may be radical, but for now their outcomes have proved nothing more than regulatory.

Published in The Guardian, 18 February 2011

The first week of February marked the annual celebration of World Interfaith Harmony Week, a UN resolution that aimed to promote religious and cultural understanding among people of different faiths. But proceedings were marred by the cruellest of events in Indonesia, with celebrations tarnished by a string of vicious attacks on the nation’s religious minorities.

The most serious attack was waged against the Ahmadiyah sect in Banten, which resulted in three of its members being beaten to death at the hands of the Islamic Defenders Front, a hardline Islamic group. The history between the two has been fractious at best, but in recent times the conflict has assumed an internecine edge. Footage of the bloody attack in Banten on 6 February showed police officers providing an embarrassingly feeble match for a crowd of 1,500 villagers, equipped with machetes, rocks and bamboo sticks.

Ahmadiyah Muslims believe Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was Islam’s last prophet, and as such find themselves at odds with the Islamic Defenders Front, which has repeatedly called upon local and provincial authorities to disband the sect, in addition to vandalising mosques and physically harassing members. The group even receives tacit encouragement from members of the Indonesian government, such as the federal religious affairs minister, who proposed that Ahmadiyah followers renounce their identification with Islam and refrain from using Islamic symbols.

Indonesia has undergone a remarkable transition after decades of repression under the Suharto regime. It can now claim a thriving democracy, a burgeoning civil society and record levels of economic growth to its name. It is touted as a bastion of a more moderate, democratic Islam; it has staked its nationhood on a mantra of “unity in diversity”. But Indonesia remains plagued by vast economic inequalities, disenfranchised youth and porous borders: elements conducive to encouraging radicalism. Lately, there have been an increasing number of attacks on religious freedom spearheaded by hardline Islamic groups, who see themselves as the sole vanguard of morality amid the nation’s anxious lurch towards modernity.

The attack in Banten is merely one in a string of attacks on Ahmadiyah Muslims, which has also included sect members being driven out of Lombok and vandalism of Ahmadiyah headquarters in Makassar and South Sulawesi. But Ahmadiyah followers are not the only target of extremists. Last week there were reports of vandalism and firebombing of Catholic schools and churches in Central Java, once again suspected to be the work of the Islamic Defenders Front. An Indonesian human rights group, the Setara Institute for Democracy and Peace, reported that 64 attacks on religious freedom – which include incidents of physical abuse, preventing groups from performing prayers and burning places of worship – took place in 2010, a sharp increase from 18 in 2009 and 17 in 2008.

As religious hate crimes blemish the archipelago’s moderate and tolerant image, the government faces pressure from human rights groups and disgruntled citizens to enshrine religious pluralism in law. International groups, such as Amnesty International, have declared that religious freedom in Indonesia is “in tatters“, while peace rallies have been staged across the nation, urging the government to protect the right to religious freedom. And still, President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono has been keen to trumpet Indonesia as a poster-child for unity amid diversity, emboldening a once-fractured nation by its embrace of religious, cultural and ethnic pluralism.

But in the aftermath of all the violence, his remarks ring hollow. While Yudhoyono has condemned the actions of those responsible for the killings in Banten, he also implored the Ahmadiyah community to “respect the joint [ministerial] agreement signed in 2008″, which refers to a decree banning the sect from public worship and disseminating its beliefs. This decree, coupled with the decision of the Indonesian constitutional court to uphold a controversial law banning religious blasphemy, shows that religious pluralism in Indonesia is far from fully realised. Instead, it reveals that institutional sclerosis systemically undermines the very values that are an intrinsic part of Indonesia’s national identity.

While these incidences of religious persecution may be specific to Indonesia, their implications are universal. Its struggles for democracy and pluralism are now being fought by other Muslim-majority nations such as Egypt and Tunisia. Clearly, the Indonesian narrative has much to teach the rest of the world: it challenges the misconception that moderate Islam and democracy are incompatible, and also shows that Muslim-majority nations are willing to embrace a more secular brand of nationalism. Of Indonesia’s 250 million inhabitants, 86% are Muslims, yet presidents from secular political parties have repeatedly been elected to office.

Of course, Indonesia’s transformation also highlights some inconvenient truths: that the road to progress is a rocky one, and that clashes between competing ideologies are inevitable. Nonetheless, it is how one resolves these clashes that is of greater significance. If the Indonesian government is serious about maintaining Indonesia’s reputation as a bulwark of pluralism, democracy and moderate Islam, it must realise that its actions will speak much louder than its rhetoric.

Published in The Diplomat, 3 Feb 2011

Social stigma, cash-strapped NGOs, and moralising politicians are stopping Indonesia taking necessary action to prevent an epidemic.

Moral outrage is a staple of Indonesian politics, which makes for entertaining—if somewhat predictable—political theatre. So it hasn’t been any surprise to see the majority of Indonesian politicians trying to score easy political points the past couple of weeks by targeting the usual suspects: sex, lies and moral decadence.

Yet while the chattering classes have been consumed by the government’s plan to implement a pornography filter on the ubiquitous Blackberry smart phone, a more insidious threat to Indonesia’s future has been growing.

Indonesia faces a looming AIDS epidemic that could wreck the big economic, political and social gains it has made in recent years. UN figures show Indonesia already has an estimated 300,000 HIV/AIDS sufferers and one of the fastest growing infection rates in Asia. The situation is particularly dire in Papua and West Papua, which have the highest HIV/AIDS infection rate outside of Africa—3 percent of the population is infected with the virus, about 20 times the national average.

But despite the looming crisis, Indonesia’s attitudes to sex are remarkably imprudent. Last year, federal Education Minister Muhammad Nuh objected to creating a formal sex education curriculum, arguing that students will learn about it ‘naturally.’ It’s unsurprising, then, that many Indonesians are unfamiliar with HIV and AIDS.

Data released last year by the Central Statistics Agency illustrate the nation’s uphill battle in promoting awareness—a mere 14.3 percent of Indonesians aged 15-24 had reasonable knowledgeable of HIV, far fewer than the 70 percent needed for the country to reach the Millennium Development Goal on HIV/AIDS.

So far, the problem is entrenched in populations that are isolated geographically and socially, such as sex workers, drug users and homosexuals. A survey conducted by Indonesia’s AIDS Prevention and Control Commission, for example, highlighted the plight of waria (transsexual sex workers), among whom the HIV prevalence rate is 34 percent in Jakarta, 28 percent in Surabaya and 16 percent in Bandung. Yet despite these alarming figures, less than half of those surveyed were using condoms on a regular basis. Indeed, many clients refuse to wear condoms—and many waria, desperate for money, comply.

It’s perhaps not surprising that so many waria feel they have little choice but to sell themselves to try to make ends meet. The Department of Social Affairs classifies the waria as mentally handicapped, which severely hinders their chances of securing regular employment. In addition, the Indonesian government has been reluctant to recognize waria as a distinct category. This means that for many, the sex trade is the only occupation that offers them any semblance of financial security while still allowing them to embrace their identity.

Dewi, a waria who works the streets of Taman Luwang in Jakarta’s tree-lined sub-district of Menteng, says she worked intermittently at a beauty parlour before finally committing fully to sex work. She says it’s the only way someone in her situation can earn a decent wage as most employers show her the door as soon as they see her. ‘As a waria I’m officially classified as a male, but I identify myself as a woman,’ she says. ‘I dress as a woman. So tell me, who’s going to employ me as a secretary in an office?’

Sexual clients are less discriminatory. On a good night, Dewi says she can take home $5-6 dollars, although she adds that there have been a few times she has gone home empty-handed.

‘Sex work pays more than triple what I was paid at the salon,’ she says. ‘I knew about the risks involved, but I’m always very careful. I don’t have sex with clients who won’t wear condoms because of the risk of getting infected. But many other girls don’t have that luxury.’ Dewi adds that although she doesn’t have HIV, many of the other girls she knows have contracted it through unprotected sex or by sharing needles.

But the problem isn’t confined to waria. Indonesia’s HIV epidemic is becoming increasingly feminised, as many female drug users are resorting to prostitution to secure drugs more easily. In an interview in The Jakarta Post, Ratna Mardiata, a former director of the Drug Dependence Hospital in East Jakarta, estimatedthat between 70 percent and 80 percent of female injecting drug users are involved in informal sex work.

Yet many remain reluctant to attend treatment centres because of the stigma attached to infection. Overall, only 10 percent of Indonesia’s HIV/AIDS sufferers are reportedly receiving antiretroviral treatment, thanks to a combination of factors,including the sense of shame felt by many people living with HIV/AIDS; shortages of antiretroviral medicines in remote areas and the simple fact that many Indonesians are unaware that they are infected.

Meanwhile, the local NGOs that are Indonesia’s best chance of providing outreach to marginalised populations with HIV/AIDS face their own obstacles. NGOs remain a fairly recent phenomenon in Indonesia, and tend to be concentrated on the island of Java, the archipelago’s cultural, political and commercial hub. Local NGOs are also often hamstrung by a lack of funding from central and district governments, with 61 percent of funding for HIV/AIDS initiatives coming from foreign donations.

Indeed, Aditya Wardana of Indonesia’s United Nations General Assembly Special Session implies NGOs might be an unexpected victim of the country’s economic success. He says that as Indonesia’s economy continues to boom, foreign donors may well start to ‘question why they should channel funds to Indonesia.’ This could already be happening, he suggests, noting the example of 100 civil society groups that were forced to abandon their clients when a foreign donor pulled the plug on funding.

A recent UNAIDS report underscored the significant challenges faced by civil society groups in Indonesia, and argued that they lack the political and financial support that would enable them to participate at higher levels of decision-making. As a result, these key groups aren’t part of the government’s frontline assault on HIV/AIDS.

But issues of funding aside, one of the main reasons the government has failed to take a proactive stance on tackling AIDS/HIV is the stigma that’s still attached to the disease. The government faces strident ideological opposition from some Islamic groups who actively oppose attempts to implement formalised sexual education programmes in schools across the archipelago.

Some hard-line Islamic groups, such as Hizbut Tahir, have urged Indonesians to ‘support the application of Shariah in an Islamic caliphate so that (the country) will be free of AIDS.’ While some local governments have provided thousands of free condoms to high-risk populations, for example sex workers in Papua, other provincial officials remain wilfully ignorant.

For many, it seems, it’s convenient to pretend that the sub-populations worst hit by the disease simply don’t exist. But the implications for the entire population of rapidly rising infection rates should give them pause for thought—HIV/AIDS epidemics ultimately undercut a country’s economic growth by cutting the labour supply, lowering the morale of communities and undermining communities’ capacity for regeneration and population growth.

The situation in Papua, where infection rates are among the worst in the country, should serve as a warning to officials inclined to treat the problem as a minority issue to be swept under the rug. Official records for 2010 released last month showed that the majority of HIV/AIDS infection cases were housewives—who had apparently caught the disease from their husbands.

Published in ABC Unleashed, 21 Jan 2011

As the UK’s debt crisis teeters precariously on the edge of implosion, the Conservative-led government has heralded in a new dawn of economic austerity that is the harshest in living history.

At a time when the unemployment rate in the UK is nervously inching past 8 per cent and the budget deficit is 11 per cent (the biggest in its peacetime history), PM David Cameron has warned that desperate times call for desperate measures. Savage cuts to the public sector under the guise of fiscal responsibility have been deemed a necessity in aiding the UK’s economic recovery. About 490,000 public sector jobs are to be slashed by 2014, taxes are being hiked and every penny is being pinched from the government’s already scant social welfare budget.  The cuts of 81 billion pounds ($128 billion) over four years are the equivalent of 4.5 per cent of projected 2014-15 gross domestic product.

In Joseph Stiglitz’s Freefall: America, Free Markets and the Sinking of the Global Economy, the Nobel Prize-winning economist noted that it is economics’ cruellest paradox that economic gain tends to be privatised while losses are socialised. Moreover, these losses – as we’ve seen in the aftermath of the global financial crisis – are a disproportionate burden to those who are most financially vulnerable. The “age of austerity” – as Cameron has called it – may have just begun but the ramifications are already crippling those who are among the most economically vulnerable in society: the youth.

Social anxieties are especially heightened in times of economic hardship, and it was unsurprising to witness students of all ages in London expressing their vehement disgust at the government’s proposed education reforms last November. The British government’s proposal to triple university fees to $14,000 a year raised the ire of more than 50,000 students, who had taken to the streets of London in spirited rebellion reminiscent of May ’68, if not in ideology then at least in spirit. And it wasn’t just the British students who had voiced their anger: students in Greece, France, Spain and Italy have also rioted against the spectre of an ever-shrinking state and an increasingly bleak future.  Bloomberg columnist Matthew Lynn has suggested in a recent op-ed that the student protests are not only a measure of public frustration against the government’s economic policies, but they are also symbolic of a new shade of generational warfare, aimed squarely at the excesses of the baby boomer generation.

Lynn may well be right. After all, can you blame British and European youths for speaking out? These austerity measures – which have been implemented by a number of similarly beleaguered nations in the Eurozone –are felt most severely by the younger generation. After enduring the hard yards at university, graduates will not only be saddled with the increasingly punitive costs of tertiary education, but they will also be confronted with tight labour markets and job scarcity. Statistics from the EU present an unflattering average unemployment rate of almost 20 per cent for those aged under 25.

Generation Y – a species often lazily maligned for exhibiting stereotyped traits such as a sense of entitlement and blinding narcissism – will now be marked by a new and equally unflattering trait: austerity. Make no mistake: austerity’s short-term effects will be brutal. Economic growth will be stunted, at least temporarily, while investor confidence in markets will remain uneasy. Experts from the independent Institute for Fiscal Studies in Britain have labelled the combination of tax hikes and welfare cuts as “regressive”, as “on average, they hit the poorest households more than those in the upper middle of the income distribution in cash, let alone percentage, terms”. But it is austerity’s long-term effects which could prove much more damaging. If social spending cuts on education and infrastructure persist, economic output and growth will remain low, ensuring prolonged stagnation of the UK’s economy.  And if unemployment persists, the skills of Britain’s labour force will eventually atrophy – as will its competitiveness in the global economy. The costs of remedying these side effects will surely balloon in the future. And what everyone seems to have conveniently forgotten is that the implementation of these measures is based on an extremely risky bet, which assumes these austerity measures will lift Britain out of its recession in the first place.

Unsurprisingly, austerity was named “word of the year” in 2010 by dictionary publishers Merriam-Webster. But for many young people, it is more than just a buzzword. The recognition of austerity’s tangible effects on their lives – as opposed to it being an abstract concept with numbers and statistics – makes its impact all the more depressing and real. Many young Europeans have realised they will find it much harder to achieve the levels of prosperity that was achieved by their parents. They sense that as the retirement age rises across Europe, they will end up working for longer, even though bricks and mortar will – for the majority of Gen Y– remain an impossible dream. Still, perhaps the biggest blow of all is that the future of these youths will be mired by the economic failures of the generation that preceded them; that such severe measures of financial austerity will deny them the opportunity to forge their own social, economic and cultural legacy.