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new olympic competition: hacking the olympics

Anonymous are chatting about the possibilities for engagement, as flagged up in this quite good piece in HuffPo:

I think the pushback against The Dystopian Olympics™, in Cory Doctorow's felicitous phrase, is going to take two forms. The first has already started and consists of leveraging the prominence of Olympic brands to shame those brands on the world stage. Remember Bhopal? Dow Chemical, which bought Union Carbide after the disaster, would prefer you didn't. But Dow's Olympics sponsorship is a perfect opportunity to refocus world attention on the ongoing atrocity of the failure to address the original tragedy. Most companies that are big enough to sponsor the Olympics are big enough to have socially transgressed royally some place along the way and we can expect militant exposures of the officially-sanctioned sponsors, hoist in full view on their 'official Olympic brand' petard.

The second kind of pushback is going to be new. These Olympics are going have the living daylights hacked out of them. It's a train wreck waiting to happen; how can it be otherwise? It's not just a matter of Anonymous' YouTube threat. Everything the IOC has done, with official London's complicity, paints an irresistible bull's-eye, not only for what has been called, "the paramilitary wing of the internet," but for a much larger cohort.

You might want to check out the "We, the Web Kids..." manifesto that is circulating rapidly around the web to get the fuller flavor. If I had to summarize the salient elements of this 'something much larger', I'd point to despair at the state of the world economy; disgust with the inability of governments to meaningfully address climate and poverty issues; dismay at nationalism, war and corporate greed; distrust of established authority (governmental or corporate); insistence on evaluating people and institutions on their current merits (the "reputation" piece); a dramatic sense of technological empowerment on an individual basis, and a fascination with what Bruce Sterling and others call "the New Aesthetic" (of which London is, by the way, ground zero).

It's rather brilliant, when you think about it, how thoroughly the IOC's approach to brand protection ticks every possible box for infuriating a huge swathe of the public. The IOC has sowed the wind and will reap the whirlwind.


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