Digital Initiation Rites

<p><b><i>Digital Initiation Rites</i></b><b> is an ethnography of Anonymous in Britain between 2014 and 2017, in the context of government austerity.</b> 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.<i> Digital Initiation Rites </i>presents another angle to contemporary debates around "conspiracy theorizing" and shows how the consumption of digital media connects to the deep history of humankind.</p>