Anarchs In The Digital Age

Anarchs In The Digital Age

**of Note**

On September 11, 2001, al-Qaeda terrorists flew two planes in the World Trade Center in New York City and a third into the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A fourth crashed in Pennsylvania before it could reach its intended target. By far the worst terrorist incident to ever strike on American soil, the 9/11 attacks provoked an immediate (and, to many, wildly disproportionate) response from elected officials.

Within months, the U.S. government reorganized dozens of In one sense, the Internet was born in the Anarch Free States: The very first email sent over ARPANET in 1969 originated from a computer at UCLA. That said, not a single vampire in Los Angeles knew anything about it, nor would any have cared if they had. No Kindred was particularly aware of the proto-Internet until several tech-savvy Nosferatu began to study the issue in the late 1980’s. By the time Congress had laid the groundwork for the “information superhighway,” a sizeable task force of Nosferatu had already taken it upon itself to study how to turn the Internet into something that could benefit the entire clan. The result, the sarcastically named “ShreckNet,” was essentially a secondary Internet that piggybacked onto the main architecture of the net but which was accessible only through special login procedures that were impossible for any non-Kindred to complete.

Initially, the Nosferatu, regardless of sect, kept SchreckNet to themselves as a clan asset, but it was inevitable that other Kindred would discover its existence. A world-renowned hacker known as Hurricane was the first non-Nosferatu to post something on ShreckNet, a mass email to all webmasters that smugly pointed out several deficiencies in the network’s security protocols, as well as suggestions for fixing them.

Incensed, the webmasters tracked the hacker to Chicago and identified him as a vampire of unknown clan. After months of cyber-dueling, Hurricane finally grew bored with the proceedings and formally introduced himself to Khalid, the powerful Nosferatu Primogen, as Bobby Weatherbottom, a childe of the late Prince Lodin. Weatherbottom then offered Khalid his services as a hacker and programmer in exchange for membership in the SchreckNet community. Although annoyed that the presumptuous Hurricane was actually a Ventrue neonate, many Nosferatu had developed a grudging respect for the hacker and his request was granted. Despite his heritage, Hurricane quickly demonstrated Anarch sympathies and made it plain that he bore absolutely no loyalty to the Ventrue who had inflicted the Embrace upon him. Other vampires would also gain access to ShreckNet throughout the 1990’s (thiugh probably never more than a dozen or so), and all of them showed greater loyalty to their shared hacker culture than to any clan or sect.

By the mid-1990’s, the existence of ShreckNet was widely known among Western Kindred even if it wasn’t easily accessible. At that point, the importance of the larger Internet was obvious even to the most computer-illiterate elder, and many American and European Kindred raced to find the next Steve Jobs and turn him to their cause.

However, since an accident of geography ensured that most Internet innovation would take place in Silicon Valley, just outside of the Camarilla enclave of San Francisco, those elders who wished to exercise influence on the Internet were compelled to do so through proxies, usually childer and ghouls sent to northern California to manage computer industry assets in their masters’ names.

The Tech Boom and Bust The tech boom started in earnest in 1996, as powerful Kindred joined throngs of venture capitalists to finance ANARCHS UNBOUND the start-ups of scores of Internet businesses in an effort to catch up to the Nosferatu. It ended in a bust at the end of the millennium, ironically due to the Y2K bug. The actual dangers of a global disaster resulting from Y2K were always overstated, but as the millennium approached and apocalyptic fears gripped mortals, many of these Kindred backers came to believe that Y2K might somehow play a role in Gehenna, and they withdrew their influence from the industry. Many childer selected to manage Kindred dot-coms were either forced to abandon their companies to join their sires in preparation for the end of the world or were simply abandoned themselves.

Either way, the result was a period of extreme mismanagement among the affected companies, and the tech market officially crashed in 2001, leading to a global recession. Those Kindred abandoned to their fates in San Francisco amid the ruins of the dot-com bubble quickly came together for mutual protection, despite having been cutthroat business rivals just a year before.

The result was a coterie of brilliant, tech-savvy Licks with libertarian tendencies who had a good reason to be bitter about mistreatment by their elders and who happened to reside on the northern frontier of the Anarch Free States.

Radicalized by their experiences and intimately aware of how vulnerable the Camarilla was to cyberterrorism, these angry young Kindred would become the vanguard for the next era of the Anarch Revolt.

By the turn of the millennium, perhaps a majority of Western ancillae and certainly an overwhelming majority of Western neonates maintained at least some Internet presence, albeit one that comported with the Masquerade. In fact, some modernist Kindred argued that not maintaining any sort of Internet presence was itself a minor Masquerade breach. After all, any Kindred who interacts with contemporary American culture but who can’t provide an email address or a Facebook account increasingly looks like a suspicious individual. Granted, it’s astoundingly dangerous to talk about Kindred affairs in email and absolutely criminal to post about it on mortalaccessible social media networks, but so long the Kindred realized that everything they say online exists as data somewhere, the ever-increasing number of young vampires on the Internet was not initially seen as problematic. After all, it’s not as though vampires could affect one another with Disciplines via the Internet.

The Camarilla’s benign tolerance for the Internet was first challenged in 2004, when the political tract Anarchs Unbound, a New Manifesto for the Digital Age appeared in the CHAPTER ONE: THE HISTORY OF THE ANARCH MOVEMENT certain Disciplines. One important early target was a coterie of Tremere from Washington D.C. who were pioneers in the Thaumaturgy Path known as Technomancy. For all their diligent work to develop the new technology-based Path for Clan Tremere, the coterie was continually mistreated by chantry elders who considered their innovations to be a curiosity at best and an insult to the Clan’s Hermetic roots at worst. It didn’t help that, over time, the young turks had developed a reputation for Anarch sympathies. inboxes of disaffected Camarilla vampires across the world.

A much longer and more politically sophisticated document than the original Anarch Manifesto (to which it was plainly intended as a response), Anarchs Unbound attempted to synthesize a wide variety of philosophical theories about individualism, collectivism, free will vs. authoritarianism, socio-economics, and even post-humanism — from thinkers ranging from Rousseau to Descartes, from Marx to Adam Smith, from Saul Alinsky to Ayn Rand — and apply them all to the Kindred condition. Kindred philosophers could debate how coherently the author (or authors, as the manifesto is written in first person plural) integrated these wildly diverse thinkers into a single Kindred ethos. But most of the recipients were not philosophers. They were young and angry vampires who chafed under oppressive sires and who were particularly responsive to the four-word question repeated throughout the tract: “WHY DO YOU OBEY?”

Invariably, whenever the question appeared in the text, the font color changed to a vivid bloody red, and while the tract was published anonymously, the mysterious author(s) became known as “The Red Question.”

For these Tremere, the subtext of Anarchs Unbound was even more important than its plain language: “There are Kindred who are like you. We can see you and hear you and talk with you in ways that your elders will never comprehend.” After months of emotional internal discussion and furious email exchanges, the entire coterie disappeared from the D.C. chantry and defected en masse to the Anarch Free States. Less than six months later, they would publish instructions for a new Thaumaturgical ritual irreverently named “Fangbook,” which allowed the ritualist to post messages and even pictures to a normal Facebook account that would appear to the uninitiated as frivolous Internet memes but that were plainly legible to anyone with Auspex. “Fangbook” was the first known ritual specifically designed for use on the Internet, but it would not be the last.

Notably, the recipients of Anarchs Unbound were very rarely potential bomb-throwers. The Red Question instead chose vampires known for personal charisma, for computer acumen, or, most importantly, for innovative skill with The Crash of 2007: