Digital Initiation Rites

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

Vita Peacock is Principal Investigator of the ERC SAMCOM Project at King's College London. Her research focuses on hierarchy, surveillance, anonymity and privacy. She is co-founder of the Anthropology of Surveillance Network (ANSUR).