Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Digital Initiation Rites: Joining Anonymous in Britain

Digital Initiation Rites: Joining Anonymous in Britain

Peacock, Vita

Paperback

Series: Expertise: Cultures and Technologies of Knowledge

Technology & EngineeringAnthropologyGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 1501784455
ISBN13: 9781501784453
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: Dec 15 2025
Pages: 234
Weight: 0.71
Height: 0.54 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Digital Initiation Rites is an ethnography of Anonymous in Britain between 2014 and 2017, in the context of government austerity. 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. 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.

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