Digital Tomfoolery in Publishing: Anonymous Book Proposal Shopped

According to The New York Observer, a controversial and secretive group known for attacks on credit card servers, Wall Street protests, and other forays into civil disobedience is shopping a book.

The group in question is Anonymous which reportedly (according to Wikipedia, and we know everything there is fact) originated in 2003. More recent targets of the group included Facebook, Sony, Bank of America, the Westboro Baptist Church and others.

In The Observer, Foster Kamer writes that book’s working title is Tales from Inside the Accidental Cyberwar and will be authored by Gregg Housh and Barrett Brown. The agent involved is Dan Conaway at Writer’s House. Conaway points out that Housh is “not a spokesman for Anonymous” but he’s one of the few identified people who are familiar with the process. So this would insinuate that Housh and Brown are working on their own as writers of their own tales, as opposed to some sort of authorized book by the larger collective.

Housh himself states that he intends to write a “page-turner.”

But Adrian Chen at Gawker wonders who will read the thing. “Anonymous is fascinating on a broad level,” Chen writes, “But most of the day-to-day details are as sexy as the intricacies of how an office drone manipulates an Excel spreadsheet.” Maybe the group really does wear trench coats and fedoras and use dead drops and safe houses and all that. Or, maybe Housh and Brown will employ some Ben Mezrich strategies for writing about technology and highly intelligent people in order to craft a thrilling account of the group’s activities.