According to Lloyd, since the film release of V for Vendetta in , interest and readership in the novel itself has increased "significantly. To coincide with the film, Rubie's Costume Company became an official manufacturer of the mask, which now reportedly sells more than , of these annually. As part of his contract with publisher, DC Comics, Lloyd told CNBC he received some economic benefits from the official mask's sales, but declined to comment in further detail.
The use of Guy Fawkes in the original novel was seen as a "happy accident", as both Lloyd and Moore were looking for a resistance fighter who could take on the world's necessary evils.
Skip Navigation. Then on December 13, at the Twitter handle YourAnonNews, Anonymous issued a message distancing themselves from a splinter group of secret hackers aligned with US security interests, the counterterrorism group GhostSec. The mask of Anonymous refuses identity. The question that interests me, as a literary scholar and critical theorist, is: how did Guy Fawkes become transformed from a 17th-century Catholic conspirator to a tool of social protest?
In recent years, Anons have donned the Fawkes mask in media performances and street protests in a dizzying array of political contexts. In early November, scores of masks grinned inscrutably at the police and public from the Million Mask March in London on the actual Guy Fawkes Day of which more later.
A week later, a Palestinian protester wearing the mask was photographed in a skirmish with Israeli security forces in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Since the Arab and African Spring in early , Anonymous has worn the mask of Guy Fawkes in protests and solidarity struggles across the globe.
Anonymous has proven its heterogeneity in springing into action to redress a vast repertoire of perceived injustice. The revolution, the Arab and African Spring reminded us, will not be televised nor tweeted but made real by the mobilization of bodies occupying space. So what does it mean for Anonymous to adopt the person of Guy Fawkes as the voice of global dissent?
Guy Fawkes was an English arch-Catholic conspirator accused in of a plot to blow up the king and Parliament with 13 co-conspirators and 36 barrels of gunpowder stored in a cellar beneath the House of Lords. Anonymous answers by remembering and resurrecting not the law that sentenced him to hang, but the person declared dead by the law, Fawkes himself.
Fawkes is transformed from an enemy combatant to the voice of the people. Its long history is perhaps more fascinating than the hacktivist group itself. In the early s, there was a great amount of religious upheaval in England, with Protestants and Catholics battling for dominance.
Fawkes was part of a group of Catholics who were unhappy with the direction the government was taking. In protest, they sent a threatening letter to Lord Monteagle, a member of the House of Lords who was planning to attend the opening of Parliament.
During the second search, a royal official discovered a man guarding a storeroom filled with firewood and 36 barrels of gunpowder. The man identified himself as John Johnson, but his name was actually Guy Fawkes, and he and his co-conspirators were executed as examples to others.
Fawkes and the mask that emerged later became the symbol for what would later be called the Gunpowder Plot of The history of the Guy Fawkes mask dates back to the late s when children reportedly began wearing paper masks with his image on them to beg for money. But it entered mainstream culture in the s in a comic magazine called Warrior. In , the Guy Fawkes image was introduced even wider in the graphic novel V for Vendetta , which was adapted as a film in That same year, a group of protestors appeared outside the DC Comics office to protest V for Vendetta , with an opposing group wearing Guy Fawkes masks in counterprotest.
It was during this event that the Guy Fawkes mask became a symbol of protest. The Guy Fawkes mask first gained international attention when it appeared in September as part of the Occupy Wall Street protest. The masks had a practical use for Anonymous. In , the group needed a way to leave the safety of their homes to protest Scientology, and the Guy Fawkes masks seemed the perfect disguise. Since , Anonymous has used its collective technological prowess to launch cyberattacks at various institutions.
Using its hacking power, the group became known for shutting down websites and exposing members of hate organizations. However, the group seems to have lost effectiveness in recent years as its membership has split in various directions.
In an interview with Vice , a spokesperson from YourAnonNews revealed that the election divided the group. The last known major cyber-based threat from the group came in when members of the group threatened both the Clinton and Trump campaigns.
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