WTF was Project Chanology?

On a freezing day in 2008. My friend, Kai, climbed into the back of my blue Chevy Malibu, and nestled himself in the middle between a couple other folks.

“I can has seatbelt…?” my roommate, Veronica, mewed twice before someone handed it to her.

When we were all buckled in, I rolled down the window a slight crack. The frigid winter air seeped in a bit, letting the smoke from Veronica’s cigarette escape. I pulled out of the small square in my vast university parking lot, sending up a silent prayer to Déa that I’d find a place to park when we got back. It was unlikely, but still.

We stopped at a gas station. Kai courteously filled my tank, in addition to what I was being paid for the drive itself. Ten minutes later, we were on the highway, speeding towards the nearest Church of Scientology.

In the trunk of my car, my assorted acquaintances had stashed some pasteboard signs. “SCIENTOLOGY = DANGEROUS CULT” “XENU.NET” “GOOGLE PROJECT CHANOLOGY,” they read. Kai, Veronica, and the others planned to attend a march in front of the Church, and I was their (nervous) driver.

You might be wondering how I ended up in that role. You also might not feel like actually googling “PROJECT CHANOLOGY,.” So, allow me to elucidate as best I can, from the perspective of someone who blundered into it rather stupidly. It started with Tom Cruise. In fact, were it not for Tom Cruise, I probably would’ve been at home that day reading fanfic, rather than driving those oddballs to the damnable Church of Scientology of all places.

At one point, famous Scientologist (and actor, I guess) Tom Cruise made this video about his Scientologist beliefs. It says a lot of really odd things. I haven’t watched the full, unedited video in almost twenty years, and I remember it being quite an experience. We see Cruise overflowing with manic delight for Scientology, and he comes across as a thoroughly brainwashed cult member. No, not brainwashed. Brain-dry-cleaned. They were thorough with that guy.

Their attempts to take down that video garnered the attention of 4chan and its orbiting sites. At the time, 4chan was rather niche. Arguably, it is and has always been, but it was less infamous back then. You’d get a blank stare from most people if you mentioned it, compared to the general uneasy glance you see now on most internet-savvy folks’ faces.

By that time, 4chan’s cluster of the internet was already collectively known as Anonymous, though not well known. Videos like the one below (a real news broadcast) portrayed the group as mean-spirited at best, dangerous hackers at worst. This was not without cause. The “random” (ie, almost anything goes) board on 4chan, /b/, was already well-known for raiding and invading other online spaces.

“They call themselves Anonymous. They are hackers on steroids, treating the web like a real-life video game, sacking websites, invading MySpace accounts, and disrupting innocent people’s lives. And if you fight back, watch out!”

The above panic wasn’t exactly justified, though many of the images and events alluded to in it (such as the Club Penguin swastikas) really did happen. That clip, of course, was mocked endlessly on 4chan at the time (circa 2007-ish), and on any number of related websites. It quickly became an early, if transient, meme. Anonymous itself quickly became a meme.

The concept was already on a gradual slide into the limelight by 2008. Opposing a sketchy cult like Scientology helped change the narrative a bit, though. Someone edited together a sort of video manifesto of their planned attack on the Church. The press material prominently featured characters Guy Fawkes masks, styled after the titular character of V for Vendetta.

“Hello, leaders of Scientology. We are Anonymous. Over the years, we have been watching you. Your campaigns of misinformation; your suppression of dissent, your litigious nature, all of these things have caught our eye. With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation the extent of your malign influence over those who have come to trust you as leaders has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed. For the good of your followers for the good of mankind, and for our own enjoyment we shall proceed to expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form.”

This was quite a different paint job for the 4channers that made up Anonymous. It made them look more friendly to the public, more like playful hackers than the online gangsters the Fox News broadcast was trying so desperately to portray. That Fawkes mask, after, was the mask of a good guy, and plus, they were going up against a cult nobody liked. It seemed Anonymous was about to redeem itself?

Those “hackers on steroids” were putting their rage to good use, perhaps?

Because Anonymous was, well Anonymous (and because the Church harassed people) everyone involved kept their names and faces out of things, at least in theory. This was why they wore masks, Guy Fawkes-style or otherwise.

The passengers in my car mostly had cloth masks. A small cadré of students at my university had decided they were part of Anonymous. Fair enough - it’s not like there were stringent requirements to join. Over the course of a few weeks, they’d launched distributed denial of service attacks against Church of Scientology websites, made vicious prank calls to the Scientology “orgs,” and more. After a little bit of this, Anonymous decided collectively to take their fight IRL, and appear in force (and masked) at Scientology churches across the country.

This all ultimately led up to this trip in the car to “protest,” and my being roped into it as one of the few people with a car large enough to carry everyone. I’d made it clear I myself had no intention of putting myself at risk by joining them in front of this Church building, though.

Kai was waving cash in my face, and I wasn’t going to say no, so I was the driver. I figured I could hop somewhere else while they were “exposing the dangerous cult,” and hopefully not get captured on camera by those people. In fact, Kai had some pretty strange ideas about the whole thing, and wanted me to know about them, at length.

“You know why we’re doing this?” he said. He’d bought one of those giant blue Slurpees from 7-11 for the road, and his tongue was turning blue.

“Because Scientology is a dangerous cult?” I replied wearily.

“That and as a test,” he replied. “For Anonymous.”

“That makes no sense.”

“I want to see what Anonymous can do.,” he clarified. ”Think about it. If this kind of organization through places like 4chan is possible, what else can we do? I bet a movement like this, if it got large enough, could do almost anything…”

“What’s that mean?”

“I honestly think people organizing like this could try to take down the government someday, or at very least cause real lasting change. Scientology is just a testing ground.”

“Oh,” I said, bored of driving on the highway. I was fairly certain at the time that Kai was wrong. I didn’t see anything that began on 4chan amounting to much. True, these raids were an interesting little curiosity, and it was funny to watch Tom Cruise and other Scientologists rage about it. I just didn’t see how it would go anywhere ultimately.

If I was smarter at the time, I would’ve been wary of the concept of Anonymous. True, the news broadcast I showed above was obviously blowing hot air, but it’s not as if they were ever some kind of benevolent internet guardians. Before these Church of Scientology raids, most raids Anonymous initiated did target various individuals. You had stories of people like Jesse Slaughter and others, often rather young girls, who found themselves on the wrong end of these people. Why trust that?

I sat at the worst Starbucks in the city, a few blocks from the Church of Scientology. I pulled out my MacBook and started working on a paper for my History of Early Modern Europe class, trying to stay inside out of the cold. I waited for Kai and the gang to text me, letting me know that their little stand against the Scientologist was complete. I wasn’t going to risk some Scientologist taking a photo of me and plastering it somewhere (or an Anon, for that matter).

About four hours later, Kai and his friends climbed back in my car, worn out and weak from chanting, and shoved their signs back in the trunk. I asked if anything untoward had happened; nope. “Did you change anything?” I also asked, clicking my tongue.

“Scientology is bleeding from this,” Raven said. “Trust me. The orgs are bleeding.” The others seemed to agree. I shrugged. I guessed it was pretty good that a dangerous cult had egg on its face, either way.

“I still say a group like this, organizing online - on the chans!!! - could change everything,” Kai added. “I’m serious. 4chan could change the world.”

For the better, right? I didn’t ask that. The question didn’t even occur to me. I thought Kai was spouting nonsense. I couldn't imagine 4chan and friends having any IRL relevance beyond (comparatively) little things like Chanology. I guess I was wrong about that. I wish I hadn't been.