Two things got me thinking. A common thread between totally different genres.

One

Yesterday on Twitter, Lauren Southern got awfully close to trying to use /pol/ as her personal army (anonymous hates that) and NotPaxDickinson laid out a plan for fighting Antifa through lawfare (as opposed to warfare). Which also involves /pol/ and assumes that polacks will remain interested in doing this sort of work.

We have a world class distributed video analysis division in this movement, give them what they need and they will produce arrests. /FIN

— Not Pax Dickinson (@NotPaxDickinson) June 10, 2017

(The whole thread, and strategy, is quite interesting so I do recommend reading, but the underlying assumption of “oh anon will do it they love that sort of stuff” rankles me a bit. I love Pax tho.)

Two

Then, today as I fed my Crippling Youtube Addiction, I watched a bunch of “making of” videos for French haute couture collections. The big fashion houses have an interesting setup, because the Brand is king (each has its own “house” style and ideal woman), but then there’s typically a lead designer (many of whom have a cult of personality surrounding them, such as Lagerfeld at Chanel), and under that designer is a small army of sub-divided categories (couture, ready to wear, men’s, accessories, fragrance, cosmetics, etc.), and then under all of those categories are the artisans who actually do the work. Who are, to all of us on the outside, completely anonymous.

And as much as the lead designer will provide sketches and specs for each collection, those are just IDEAS. The execution is left to the individual person crafting each garment or stitching each piece of embroidery. The idea/vibe/theme comes from the Named person, but the actual creation of the garment, the placement of each embellishment, are done by anons.

Unlike the anons on /pol/, these people are paid for their work, but I find it quite interesting that the two are very similar. Painstaking, detail-oriented work that can’t be shortcut. Identifying Eric Clanton took a lot of sifting through photos, identifying details, and matching up to the photo of him at the rally. Creating a couture gown involves sifting through materials, paying close attention to detailed stitches, and matching up the final product to the sketch of the designer.

The work done on /pol/ won’t be attributed to any one person–they pretty much got the credit, if only as an aggregate entity–but the anons who did the work aren’t paid (although that is not to say that the only work worth doing is for pay; it’s absolutely not but that’s a post for another day).

The work done by the atelier anons will never be credited to them (except maybe internally), but they do get paid. Perhaps part of the unspoken agreement with work-for-pay is that your individual contribution gets subsumed into the larger entity for which you get paid.

No, scratch that–there is no “perhaps.” If someone else pays you to do work for them, they get to decide who gets the credit.

At the end of the day, though, it’s the anons who do the work.