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“Language has run riot in an age of mass communication. It must be reduced to its proper function – the expression of authentic content, rather than its concealment.”

Martin Esslin

If Anonymous is not a hacking gang,

With a master plan

To crack the safes of every bank in town,

Then go to ground

To turn up later on a yacht in Malta

Or dacha in the Baltics

Or cyberspies devoted to the death

Of the U.S.

Or post-pubescent clowns with rattlecans

And sticky hands

What are they then, this mob of secret hackers?

No group. A syntax.

A brand new protocol for public discourse,

A nascent source

Of civic language for the appraisal of power,

to parse the force

That governs public life, from winter socks

For the indigent, lost

Amid plenty, to pirates whose depredations made them;

A tongue whose cadence

Simultaneously breaks and mends what’s broken,

Where knock is wide open.

Numbers is a new weekly column by contrubutor Curt Hopkins. “Numbers” is an historic term for poetry, and also alludes to the numbers in programming. The title of this poem, Lingua Nova, is Latin for “new language.”

Featured Image via AnonGallery

Categories: Anonymous, Breaking, Cyberpunk, Leaks, Media, News, Numbers, Poetry