Digital Initiation Rites
Joining Anonymous in Britain

Vita Peacock (Author)

9781501784446

Hardback, published 15 December 2025

234 pages, 11 b&w halftones, 3 charts - 11 Halftones, black and white - 3 Charts
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.907 kg

Digital Initiation Rites is an ethnography of Anonymous in Britain between 2014 and 2017, in the context of government austerity. Drawing on testimonies of dozens of participants, for whom digital technologies enabled and articulated a political transformation from being "asleep" to being "awake," Vita Peacock narrates the process through which these technologies have become implicated in profound subjective changes. The book joins a wider return of the comparative method in anthropology by placing these accounts in direct conversation with studies of traditional initiation rites - ritual sequences of symbolic death and rebirth - that charge the initiand with knowledge about a society to produce a moral responsibility for it. Through this juxtaposition, Peacock conceptualizes the historically novel form of digital initiation rites, in which digital communication and information technologies play a substantive role in these sequences. Digital Initiation Rites presents another angle to contemporary debates around "conspiracy theorizing" and shows how the consumption of digital media connects to the deep history of humankind.

Introduction
1. Body
2. Dream
3. Society
4. Mask
5. Knowledge
6. Symbol
7. Growth
8. Sacrifice
9. Conclusion