Guy Fawkes Mask

Forget 'V For Vendetta' - This is where it all began.

The ubiquitous Guy Fawkes Mask is the most recognizable symbol of Anonymous. Since the days of Project Chanology, the Mask has been a regular sight at Anonymous-led protests. Even now, as Anonymous hibernates, the Guy Fawkes Mask is still seen out in the wild, having imprinted itself on the world as an eternal reminder of the terrifying power of the sleeping Beast.

…but why is this? How did this happen? To find out, we must trace back the history of the Mask.

Many will say the Mask originated from the 2005 film V For Vendetta. Others will say it originated from the 1980's comic strip that the movie was based on. All of these people are wrong, and they are Liars, and they know that they are Liars. The origins of the Guy Fawkes Mask as a symbol of Anonymous trace back to 2006 and 4chan. It's first appearance was on September 25, 2006, as part of a series of popular Microsoft Paint comics starring Epic Fail Guy, who was also known as EFG for short.

Ground-zero of the catastrophe.

By the end of the month, the Mask had already built enough momentum to reach meme status.

And so, Pandora's Box was irreversibly opened, once again.

Epic Fail Guy at least had something in common with Guy Fawkes, being that his efforts would inevitably fail (over and over again). In the first appearance of EFG using the Mask, we see his failure. EFG is hungry for tacos and ends up failing in the simple act of eating one. Faced with a mess he made, and feeling obligated to clean it up, he takes his refuse over to his trash can. In the act of placing his waste into the can, he notices the filthy trash-covered Mask contained within, and decides to put it back on.

Little did anyone know at the time, this nascent egregore was about to put everyone else on.

The Guy Fawkes Mask quickly became known as a symbol of failure, linked to Epic Fail Guy. It did not take long for this egregore to fester and take on a life of its own. EFG himself would be the first to be consumed by the Mask, as he would rarely be seen without it again from this point forward. Soon after, the original artist of the strip vanished, shuffling their unholy creation off onto various community OC producers and Photoshop pirates, who continued to churn out a steady supply of EFG memes with the Mask.

For the next year and a half, the Mask remained confined to the imageboards and IRC, charging itself off the collective psychic energy of /b/ and /i/. That is, until the /i/nsurgency's first venture into street activism with Project Chanology in early 2008. The first few released videos addressing the Church of Scientology (and the criticisms that Anonymous took with the Scientologists) were devoid of Guy Fawkes Masks, but that was soon about to change forever as the Mask waited patiently for the Right Moment.

Anonymous /i/nsurgents were warned quite early on about the Church's tendency to harass “Suppressive Persons” long-term via their lawless Office of Special Affairs (OSA). In response, it was quickly agreed to recommend the use of any kind of mask at protests. Being not long after Halloween, and with the recent popularity of V For Vendetta, the Guy Fawkes Mask was a convenient readily-available prop mask, which just so happened to match one of the memes from the imageboards. A few Anons wore the Mask at first as a clever means of disguise, and the idea memetically spread like a wildfire after the first few marches.

Eventually, the accursed Mask became the face of Anonymous in the press.

And so, taking advantage of a moment of passionate reckless abandon, the Mask broke its containment, and escaped into the outside world, fusing with a novelty Halloween prop in the process. Eventually, thousands of people would don the Mask that winter - all melded into one identity, all focused on the same goal.

The Mask (and the Guy Fawkes Mask it possessed) continued being used as a convenient disguise by the /i/nsurgency and her allies through Occupy Wall Street in 2011. By this point, the Mask was solidified in the public consciousness as the face of Anonymous, and now basked like a lizard in the light of the press and internet. Anyone could become Anonymous, and the Mask provided newcomers & outsiders with an “icon” that stood for the idea of Anonymous: A faceless, leaderless horde of individuals that could consist of literally anyone, banded together as an organized collective of decentralized independent cells, working to accomplish things bigger than themselves, with the egalitarian belief that no one member of Anonymous was of any greater or less significance than any other.

By 2012, the heat came down and the /i/nsurgency was broken up. However, the idea of “Anonymous” pushed forward under new stewardship, who continued to use the Mask (which had by this point had absorbed immense amounts of energy) for their own various illegal shenanigans. Since nobody challenged the Mask's psychic hegemony when they had the chance, it has represented Anonymous ever since. To witnesses, the Mask now evokes feelings of nostalgia, sadness or terror, depending on who you ask and what their memory of the Mask consisted of.

Today, members of Anonymous have very mixed feelings over the Mask. To many who knew what the Mask was (before its mutation and subsequent leak into the real world) the Mask is viewed with contempt and disgust. Indeed, the irony of the failure to contain the Mask is not lost on the collective. Yet to others, the Mask is viewed with reverence. Many Anons, whether they participated in protests or not, have been known to keep an actual Mask as a souvenir, totem or good luck charm. Some keep one simply as a psychic anchor to remind themselves why they were there in the first place - an icon.