Guy Fawkes Mask

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

The ubiquitous Guy Fawkes Mask is the most recognizable symbol (or icon) 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 Legion's terrifying power.

…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. Its earliest confirmed 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.

Pictured: Artifact from ground-zero of the catastrophe.

Within a few days, the Mask had already built enough momentum to reach meme status, and hypnotized users demanded more.

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

Just as Guy Fawkes failed to slaughter Parliament, Epic Fail Guy would also fail at anything he set out to do (over and over again). In the strip above, we see a classic example of EFG's failure. EFG is hungry for tacos, but ends up failing several times in the simple act of eating one. Then he fails at throwing his mess away, when he gets distracted by the filth-covered Mask contained within the trash can, and decides to put it back on.

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

Houston, we have containment breach.

The Guy Fawkes Mask quickly became known as a symbol of failure, linked to Epic Fail Guy. It did not take long for this cancerous egregore to fester and take on a life of its own. EFG himself would be the first 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 him wearing 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 major venture into street activism with Project Chanology in early 2008. The first few Chanology videos addressing the Church of Scientology (and the criticisms that Anonymous took with the Scientologists) were devoid of Guy Fawkes Masks. 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, in order to avoid being identified by OSA goons. 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, subconsciously allured by the power of the Mask, wore it at first as a clever means of disguise. The idea soon spread memetically like a wildfire in just a 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, that is how the Mask broke its containment and escaped into the outside world, fusing with a novelty Halloween prop in the process. While several other representations of Anonymous had already preexisted (the Green Man, Suits & Afros, Richard C. Mongler, Yotsuba) the Mask quickly began to eclipse all of them. 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. Now, together with Legion, they basked like lizards in the light of the press and internet. Anyone could become Anonymous, and the Mask provided newcomers & outsiders with an “icon” that symbolized 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.

The Mask now manages its own supply chains, to the astonishment of scientists & evolutionary biologists.

By 2012, the heat came down and the /i/nsurgency was broken up. However, Legion and the idea of “Anonymous” pushed forward under new stewardship and more splinter communities, who continued to use the Guy Fawkes Mask for their own various illegal shenanigans. Just like those who came before them, these too were completely unaware that the Mask was Haunted. Since nobody ever challenged the Mask's psychic hegemony over the Guy Fawkes Mask and Anonymous, it has represented both of them 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.