These interviews are concerned with how and why activists in the UK came to support the 'Anonymous' movement. In the process they cover a range of biographical details and information, which are embedded with qualitative descriptions of how and why they arrived at particular political and epistemic positions. As is customary in this form of anthropological research, the interviews are loosely structured around these themes, and many develop in a free-form way based on the questions which arose in the course of discussion.This project is a study of how an ethical hacking movement known as 'Anonymous' mobilized into a significant form of street-based protest in the UK from November 2013-November 2016. Through the ethnographic methods of interviewing, participant observation and visual and discourse analysis, it sought to uncover why and how supporters of Anonymous came to 'join' the movement over the given time frame. In the process it uncovered that the imagery and discourses of Anonymous enabled its adherents to narrate experiences of personal transformation, and to connect these with real or desired transformations in the UK at large. For many therefore, Anonymous potentiated a particular form of politicization, widely known as 'waking up', which hinged on access to digitally-mediated communication and information.

These interviews took place as part of long period of immersive research known as ethnographic fieldwork. I had gotten to know each participant at public political events, and met those individually who agreed to a subsequent request for an interview. In total, I and my research assistants spoke to ninety-nine people on audio record as part of this research, and dozens more informally. These longer biographical interviews are with those I came to know well and who agreed for their interview(s) to be archived by the UK Data Archive. A further seven participants (of whom three were men and four women) refused to give consent to be archived.