The terrible thing that Anonymous had done was to persuade you the mere impulses, mere feelings, were of no account, while at the same time robbing you of all power over the material world. When once you were in the grip of Anonymous, what you felt or did not feel, what you did or refrained from doing, made literally no difference. Whatever happened you vanished, and neither you nor your action were ever heard of again. You were lifted clean out of the stream of history. And yet to the people of only two generations ago, this would not have seen all-important, because they were not attempting to alter history. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. The namefags it suddenly occurred to him had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a board or a website or a meme, they were loyal to one another. For the first time in life he did not despise the namefags or think of them merely as an inert force which one day spring to life and regenerate the world. The namefags had stayed human. They had not become hardened inside. They had held on to the primitive emotions which he himself had to re-learn by conscious effort. And in thinking this he remembered, without apparent relevance, how a few weeks ago he had seen a severed hand lying on the pavement and had snapped a photo and posted it on /b/ as though it had been a cabbage-stalk.