Anonymous

The word does double duty: it names both a way of working together and the people who work that way. The method is stigmergic, coordination through signs left in the shared environment rather than through leaders or membership, so contributors act on what they can see has been done and add to it without needing permission or identity. Marsh wrote from direct experience here, noting that she was already working with an early version of Anonymous while developing her account of stigmergy, and the two ideas are bound together. Naming the people and the method with one word is deliberate, since in a genuinely stigmergic effort there is no membership roll separate from the act of contributing.

In ordinary use, anonymous means unnamed or of unknown identity, and Anonymous is widely known as a loose online collective associated with hacktivism. Marsh's usage is narrower and more precise: a specific stigmergic method of collaboration, and the people using it, offered as a working example of the leaderless, action-based organizing her framework sets out.