For scholars of social behavior, the internet has remained a vast and largely unexplored continent—full of unusual and isolated tribes with their own languages, customs, and rituals. Jessica Beyer’s Expect Us is a voyage into this strange land, with the author acting as a sort of online anthropologist—exploring the true meaning of “lulz,” decamping on dragon raids with World of Warcraft guilds, and deciphering profanity-laden, barely-intelligible message boards like ancient hieroglyphics. (It is certainly refreshing to read a book that explicates “The Internet Fuckwad Theory” in its opening pages.)

Like any good ethnographer, Beyer wants to explain what motivates these groups. The book examines four popular online communities, seeking to explain why two of them (Anonymous and The Pirate Bay) became real-world political actors, while two others (World of Warcraft and IGN.com) remained politically aloof despite their potential for mass mobilization. Member anonymity, she argues, was the main factor in shaping the level of political engagement. Namely, the ability to remain anonymous increased political mobilization by promoting openness, collaboration, and creativity. Having a persistent online identity, on the other hand, creates interpersonal relationships and social hierarchies, which “thwart political organizing in online spaces” (p. 9).

Two factors shape the level of anonymity—the number of formal rules for participation, and the availability of small-group interaction. Communities bound by formal rules are less anonymous and more constrained in their ability to mobilize politically. Similarly, online spaces that foster small-scale interaction decrease anonymity and thus discourage political involvement. When online communities cannot fragment into smaller groups, the result is a more cohesive overall group identity, which encourages political engagement.

Unfortunately, the central argument is not especially persuasive. According to the book, anonymity and the absence of rules promotes political participation. But if so, we would expect sites like Facebook or Twitter—where participation is rarely anonymous—to perform poorly at political engagement. In fact, these two platforms have been a focal point of political mobilization over the previous few years. And precisely those features that Beyer sees as inimical to political organization—the ability to form small tightly-knit groups, and to develop reputations linked to real-life identities—have been crucial in making them into successful political actors. In fact, there are good reasons to suspect that personal relationships and social hierarchies are integral for mass political engagement. (The conscious lack of such hierarchies in the Occupy movement, for example, has been posited as one cause of its demise). Likewise, it’s not clear that anonymous interaction aids collaboration. The lack of small-group interaction is said to produce group cohesion by preventing fragmentation—yet as Beyer herself shows, Anonymous was far from a cohesive group, splitting into factions that fiercely debated both the group’s goals and the methods used to achieve them.

Moreover, the characterization of anonymity within these groups seems at odds with the author’s own conceptual framework. Beyer (rightly) laments that anonymity is too often portrayed as a binary concept, when there are in fact shades of anonymity, defined by factors such as the presence of IP tracking or a website’s requirement to use static names. Sites like Facebook, which require participants to use their legal names, have a low level of anonymity. Sites like Reddit or IGN.com have a medium level of anonymity—users don’t have to use their real names but they do register a persistent handle, allowing them to develop a reputation in the site’s community. Sites like 4chan, on the other hand, consciously opt for a high level of anonymity—users are not tracked and do not have a static nickname. It is, strange, therefore, that her two non-mobilizing cases—World of Warcraft and IGN.com—are classified as having a “low” level of anonymity, since they do not require legal real-world names, and thus fall squarely into the “medium” category. This is a minor mistake, but it’s symptomatic of the book’s general lack of conceptual clarity.

The book’s parsimonious conceptual framework—emphasizing anonymity, rule-making, and small-scale interaction—quickly grows more complicated in the case studies. In the case of Anonymous, other important factors for its politicization seem to be media coverage and “the ability to draw on past patterns as templates” for political action (p. 50). In the case of The Pirate Bay, the “central role” (p. 65) of the site’s leadership—the highly publicized actions of its founders and administrators—seem to be more important than the actions of regular members. Instead of The Pirate Bay being a catalyst of political action, it seems more likely that its prominence was part of a larger global political movement—embodied by various Pirate Parties—which challenged copyright laws on the basis of both privacy concerns and ethical principles about the freedom of information.

The politicization of a site like The Pirate Bay is hardly surprising—as Beyer notes, illegally downloading copyrighted material is an inherently political act. Choosing your elf race is not. There is, therefore, a much simpler explanation lurking in the background that the book utterly fails to engage. Both of the non-mobilizers—IGN.com and World of Warcraft—are sites designed for gaming. The latter is a massive online game and the former a discussion site about games, game reviews, and game strategies. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that neither online community seems particularly interested in political action. (IGN.com, for example, lacks even a message board for political discussions). The people who visit these sites are there for a specific reason—to find the optimal strategy for dealing with the Lich King, or to level up their character by looting another dungeon. For many of them, real-life political engagement is likely to be an alien intrusion rather than an added benefit of being part of a social community. The book focuses on the structure of online communities, defined by site regulation and fragmentation of group interaction, as the driver of political outcomes. Yet it seems to be the purpose of the online communities, rather than their structure, that shapes the level of political engagement. Beyer alludes to this factor by noting that participating in Anonymous or The Pirate Bay creates tensions between online behavior and real-world legal norms, whereas playing World of Warcraft or posting on IGN.com creates no such conflict. But she does not fully explore this alternative argument, instead focusing on factors that ultimately seem secondary or extraneous to the outcomes being examined.

In the end, the book provides a fairly breezy (140 pages excluding supplementary materials) and sometimes-entertaining ethnography of the digital natives. It might have benefited from a more detailed exploration of their rituals. Instead, it builds a theoretical edifice that seems to rest on shaky foundations.