Review: Anon Collective (eds.), ‘Book of Anonymity’
Review of Anon Collective (eds.) Book of Anonymity (Punctum Books, 2021), open source book, 486 pages
Abstract
This luxuriantly interdisciplinary, highly original, provocative, deeply reflective and current, open access volume should be in the library of anyone concerned with the sociology of knowledge and, in particular, information and communication as they involve revelation and concealment and new social media technologies. Edited by a collectivity consisting of social anthropologists, a sociologist, a designer and a curator it offers artworks, academic articles and experimental texts. Criminologists, political scientists, scholars of media and culture, computer scientists, philosophers and art theorists offer 24 quite distinct, but thinly connected entries. These are organized under four broad topics: reconfiguration, assault weapon and delight. The richness of the book’s diverse examples makes clear the need for analytic concepts that can help, as Simmel suggested, unite the dissimilar and separate the similar. To that end, I suggest some concepts involving anonymity and identifiability seen on a continuum and some basic settings and types.
Reviewed by Gary T. Marx
Anonymity and identifiability involve the broad topic of the sociology of knowledge and non-knowledge (or perhaps better of the known and unknown, terms that should not necessarily bootleg in assumptions of accuracy). They are vital components of the related sociology of information and communication, in particular as these involve revelation and concealment.
As Simmel (Levine 1971) and other theorists of the rise of modern, urban society (with its scale, mobility, impersonality, differentiation and compartmentalization of interaction) occurs in a context of a money economy and evolving technology. This has profound implications for the trust that is vital for social relations. As well, it involves the paradoxes of freedom and control and alienation and connection that plague, challenge and inspire modern society.
What do whistle blowers, amnesiacs, false flag operations, unsigned hate (or love) letters and postings, online self-help groups, tests for sexually transmitted disease, witnesses in the Federal Witness Protection program, secret ballots, fugitives, costume balls, blood donors, tombs of unknown soldiers, Bitcoin, blind grading of student papers, undercover police, robbers wearing masks, artists who pass off fake Rembrandts, shell corporations, identity theft, persons who fake their death or kidnapping or disguise murders as accidents or suicide, commercial sexual encounters, the freedom and loneliness of being in a large crowd along with “Jane Roe” -aka Norma McCovery of Roe v. Wade? They are from a never-ending list of distinct, yet connected, examples of anonymity, pseudonymity and identifiability that cry out for inductive ordering and contrast.
But just what is anonymity? Metaphysically, inscrutability is distinct from the social and personal functionality of the human need to know and name what is encountered in the world. In literary criticism, a text has a life apart from the author’s intentions (Barthes 1967). But in everyday life, for an audience to know who “authored” or is responsible for an act (whether an unsigned love letter or a murder) matters a great deal for rationality, trust, reciprocity, accountability and justice.
This unique book helps us wrestle with the “what is it?” and “what does it mean?” questions. It is doubly welcomed given the accelerated impact of new technologies and the minimal scholarly attention anonymity has directly received from the social sciences.
The book is edited by a collectivity consisting of social anthropologists, a sociologist, a designer and a curator. It includes artworks, academic articles and experimental texts from many contributors, mostly from Europe and the United States. Criminologists, political scientists, scholars of media and culture, computer scientists, philosophers and art theorists offer distinct but thinly connected entries.
Consistent with the book’s theme, its editors and authors are initially unidentified. This aligns with the time honored literary and political tradition of authorless texts. As in a murder mystery, readers are not told “who did it” (or in this case “who wrote it”). Guessing is part of the fun and is educational. Nonetheless, given the pull of careers in our institutions and a bit of residual ego, an appendix “identifies” almost all of the authors.
Articles are organized under four topics:
Reconfiguration: Articles here emphasize technical and social changes that require revision and extension of the limited literature on the topic. Among topics: blood donations in India that ignore caste lines; anonymization and big data; and hiding individual and organizational identities in offshore financial services.
Assault: Articles here consider anonymity and sperm donors; “sanitary police” tracking the identity of endocrinal disruptors; anonymity and networked neighborhoods; the challenges of internet regulatory strategies for content moderation involving Yik Yak.
Weapon: Included here is a poem that uses familiar information technology icons to imagine workers joining with bots and AI in combatting what computers generate; the complexities of distance and proximity in policing; and photos of unmaintained, mass, anonymous graves of dissidents in Iran.
Delight: Here, anonymity is a factor in pleasure, fun, and recreation. There are articles on sexual encounters in public restrooms; the discovery that one was donor conceived (unlikely a source of delight for those who discover this at an older age); anonymity in self-help groups on and off line; and in Bitcoin.
The four topics above offer a loose, general way of organizing the material, but without any operational guidelines. This framework brings some coherence to aspects of anonymity, yet questions remain. When do we have a case calling for reconfiguration given technical and social changes and when a traditional form? Are the categories found in the motives of the anonymizer or the anonymized subject (as we will note these need not be the same) or in the view of the outside analyst? When is anonymity an assault and when a weapon? Can the responsible agent also take pleasure in the hidden action? Who is assaulted and who is it a weapon for? Is anonymity the solution or the problem and then for whom and when? How should the paradoxical ethical implications be approached even as the tool’s form remains the same? There is also a need to systematically sort out the links between anonymity and (what is often its‘ functional alternative) pseudonymity.
The richness of the book’s diverse examples makes clear the need for analytic concepts that can help, as Simmel suggested, unite the dissimiliar and separate the similar. From work in progress, this review concludes with some efforts toward that end.
Over a wide tableau the book’s case studies document efforts to produce, protect and expose anonymity. The book’s cornucopia of ideas illustrates how varied the topic is and why it requires, “a multifaced analysis, shifting with its moving target” (P. 31). An introduction sets the stage with two chapters: “Toward a Kaleidoscopic Understanding of Anonymity” and “Artistic Research on Anonymity”.
Various turns of the kaleidoscope offer ways to approach the topic. Through case studies, anonymity techniques are catalogued whereby identifying data is stripped away from the subject. Anonymity as a calculated endeavor is produced through a variety of tools and these have changed markedly with computerization and new forms of surveillance and communication --always accompanied (if with a lag) by new means of de-anomization and protection against it Another turn of the kaleidoscope illuminates anonymity as a broad social form with different shapes and relations that vary across history, culture and society, but with shared elements none-the-less regardless of social and technical change. Yet another turn considers possible consequences, --intended and unintended, utopian and dystopian, or more modestly, good or bad, given the values of a democratic society.
The kaleidoscope can be further turned to consider how the absence of something ironically also produces something. This is most clear in art and typography where negative space (the white space surrounding letters) is a condition for their legibility. Also consider the pauses (silence) in music. Anonymity can make us aware of what is usually unseen –the enduring paradoxical presence of what is absent. This authorless book suggests the nifty concept of anonymity as creating “active absences.”
The self-respecting reviewer seeking to go beyond a descriptive high school book report is challenged by this volume’s feast of disciplines, perspectives, methods, varied empirical examples, data types, settings and locations. The book’s fecundity makes finding common threads difficult, beyond seeing that the tent is enormous and that the topic nestles within larger issues of the sociologies of knowledge, truth, framing and coding (typification) and that it is complex, complicated, changeable, paradoxical and conceptually impoverished relative to other information treatment terms such as surveillance, secrecy, confidentiality, privacy, publicity, visibility and transparency.
Absent agreed upon definitions and concepts for the varied aspects, discussions fail to go beyond specific descriptions and authors talking in different languages. The undifferentiated Jello just lies there without a mold. The book is an invitation to those in the conceptualization business to better contain the topic. Systematic analytic borders and, at some point, hypotheses to systematically bind in the plethora are needed.
Building on this book and earlier work (Wallace 1999, Marx 1991, 1999, 2017, Marx and Muschert 2007) and Thomas DeGloma’s (2023) recent major statement, I suggest some concepts (the variable of anonymity-identifiability, basic roles, four types and an elaboration of the motivated anonymity, the most salient type) that can help better organize the topic.
Much writing on anonymity treats its meaning as self-evident and does not go beyond taken for granted assumptions that a name is missing). Anonymity and identifiability can usefully be seen as polar values of the broader variable of identity knowledge (information about the person) as unknown or known. Degrees of anonymity and identifiability are on a continuum from the absence, or minimal presence, of personal information (anon) to its maximal presence at the other end (the archaic nonm --named) with various paths diverging and twisting paths along the way for pseudonymity, pseudo pseudonymity and pseudo anonymity.
Anonymity and identification involve role players in actions of connection and disconnection –of production and destruction. Among the major roles are:
anonymizing agent - fails to add, prevents from attachment, shields or disconnects identifying information from the unnamed subject whether person or organization.
pseudonymizing agent - attaches invalid identifying information to a person or organization (primary or secondary depending on whether the agent is also the subject or another person is).
identifying agent - searches for/attaches data linkable to a person or an organization believed to have characteristics of interest to the agent.
third party intermediary anonymizing and pseudonymizing agents - serves as opaque or shielding links between the subjects (who initially may or may not be identified, whether accurately or not) and other party(ies) to a transaction (charitable donation, auction, disguised court testimony).
recipient/audience - for what is/isn’t communicated - the intended target the agent has in mind for the withholding, falsifying or identifying information about the subject.
Types of Anonymity
Anonymity is ubiquitous in human environments. Four broad types can be noted:
De facto anonymity reflects the natural or given environment that blocks (or makes identification unavailable).
Cultural anonymity reflects everyday common sense, unreflected upon, taken for granted (often mannerly) understandings of when it is unnecessary or even inappropriate to ask or offer personal information without strong emotions.
Uncapacious anonymity involves persons such as foundlings, very young children lacking language or those with nonverbal autism, transient epileptic amensiacs and those with other dissociative identity disorders who are unwillingly anoynmous to themselves and to others.
Motivated anonymity involves goal directed, conscious, intentional performances undertaken for strategic reasons with a potential audience in mind. Six major forms of this broad type can be noted.
The first three types above in general do not involve strong motivation, prior thought, strategy or planning. They do not raise deep social or ethical issues – at least of the kind raised by the last type.
Basic Forms of Motivated Anonymity
Directly Instrumental: Here, anonymity or pseudonymity are central and necessary to achieve a given end. Consider on-line anonymous forums, hate and love letters, costume balls, games or fugitives and restaurant critics using pseudonyms.
Organizational Incentives: Organizations often have different (or additional) motives for anonymity apart from those of the individual. They may use secret, disingenuous forms of identity to hide their deeds (shell companies, false flag operations using an opponent’s uniforms). Consider medical testing for pregnancy, sexually transmitted diseases, tips to hotlines, confessionals and requests for banned weapons or stolen goods to be turned in ”with no questions asked.” The law may encourage challenges using the “John Doe” trope for anonymity. Consider the “Jane Roe” aka a woman named Norma McCorvey in the landmark 1973 abortion case Jane Roe, e al. V. Henry Wade.
Organizational Processes: Organizations present self-images just as people do. Their public procedures communicate how they wish to be seen. It is vital for organizations to have their constituencies trust them.
Disingenuous Messaging: Publicity, propaganda mis- and disinformation, half-truths and rumors/gossip can be dishonestly attributed to an authentic organization or known person such as a politician or offered anonymously or pseudonymously. The performance quality of such communications is most apparent here. Rather than a consistent effort to direct or redirect public opinion, the goal may be to confuse it and create doubt, chaos and discord by sending out contradictory messages to targeted audiences Innes (2020) and Innes and Dawson (2022).
Strategic Information: With the strategic form, in contrast to several of the above forms (e.g., the fugitive) interaction with (rather than avoidance of) the other is a part of the situation and is often symmetrical.
Protection or Enhancement of Self-Image: Here we look at the level of a person’s sense of themselves as this involves feelings experienced from discrediting characteristics, experiences, unwanted connections that can be attached to the person. A positive sense of self can be maintained from holding back on these. The goal is to shield a vulnerable self from feelings of shame, embarrassment, responsibility, guilt, painful reminders or anticipated snubs, and from having to engage in conversation (whether to explain, distance oneself or hear sympathy) about a topic the person wants to avoid.
In marked contrast is the positive self-image sustained from withholding information about benevolent deeds, whether involving anonymous charity donations or acting as a guardian angel. To be identified as the source would undercut the purity of the personal goal - the idea that virtue should be its own reward.
Many articles in the book have a subtext documenting how anonymity tied to social stratification contributes to inequality and injustice. Yet ironies and value conflicts abound, as other articles document its double-edged sword quality as a resource against injustice and as an intrinsic and necessary component of daily life.
Whether self-consciously chosen as a tool or merely resulting from the elements in a situation, anonymity like surveillance, privacy, publicity, confidentiality, visibility and secrecy (Marx, 1988, 2017) is neither good nor bad, but context, comportment and contingency make it so.
If you have ever been confused about what anonymity is/means, this volume will add to the confusion. But it is good confusion in helping us better see the need for greater conceptual and moral clarity in an issue so central to our time of profound social and technical change.
References
Alindahao K. (2019) The Secret Life of an Anonymous Michelin Restaurant Inspector. Forbes.com
Callahan, S. 2013, Brain on Fire My Month of Madness. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Degloma, T. 2023. Anoymous the Performance of Hidden Identities. Chicago: Univ. Of Chicago Press.
Forsch 2010. Do You Know This Man? The Guardian.
Levine, D. (editor) (1971). Georg Simmel On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
Marx, G. (1988). Undercover Police Surveillance in America. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
(1991) Fraudulent Identification and Biography. New Directions in the Study of Justice, Law and Society. D. Altheide, et al, New York: Plenum.
(1999) What’s on a Name? Some Reflections on the Sociology of Anonymity. The Information Society, vol. 15, no. 2.
In W. Aspray and P. Doty (eds.) (2011). Turtles, Firewalls, Scarlet Letters and Vacuum Cleaners: Rules about Personal Information. Making Privacy. Scarecrow Press, vol. 9, no. 1/2,
(2017) Windows Into the Soul: Surveillance and Society in an Age of High Technology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Marx, G. and Muschert, G. (2007). Personal Information, Borders, and the New Surveillance Studies. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, vol. 3.
Wallace, K. (1999). Anonymity. Ethics and Information Technology. 1.
Gary T. Marx is Professor emeritus MIT. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley in 1967 and he has been bemused and sustained since then teaching at Harvard, MIT, Colorado (and 20 other schools as a visiting professor) and working with governments, nonprofits, social movements and the media. Additional information is at What's it all about? Reflections on Meaning in a Career (mit.edu) Fran Morente Interview with Gary T. Marx (mit.edu) and his take on bio statements like this and reviews: Satirical Review of Windows into the Soul - G. T. Marx (mit.edu)
Email: gtmarx.@mit.edu
