Anonymia

The sociologist Gary’s Marx’s text, What’s in a Name? Some Reflections on the Sociology of Anonymity, begins by citing Mark Twain’s infamous paradoxical predication: ‘reports of either the recent death or coming dominance of anonymity have been greatly exaggerated’ (1999:99).

Remaining contrarian, he argues for and against anonymity as well as cogently pointing out that

‘[i]ronically, anonymity is fundamentally social. Anonymity requires an audience of at least one person’ (ibid:100). Written at the dawn of the millennium, around the time of PageRank’s first implementation and Introna and Nissenbaum’s seminal text on the politics of search engines (2000), Marx draws mostly on the issues surrounding anonymity in contemporary life in the

‘meat world’, before the online era of personalised (Google) search, and maps out the

‘conceptual landscape’ in various contexts of privacy and anonymity.

Figure 58: Types of identity knowledge (Marx 1999)

Marx begins by defining his contexts with what he calls ‘Types of identity knowledge’ that function ‘as an aspect of informational privacy’, which ‘involves the expectation that

individuals should be able to control information about themselves’ (Marx 1999:100). (Figure 58) According to Marx, in order to achieve anonymity, there are seven dimensions of identity knowledge that would need to be subverted,

legal name, location, behavior patterns, social group membership, identifying personal characteristics, pseudonyms that can be linked with other forms of identity knowledge, or pseudonyms that cannot be linked and serve as alternate identities’ (ibid; Forte et al.

2017:3).

Concentrating on the first two ‘rationales’ of Marx’s Table 1, a person’s legal name answers the

‘who’ question and contains social and biological information [usually paternally organised].

The second is ‘locatability’ with which the person is identified with an ‘address’ that enables what Marx defines as ‘reachability’. This harks back to the bureau d’adresse with its collections of house addresses described in Chapter 1. Later on governmental methods include using numbers to identify citizens and, within private homes, the telephone became the identity marker. Marx’s elucidates how, with early telephone usage, connections had to first pass through an operator before automated switching was introduced, not for privacy but for efficiency. As stated in Chapter 5, people are now identified online by their IP address.

Furthermore ISPs (Internet Service Providers) control users’ access to the internet and can view all the websites visited by the client (user) even if they use Marx’s third rationale, pseudonyms, which are not linked to a name or a location. Everyone who uses Tor Hidden Services applies a pseudonym (user name) connected to an email when communicating and interacting on the Dark Net. Moreover, onion addresses serve as pseudonyms for websites.

I began searching Grams with the term ‘anonymity’ and first found how to ‘disappear and live free forever with an ‘Anonymity Guide’. (Figure 59)

Figure 59: keyword ‘anonymity’ with Grams

Figure 60: keyword ‘anonymity’ with Grams

Furthermore, my results support the dissemination of literature, ‘how to guides’, geared to how to be anonymous online and guidebooks where it was unclear who compiled them.¹²⁶ The keyword ‘anonymity’ delivered information on ‘Complete Anonymity’, or how to create an anonymous wallet to use Bitcoin and a guidebook, ‘Tor and the Dark Art of Anonymity’, or even ‘How to be Invisible from the NSA’. (Figure 60)

126 According the US Supreme Court ruling Talley v. California (1960), ‘anonymous pamphlets, leaflets, brochures and even books have played an important role in the progress of mankind’ Talley v. California, 362 U.S. 60, 64 (1960). http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/93-986.ZO.html

Marx’s Table 2 structures the usage of anonymity in various contexts and situations, what he deems ‘Rationales for anonymity’. (Figure 61) Here I draw attention to the context of

anonymous authorship, using pen names or a nom de plume in regard to publishing to protect

‘reputation and assets’. If one refers to the Greek etymology of the word, anonymia, it is that without a name, both human and object, whilst the Latin term, Anonymus is usually reserved for scholarly documents where the writer is unknown. However, the contributions of indigenous peoples, who often practice the oral tradition with knowledge sharing, to culture, linguistics, botany, mathematics and numerous other disciplines, have often been described as ‘anonymous’

in the ‘Western canon’. Enslaved people and women throughout history have published books or contributed to them, unbeknownst or under pseudonyms. Many define the reason as ‘social constraints (modesty)’ but they didn’t have the same rights as white, upper-class men.

Figure 61: Rationales for anonymity (Marx 1999)

Upper class authors, those who had the time to write and were literate, also published anonymously to protect their reputation.¹²⁷ Or the inverse, which harkens back to academic citation and the ‘impact factor’ from Chapter 3, with Foucault’s remark that most authors wouldn’t publish anonymously because they need their reputation to succeed:

Why did I suggest that we use anonymity? Out of nostalgia for a time when, being quite unknown, what I said had some chance of being heard. With the potential reader, the surface of contact was unrippled. The effects of the book might land in unexpected places and form shapes that I had never thought of. A name makes reading too easy.

I shall propose a game: that of the ‘year without a name.’ For a year, books would be published without their authors’ names. The critics would have to cope with a mass of entirely anonymous books. But, now that I come to think of it, it’s possible they would have nothing to do: all the authors would wait until the following year before publishing their books ... (1994:321-322).

127 According to book historian James Raven, between 1750 and 1790, over 80 percent of all British novels were published anonymously.

This also ties into the fusion of ‘search’ and ‘research’ mentioned in the Introduction in relation to the peer review system in academia, where an academic reviews another colleague’s text and provides critical feedback in the form of a written appraisal, comments and suggestions, which often determine the acceptance of the text (or its rejection) by a journal.