The Quest For Anonymity
Whoever makes it possible will bathe in riches
Years ago, in the early aughts, I had a discussion with a writer who was adamantly opposed to anonymity, which he thought was synonymous with cowardice. This was before Facebook and Twitter arrived but in the flower of online publications opening their content to sometimes vitriolic comment. He was a military man who had lost his chance at a final, significant promotion before retirement because of his published writings while on active duty, and he thought anyone who wasn’t willing to make that kind of sacrifice, or simply own up to their bilious nature in the comments section, should hold their tongue rather than resorting to anonymity.
Of course he was wrong. Trolls are an irritant and can be much worse, but one of the things he was meant to be defending as a military man is the Constitution, which was amended to include a right to free speech, which the Supreme Court has on multiple occasions interpreted to broadly include anonymous speech.1
And the Bill of Rights was itself written in part by men who had pamphleteered anonymously in the past. Anonymous writers and commenters today aren’t necessarily the equivalent to the people we think of as the founders of the country writing anonymously, or Thomas Paine, who published Common Sense2 anonymously, or Sam Adams,3 who brought about a revolution while often acting and writing under the cloak of anonymity, but they have the right to conceal themselves.
My interlocutor conceded the point in relatively short order, but his original view remains far from uncommon among writers and others exposed to sometimes extraordinarily vile anonymous speech, and of course governments at all levels, corporations, politicians, police forces and others are constantly looking to unmask anonymous critics or simply collect identities, forestalling anonymity in advance.
The young woman whose picture graces the top of this post didn’t know she was the subject of a photo. She’ll never see it and nobody she knows will either, but she’s not immune from facial recognition programs trawling the web to collect images. She may not wind up in somebody’s dataset but she equally well may, and no one acquiring faces in volume is doing it for your own good.
What, though, if instead of looking as she does she looked like this instead:4
or this:
Projection mapping has been a thing for many years now, and facial projection mapping for about a decade. You may have seen it used in commercials.
The linked video from which the stills above are taken is mesmerizing, and the technology used in it is seven or more years old. The obvious drawbacks in this and other similar videos are that faces have to be kept more than usually still, and having twenty people following you around with projectors is impractical. But if we can put a man on the moon …
Conceivably we’ll have miniaturized projection mapping devices no larger than, say, an LED headlamp within the near future. It’s really the least we can ask as we head into our also-near and extremely dystopian future. (That and flying cars. Make them coal powered if need be. Who gives a fuck at this point.)
Imagine the delight of walking down a street filled with fellow camera-baffling shape-shifters, and with the other half of the physical privacy equation in effect: location-spoofing devices. Combine them into one easy-to-use package and money will come pouring down from the sky, followed immediately by heavily-armed men in black.
(Spoofing your location is already easy enough, with Virtual Private Networks and apps that can change the apparent location of your phone,5 but they can erode the convenience of your online and physical activities, as there are times when you want your phone or computer to know where you are. We need something that can slide us in and out without effort.)
Meanwhile, get yourself a nice comfy mask6 and turn off your GPS.
J.J. Cale’s “Number 10” and “Naturally” started me off this morning, as I awoke unreasonably early and you can play his music low enough not to disturb the neighbors in the silent hours without missing anything, particularly his genius guitar. “Naturally” is fabulous. “Bitumba” from Montparnasse Musique features a lovely group with which we recently became familiar, Mbongwana Star.
“Who gives a fuck at this point?” It’s like you’re reading my mind.