Anonymity is highly contested, marking the limits of civil liberties and legality. Digital technologies of communication, identification, and surveillance put anonymity to the test. They challenge how anonymity can be achieved, and dismantled. Everyday digital practices and claims for transparency shape the ways in which anonymity is desired, done, and undone.
The Book of Anonymity includes contributions by artists, anthropologists, sociologists, media scholars, and art historians. It features ethnographic research, conceptual work, and artistic practices conducted in France, Germany, India, Iran, Switzerland, the UK, and the US. From police to hacking cultures, from Bitcoin to sperm donation, from Yik-Yak to Amazon and IKEA, from DNA to Big Data - thirty essays address how the reconfiguration of anonymity transforms our concepts of privacy, property, self, kin, addiction, currency, and labor.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface
Intro
Toward a Kaleidoscopic Understanding of Anonymity
Artistic Research on Anonymity
Reconfiguration
Anonymity and Transgression: Caste, Social Reform, and Blood Donation in India
Anonymity: The Politicisation of a Concept
USAE
Big Data's End Run around Anonymity and Consent
A List of Famous Artists Who Used to Be Invigilators
Anonymity as Everyday Phenomenon and as a Topic of Research
Anonymity on Demand: The Great Offshore
Assault
DNA Works! Merging Genetics and the Digital Realm
Sanitary Policy and the Policy of Anonymity: Observations on a Game on Endocrine Disruptors
Where Do the Data Live? Anonymity and Neighborhood Networks
Fraught Platform Governmentality: Anonymity, Content Moderation, and Regulatory Strategies over Yik Yak
Anonymity: Obsolescence and Desire
Policing Normality: Police Work, Anonymity, and a Sociology of the Mundane
Weapon
Amazonian Flesh: How to Hang in Trees during Strike?
Proximity, Distance, and State Powers: Policing Practices and the Regulation of Anonymity
Dual Reality: (Un)Observed Magic in the Workplace
A Provisional Manifesto for Invigilator-Friendly Artworks, or Your Artwork Is an Invigilator's Labor Conditions: Informally Sourced from Security Guards at an Art Gallery in Central London
Care or Control? Police, Youth, and Mutual Anonymity
She Remembers
Delight
Collective Pleasures of Anonymity: From Public Restrooms to 4chan and Chatroulette
Transformella Malor Ikeae: InnerCity Ikeality [4.4.6.11]
Authenticity
Longing for a Selfless Self and other Ambivalences of Anonymity: A Personal Account
Speak their Endless Names
Bitcoin Anonymous? Of Trust in Code and Paper
Anonymity Workshop