Earth, Milky Way: punctum books, 2021. 486 pages, illus. ISBN-13: 978-1-953035-30-1. DOI: 10.21983/P3.0315.1.00. OPEN-ACCESS e-book and $27.00 in print: paperbound/6.69 X 9.61 in.

The Book of Anonymity is a stunning achievement! It is luxuriantly interdisciplinary, highly original, and deeply reflective. […] It should be in the library of anyone concerned with information control and revelation issues, as these touch anonymity and identifiability, privacy and publicity and secrecy and transparency. Whether involving scholarship, activism or art, the varied articles strike at the very core of contemporary new technology communication issues such as trust, legitimacy, access, authority and power, and the principled reciprocity central to the social bond and a decent (or, when these are lacking) indecent society.

~ Gary T. Marx, M.I.T.

 

Book of Anonymity

Edited by Anon Collective

Contributors Anon, Götz Bachmann, Dwaipayan Banerjee, Solon Barocas, Aram Bartholl, Amelie Baumann, Vadim Bernard, Paula Bialski, Andreas Broeckmann, Heath Bunting, Martin De Bie, Bureau d’études, Jacob Copeman, Abigail Curlew, Stéphane Degoutin, Simon Farid, Parastou Forouhar, Randi Heinrichs, Anna Henke, Michi Knecht, knowbotiq, Gertraud Koch, Julien McHardy, Helen Nissenbaum, Gerald Raunig, RYBN.ORG, Daniela Silvestrin, Thorsten Thiel, Transformella, Daniël de Zeeuw, Nils Zurawski

Published: 03/04/2021

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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

About the Editor

The Book of Anonymity is written in the tradition of author-less texts. Editing and contributing anonymously constitute experiments in anonymity that speak to the aggressive valuation regimes shaping contemporary artistic and academic knowledge productions alike. This is not to discount the usefulness of attribution, but to trouble the ease with which labour is still dissected, measured and attached to the nexus of person, value and knowledge. To name, one contribution insists is to “define people, things, as individuals, to mark them, hold them, hierarchize them, to press them into service and turn them into value.” Another contribution advocates and questions if an ethics of anonymity can engender the kind of care that individualised practices arguably strive for yet undermine. Not all contributions speak to such concerns directly but all consider what is at stake in the im/possibilities of anonymous expression, at a time of thick digital traces. Editing and contributing anonymously thus is a practical commitment to one of the red threads that criss-cross the kaleidoscopic accounts presented in this book.