Gyges in Incognito

In Plato’s Republic, Book II, Plato describes the ring of Gyges, a magical ring which renders its owner invisible. From the perspective of Gyges’ brother, Glaucon, he writes:

This they affirm to be the origin and nature of justice; —it is a mean or compromise, between the best of all, which is to do injustice and not be punished, and the worst of all, which is to suffer injustice without the power of retaliation; and justice, being at a middle point between the two, is tolerated not as a good, but as the lesser evil, and by reason of the inability of men to do injustice.
For no man who is worthy to be called a man would ever submit to such an agreement if he were able to resist.

Our current scaffolding of polite company is emergent from iterations of various behavioral norms that enabled this version of society to survive evolutionary forces. Part of it is organizing human beans into functional engines by incentivizing cooperation, the removal of which allows for local maxima in selfishness. Invisibility thus becomes a catalyst for ethical dissolution by excising the social subroutines that keep our base algorithms in check.

Unfortunately, this is not limited to an ancient philosopher’s thought experiments. A 2014 paper by Bartlett et al showed that anonymity was a risk factor for cyberbullying proclivity. The 2014 Gamergate phenomenon of attacking women in gaming was built on the vehicles of anonymous platforms like 4chan and 8chan.The Pew Research’s 2021 survey found that 41% of Americans had personally experienced some form of online harassment. In 2022 alone, Omegle reported over 600,000 incidents of child sexual abuse, which led to its shuttering in 2023. The Onion Router has enabled $180M+ ($1B+ in today’s Bitcoin dollars) of Silk Road activity, enabling of a whole host of the darkest dredges from the deepest pits of humanity. Suler’s 2004 paper on The Online Disinhibition Effect discusses how anonymity fundamentally alters the psychological experience of selfhood.

But what if injustice lies in the social trappings themselves? The Arab Spring and its #Jan25 hashtag percolating via anonymous Twitter accounts orchestrated a synchrony of revolution, protecting individual users from state retaliation. The anonymous account @ElShaheeed became a symbolic voice of the dead, and a rallying point for protests. A study showed that only 6-7% of TOR users are actually using it for malicious activity; whistleblower submission portals and protests against oppressive regimes have been supported on this protocol.

Anonymity can create space for agency by temporarily suspending the normative violence that would otherwise constrain their capacity to speak, create, or resist. There is the famous 2000 study that showed blind orchestra auditions increased the likelihood of female musicians being selected in the final rounds by 30%. In 1970, women comprised only about 6% of orchestra musicians, but after the implementation of blind auditions around that time, female representation increased to 47%. OK, it’s hard to disentagle causation from correlation here, but you get the drift.

James Tiptree Jr. was an American science fiction and fantasy author. Lauded by writer Harlan Ellison in his anthology with the introduction “[Kate] Wilhelm is the woman to beat this year, but Tiptree is the man.”; compared to Ernest Hemingway by Robert Silverberg with the words “[there was] a prevailing masculinity about both of them - that preoccupation with questions of courage, with absolute values, with the mysteries and passions of life and death as revealed by extreme physical tests, by pain and suffering and loss.” You probably saw this coming, and you are right: Tiptree was a woman, Alice Bradley Sheldon. So was George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans); Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (the Brontë sisters), and Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling).

「雄兔脚扑朔，
雌兔眼迷离。
双兔傍地走，
安能辨我是雄雌? 」
“The male rabbit normally hops and runs,
while the female sits and stares.
But both flee fast when danger threatens.
How can one tell whether they are male or female then?”
— 木兰辞 (The Ballad of Mulan)

Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari see the self not as a fixed thing, but a series of “assemblages”: a temporary configuration of desires and connections. These assemblages are maintained through a homeostatic process that whittles down its constituent parts into the shapes that enable the assemblage’s form. Their concept of a “Body without Organs” (BwO), borrowed from French wrtier Antonin Artaud’s play, is the unfettered manifestation of the fundamental desires that make an organism alive. It is akin to the egg before its various parts (organs) have been pruned and pared for its machinery.

In this sense, anonymity allows for a Body without Organ by freeing it from its stratification. Deleuze and Guattari espouses the full or productive BwO that uses the raw substrate of experience, intensity, to explore, experiment, play, and create.

When you will have made him a body without organs,
then you will have delivered him from all his automatic reactions
and restored him to his true freedom.

They you will teach him again to dance wrong side out
as in the frenzy of dance halls.
and this wrong side out will be his real place
— Antonin Artaud, To Have Done With the Judgment of God

In the Taoist text *Zhuangzi *(莊子), there is a parable about the emperors Shu (儵, quick), Hu (忽, sudden), and Huntun (渾沌, primordial chaos). Huntun was described as a faceless being, aligned with the Taosit concept of wuwei (無為, effortless action, spontaneity, etc.) Huntun treated the other emperors with generosity, and in return they thought they could repay his kindness by giving him the orifices that ‘all men have’. Every day, they bored a hole into his face; and on the seventh day, Huntun died. Their imposing of their version of normalcy, of what they think a man “should be like”, is a brutal version of Oscar Wilde’s line in The Portrait of Dorian Gray: to define is to limit.

Michael Levin, the renowned developmeental biologist, is a key reseracher in the field of cellular intelligence. In a study, the lab cultured human cells (essentially fibroblasts, or skin cells) into what Levin calls anthrobots: a synthetic biologicalk proto-organism that was self-assembled from a single cell - without any genetic modification. Losing their fibroblast-ness and reprogramming their own geometry and cytoskeletal dynamics was entirely driven by their removal from its original context. (with its nutrient medium, but without any external patterning or scaffolding)

Consider the fact that my name is absent from this blog. I drop affordances here and there, but largely if I am not the person who directly sent this to you, you probably will need a non-zero amount of sleuthing to know who I am. I write for myself, and for a select few whose feedback I respect and learn from. I want my posts to be isolated from my LinkedIn or Instagram or real-life social awkwardness. I write better than I speak. I write differently from how I speak.

Karen Barad talks about intra-action, the idea that selves are emergent from the tango of two consciousnesses rather than two immutable beings that exist as the same entity before, during, and after the interaction. Anonymity isn’t the opposite of identity, it’s identity in its most quantum state. Full of potential, uncollapsed, and a freedom not just to be yourself, but to be the many other versions of you, for better or for worse.