BOOK OF ANONYMITY Before you start to read this book, take this moment to think about making a donation to punctum books, an independent non-profit press, @ https://punctumbooks.com/support If you’re reading the e-book, you can click on the image below to go directly to our donations site. Any amount, no matter the size, is appreciated and will help us to keep our ship of fools afloat. Contributions from dedicated readers will also help us to keep our commons open and to cultivate new work that can’t find a welcoming port elsewhere. Our adventure is not possible without your support. Vive la Open Access. Hieronymus Bosch, Ship of Fools (1490 – 1500) BOOK OF ANONYMITY An edited collection Preface Writing Anonymity The Book of Anonymity gathers contributions by more than forty writers, academics, and artists. Published in the tradition of author-less texts, the volume is edited by the Anon Collective. Contributions are published partially anonymously, too. Withholding author identities affects writing and reading, adding a reflexive layer to the collection, raising broader questions about anonymity, and thus providing one way into the subject. In place of a foreword, we share our thoughts on writing anony- mously as one reading guide to this volume. We also supply a how-to guide for citing the book and its anonymous contributions. Writing anonymously amplifies well-established questions of authorship and readership: who gets to speak, with what authority, from what position; who is foregrounded and who is marginalized; what constitutes a writing subject and what brings a reader, a public into being? Rarely framed in terms of anonymity, these questions nevertheless have been interrogated at length, in Foucauldian critiques of authorship, the writing culture debates of the late 1980s, or feminist scholarship, for example. That the body of literature on the death of the author is attributed to particular authors perhaps demonstrates how resilient notions of authorship are. Such writing and reading questions evoked by notions of authorship have lost none of their relevance. On the con- trary, the digitalization of textual-visual production, the algorithmic aggregation and segregation of knowledge publics, the relentless competition and self-branding of individualized knowledge producers, coupled with Preface 6 techniques for securing and defying attribution have 1 See “Speak Their Endless intensified the stakes. Copyrights and intellectual property, Names, ” this volume, 424. the battle for open access, the grip of evaluation regimes, 2 See “ Longing for a Self­­less Self and Other whistleblowers, fake news: there is no lack of evidence Ambivalences of Anonym- that the relations between authors and texts, knowledge ity,” this volume, 401. producers and their products, are highly contested, much debated, and embedded in open-ended processes of change. 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 labor and imagination are dissected, measured, and attached to the nexus of person, value, and knowledge. To name, in the words of one Deleuzian (oh, no, we just did it again) contribution to this volume, is to “ define people, things, as individuals, to mark them, hold them, hierarchize them, to press them into service and turn them into value” 1. Another contribution advocates and questions whether an ethics of anonymity can engender the kind of care that individualized practices arguably strive for yet undermine.2 Not all contributions speak to such concerns directly. Still, all consider what is at stake in the im /possibilities of anonymous expression, at a time of thick digital traces, data aggregation, and data mining. Editing and contributing anonymously are practical commitments to one of the red threads crisscrossing this book. The absence of author names does not necessarily do away with authors. Withholding author names, at least in this context, does not give us no-authors, but gives us unidentified, or yet to be identified, authors. Far from making authors disappear, the absence of author names renders authorship more powerfully present. The argument that anonymity can be understood as a particular patterning of absences and presences, we develop further in the introduction. Here, we simply note that removing Preface 7 names can also enforce the notion of author that it seemingly undermines. Obviously, more is missing than just names: without names, making sense through attribution becomes harder. You do not know whether you know us from other circumstances, be it personal encounters or by reading other stuff we have written. Without our names, you rely on implicit markers of our gender, class, or attach- ments to this or that language. Citation cartels and other means of distinction are disrupted. There is no straightforward way of googling us, and therefore you can only guess our professions, our institutional and disciplinary affiliations, or status. Titles and texts are all you have, to establish what interests you, or to judge what is justified, or trustworthy. The Book of Anonymity consists of texts and visuals from contributors whom we, the editors, know — either through collaborative projects, conferences and workshops, or through their work in art, social and cultural sciences, or open-data activism. Most contributors are well known in their respective fields; some speak from “ emerging ” positions, while others still live in the contemporary reality of being established yet precarious. The writing-we of this editorial introduction is that of the Google Docs–mediated Anon Collective: five people; two social anthropologists, one sociologist, one designer, and one curator; two women and three men. While the editing collective is German-ish, the authors of this volume come from a more extensive array, including artists from France, the UK, Germany, and Iran as well as criminolo gists, art theorists, computer scientists, philosophers, political scientists, and scholars of media and culture from all over Europe and the United States. Now, you know quite a bit about the bunch behind this volume. Still, you do not know who has done what. Within this anonymity set, we remain unidentified but not unknown, leaving you free to guess what is written by an artist or an academic, by someone “ prominent ” Preface 8 and perhaps comfortably safe or someone “emerging ” and CITATION GUIDE probably struggling. This might leave you to concentrate The author is dead, and this Book of Anonymity more, or differently, on the content — unless the opposite is written in the tradition of author-less text. Yet, occurs, and you spend your time guessing. bound up in regimes of accountability, we are providing a citation guide This book, however, must be taken into account to be fair on page 481, complying to those who struggle to make their labor count. With with conventions of authorship. this in mind, we choose to proceed in a way that highlights tensions between authorship and anonymity, while FREE COLOUR The Book of Anonymity is still allowing attribution and referencing for individual printed in black and white, contributions. In terms of citation, this means that to keep it affordable. A full-colour PDF version the book and book chapters will be referenced like this: of the book is available at punctum books for free download. BOOK: Anon Collective, ed. Book of Anonymity. Earth: punctum books, 2020. CHAPTERS : Individual contributions are referenced with full author names and chapter titles, except for “ Longing for a Selfless Self,” whose author chooses to remain fully anonymous. The authors, to summarize, are only partially anon ymous because they can be identified in the back of the book, where we provide an over view of contributors and a citation how-to for each contribution ( page 481 ). This is a concession to people’s dependence on contemporary knowledge regimes, but it also speaks to the tempo- rality of anonymity more broadly. At a time when the possibilities for data storage continue to increase, data are always subject to future computation, pattern recognition, cross-linking, and thus potential identi - fication. Anonymity, under these conditions, is often temporary, fragile, and incomplete. Returning to the notion of a reading guide, we note that anonymity’s temporal fragility helps to maintain the tense space in which absences and presences play out. Anonymity’s play of absences and presences, and its temporal vulnerability then, is a feature of our writing experiment and a guiding theme of this book. — The Anon Collective, Earth, Internet, June 2, 2020 Preface 9 Keywords Anonymity, Data Security, Surveillance, Personhood, Privacy, Art-Science Collaboration, Digital Cultures Subject Codes COM079010 COMPUTERS / Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) COM079000 COMPUTERS / Social Aspects SOC000000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / General SOC010000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Feminism & Feminist Theory SOC071000 SOCIAL SCIENCE / Technology Studies Edited by Anon Collective All contributions to this volume are published pseudo-anonymously. Aiming to highlight tensions between authorship and anonymity while still allowing attribution, we provide an overview of contributors and a citation how-to for each contribution in the back of this book (page 481). Book of Anonymity. Copyright 2020 by the editors and authors. 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