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