Anonymity--The New Protest Movement (picture)

Anonymity is a useful tool for activists. by Anonymous
“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Over the past ten years or so, this quote from Oscar Wilde has been flagrantly overused to the point where it qualifies as a cliche. During a decade in which whistleblowers and anarchic hacking collectives have undeniably come to the fore, Wilde’s statement, promoting anonymity, has become a mantra for the new movement.

And rightly so. The argument is as persuasive as it is intriguing; surrounded as we are by evidence to support it, ranging from the antics of internet trolls to the courage of all breeds of whistleblower, it seems that anonymity truly is the best means of securing total honesty. Without the fear of repercussions, a masked man becomes a vessel for the truth — his own and everyone else’s. As a free agent, capable of actions anyone else would deem horribly reckless, he is a valuable tool for 21^st Century activism. So, taking that point to its logical conclusion, we should surely be arguing for every activist to be anonymous, right? Why bother with celebrity figureheads whose lives are endangered by their work, when there’s a much safer alternative just waiting to be put into action? Why not push for total anonymity in every area of activism?

The benefits of this strategy are far greater even than those implied by the above quote. Imagine: in a world without famous leaders at the head of every activist movement, there would be no personal issues to serve as potential ‘dirt’, capitalized upon inevitably by the mainstream media in order to obfuscate the goals and message of the movement / organization in question. WikiLeaks’ recent troubles serve as an appropriate example. Regardless of your thoughts on the rights and wrongs of the legal action pending in Sweden against Julian Assange, you can’t deny that the case has changed the focus of all the media attention on the organization. An article about WikiLeaks’ releases would seem incomplete nowadays without a small paragraph dedicated to the affair in Sweden, which detracts from the attention that should really be given to the work of the organization, not one man’s personal business. Granted,

Mr Assange and his legal team have themselves made every effort to interrelate the two stories — WikiLeaks’ truculent pissing off of the American elite and the sudden reemergence of charges against the organization’s founder — and the possibility of a link between the two is worth seriously considering. But the case against Mr Assange is still a major distraction, and, depressingly, has actually tainted WikiLeaks’ reputation as far as a number of people are concerned. As Owen Jones put it shortly after Mr Assange first took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy, London: “Assange should go to Sweden to face the allegations. That doesn’t mean abandoning the struggle to hold Western governments to account… But this is a struggle that has become tragically compromised by Assange.” ¹ If Mr Assange had maintained the relative anonymity he enjoyed before summer 2010, the issue could have been dealt with privately and without the risk of damaging WikiLeaks. Heck, if the man himself is right in attributing a political motive to these allegations, perhaps they wouldn’t have even come about if he’d never publicly become the head of the hacktivist hydra that the establishment most wants to chop off. morehere