Anonymity, Deception, and Power

Anonymous: The Performance of Hidden Identities By Thomas DeGloma (The University of Chicago Press, 2023) Anonymous: The Performance of Hidden Identities recently won the 2024 Theory Prize from the American Sociological Association's Theory Section and the Charles Horton Cooley Book Award from the Society for the Study of Symbolic Interaction. I read the book in preparation for my podcast interview with DeGloma, which The Annex released in March of this year.1 Here, DeGloma takes readers on a sometimes exhilarating, and often quite funny ride at the nexus of formal sociology, interactionism, and pragmatic social theory. Across a great number of cases and contexts, we come to understand that performing anonymously, or pseudonymously, can be freeing, or dangerous. It can protect vulnerable individuals and groups as they, for example, speak of their oppression as part of a liberation movement. The cloak of a pseudonym can also embolden the most vile white supremacist, anti-Semitic, people and shield powerful people and institutions from the consequences of their actions. Every so often, a politician, writer, academic, or other public figure is found to have used a pseudonym or attempted to remain anonymous in an encounter, whether illicit, erotic, or both. Does anyone else remember Carlos Danger? "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." This caption, and the New Yorker cartoon by Peter Steiner that accompanies it, captured a moment when published in 1993 and now lives forever online. Today, many of us in always-connected internet culture live with mass surveillance alongside campaigns to unmask, dox, or even swat people who post anonymously, or take on pseudonyms online and off. Apps like YikYak enable users near college campuses to post all kinds of messages. End-of-course evaluations grant students anonymity so that they can respond freely. Faculty may not like what they read, and freed from the constraint of having to personally identify with their comments, students can express their opinions and relay their classroom experiences in unkind, sexist, racist, or otherwise biased ways. In short, anonymity often provides a measure of liberty otherwise unavailable when individuals own their words. There is power in becoming "anyone." In a blurb on the back cover of DeGloma's new book, Gary Alan Fine writes, "Anonymous does what sociology does best: take a concept (in this case, anonymity and pseudonymity) and explore it as a performative practice, a practice of sociality, and as linked to institutional structures. This book is a major addition to the sociological canon." Interactionists might question such a statement as too excessive in its praise, and then turn to query both the notion of holding up one criterion as defining the best in sociology as well as the idea of a sociological canon. In this review, I aim to lay out some of the many useful concepts DeGloma develops in each chapter before turning to a brief assessment of the work. Anonymous has much to offer interactionists, as DeGloma approaches the topic on anonymity as performance deeply informed by pragmatism and drawing on Goffman's insights on impression formation, fronts, and passing, among other concepts. Here, he focuses on the production, maintenance, and breaches of cover identities. Cover identities, the personas that actors who wish to remain anonymous create and attempt to sustain, allow individuals and groups to act across an exceptionally broad range of contexts. Such identities are facilitated by masks or other forms of concealment in person and in online spaces. DeGloma's text focuses on the action that cover identities allow people to do, both individually and collectively. Some cover identities are intended to protect the actor from negative consequences of exposing personal identity. This goal is the subject of chapter 2. Here, DeGloma offers examples like Elena Ferrante, the pseudonym of a writer who has sold millions of books, from personalized acclaim and the difficulties that come with life as a literary celebrity. The type is, like all of those profiled in the book, common in everyday life. Think: anonymous internet fora, the sacrament of confession practiced behind a screen among Catholics, various "Anonymous" support groups, and in popular culture such as the television program The Masked Singer. In our fields, ethnographers and interview researchers often extensively mask details of participants' personal identities, either changing or obscuring race, class, and other details. Some of these contexts both provide protection from stigma while simultaneously affirming that the content shared is indeed risky, problematic, and/or deviant. Other cover identities are adopted in order to engage in subversive acts, those that challenge, disrupt, or otherwise upend existing power arrangements. Some examples include artists such as Banksy, whose identity, DeGloma writes, is "distinctively unknown" (p. 76). Here, masked social movements and anonymous rebels (think the KKK, Antifa, Zapatistas, and the internet activist group Anonymous) mask their identities for several purposes, including the implication that a masked person could be anyone and thus creating a sense of fear, unease, and suspicion among a targeted person or group. One of the most striking examples of subversive anonymity concerns the FBI's COINTELPRO, in which agents engaged in anonymous activity to undermine trust that different social movement groups had in each other, sowing discord and suspicion. Indeed, the FBI also attempted to subvert Dr Martin Luther King, Jr's work by sending anonymous letters threatening to reveal aspects of his personal life, thus discrediting the Civil Rights Movement (see pp. 19–20). Chapter 4 turns to the anonymity of social systems, and the impersonality of both public and private bureaucratic institutions. Such systems, DeGloma argues, become more opaque as their complexity increases, and consequently it becomes more difficult to recognize both the influence of a particular person and to hold them to account. Like the Clash, one can fight the law, but the law will (most likely) win, and do so under its own cold and dehumanized logic, free from the appearance of individual decision-making. Examples in this chapter include the 2008 financial crisis, the corporate personhood codified in the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, NSA and Big Tech surveillance, long-distance killing via drone, and modern lethal injection, undertaken by medical professionals given a cloak of anonymity. The personal anonymity afforded by membership within social institutions allows their members to wield power with little personal accountability; corporations are named as defendants in lawsuits and occasionally fined. But their leaders are rarely, if ever, given jail time or even a personal fine. Chapter 5 covers the anonymity of types and categories, each of which feature prominently in mainstream sociological work. DeGloma notes that typification is a ubiquitous social process that necessarily anonymizes the person typified, obscuring personal identity and idiosyncrasy in favor of a cover representation and set of imputed qualities, characteristics, and expectations based on group membership. These practices are both mundane and laden with power, and this chapter is especially strong in dealing with the formal aspects of anti-Black racism and White supremacy within and across social institutions and micro-level interactions. DeGloma argues, "…typification norms are often organized around entrenched power dynamics that characterize the structured relations of race, class, occupation, sex, gender, disability, citizenship, and more" (p. 138). Thus, the matrix of abstraction is organized along the lines of Patricia Hill Collins's matrix of domination. Many more examples are featured here, including analytic typification in scholarly work and cisgender typification in "bathroom bills" that restrict access to public restrooms based on sex assigned at birth. DeGloma's book is a masterful work of scholarship, creative, and wry, identifying the formal characteristics of interactions that link many different areas of social action. It is also artfully written with several clever passages and wordplay. In short, a conceptually and empirically engrossing and delightful read, ideal for graduate-level courses in social theory, formal sociology, and more. Like Berger and Luckmann's Social Construction of Reality, Anonymous takes us on a perspective-bending ride, revealing what was hiding in plain sight. Daniel R. Morrison is Associate Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. A sociologist of science, technology, and medicine, pragmatic interactionist theory, and race, his current research investigates how scientific fields define their research problems.