Immunity from the image: The right to privacy as an antidote to anonymous modernity

Being unidentifiable and untraceable to state or corporate apparatuses of surveillance and control today has become almost synonymous with being anonymous. It is in this capacity that anonymity is often understood as instrumental and conducive to citizens’ personal privacy vis-à-vis said apparatuses. Yet there is another sense to anonymity less immediately aligned with or intelligible within these privacy-centric narratives. In the motto that epitomizes the liberatory role attributed to online anonymity in early net culture (‘On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog’), anonymity designates a particular mode of sociality and culture that is impersonal or even anti-personal, ephemeral, collective, authorless and in that sense ‘nameless’ and ‘faceless’. Today, imageboards like 4chan continue to cultivate and embrace anonymity in this sense, as a mediatic condition post-humaine. The article aims to show that these forms of anti- and impersonal media prosumption have their roots in a more encompassing tradition of popular mass media culture, against which the right to privacy was originally asserted. As a value, privacy is linked to class-specific anxieties over the increasingly anonymous and impersonal forces of mass modernity and its new media publics, whose profane curiosity desired to ‘bring things closer’ by means of their technological reproduction. The emergent mass culture threatened dominant bourgeois values of personal autonomy and selfhood historically and culturally implied in the idea of a right to privacy. The resulting understanding of anonymity and its relation to privacy suggests an alternative perspective on what is at stake in the politics of online anonymity today.