anonymity is a room

Before I had a face online, I had a room. It had no walls, only a name I chose at fourteen and a small square of pixels that could have been anyone. In that room I said things I could not say anywhere else, not because they were dangerous, but because nobody there knew what I was supposed to be like.

Anonymity is usually described as a hiding place. I think it is closer to a room with the lights off. You can still move, still speak, still meet people. You just cannot be judged by the parts of you that show in daylight: your voice, your age, your clothes, the way you stand. What remains is the rest of you: the sentences, the attention, the way you keep coming back.

Of course the dark hides the worst of us too. Everyone knows that part; it is the reason the lights are being switched on, one platform at a time. Real names. Verified accounts. Faces as keys. And it works: people behave better when they are watched. They also get smaller. They say less, and only what they can afford to be remembered for.

There is a kind of honesty that only happens when nothing is at stake. A confession to a stranger at two in the morning. A question too stupid to ask a friend. A poem posted under a name that will be abandoned tomorrow. These things need a room where the self is optional.

I do not want to live in the dark room. I want it to exist. I want to know that somewhere on the network there is still a door with no camera above it, and that I could walk through it, be no one for an hour, and come back.

This page has no author. That is not modesty. It is the room.

eof