Soft, steady taps of fingers against keyboard keys stop just as the hypnotic hum of the heating roars through the air duct beside my desk. The wheels of my chair drag against my bedroom floor as I stand, stretch my arms, sigh, and slump back down before surveying the laptop screen before me.

“Submitted!” comforts the Quercus page open on my Google Chrome browser. “11:53 pm,” informs the bottom right corner of my laptop. “Sunday, January 13, 2019,” announces my laptop when I hover over the aforementioned corner. “Agh,” groans my throat, involuntarily, after realizing that I might enjoy more than five hours of sleep tonight. Unless…

I squint at the bottom right corner of my laptop — 11:54 pm. I peep at my door — closed, by my sister in a huff after I made fun of her for having to wear braces for two years. I pop my headphones out and scrunch my ears — snores and snorts sneak underneath my door and permeate my room. I pop my headphones back in before dragging my mouse to the three dots my Google Chrome window wears like a medal of honour on its top-right shoulder, er, side.

“New Tab?” The pop-up asks me. “New Window?”

“New Incognito Window,” I answer, through a click of my mouse.

“You’ve gone incognito,” informs the bespectacled and hat-clad entity. I count incognito mode as one of my best, nay, my best friend, because unlike my other friends, it doesn’t remember all my embarrassing missteps or mock me for them every chance I get. (I only fell down in a bus that one time, okay?)

“P,” I tell it gingerly. I glance at my closed door. “O,” I continue.

“Portal.utoronto.ca?” incognito mode guesses.

“Popeyeschicken.ca/promos?”

“Potterybarn.com?” incognito mode suggests. “Portuguese water dog?”

I longingly glance at Potterybarn.com, before realizing that I neither have the time nor the budget to click through its catalogue of beautiful furniture that would look even better in my room. Retracing my steps, I hit backspace twice.

“Pi,” I tap out.

“Pinterest.com?” offers incognito mode.

“Pictures of cavities,” I press enter.

Both my siblings are currently smitten, or rather ensnared, by the costly cult that is dentistry. After having made numerous trips to both the dentist and orthodontist, both of them have racked up thousands of dollars divided among braces, cavity-fillings, and other drillings into their teeth that are likely to induce anesthesia addiction. And as happens with most cults — social media influencers, Starbucks Rewards™ members, and student journalists — its members always tell you to join it.

I have no plans to listen to my siblings — I have an expensive education habit that I need to support — but their constant needling, nay, drilling, might have chipped away at both the enamel of my teeth and my confidence in their perfection.

Thus, here I am, googling pictures of cavities near midnight to assuage my fear that the suspicious black mark I have on one of my lower teeth is not a cavity.

Maybe it’s deposits of black pepper from the lime and black pepper chips I often scarf down mid-assignment? Perhaps it’s a tea leaf stuck to my tooth? It could, perchance, also be some of the Oreos that I gobble alongside the lime and black pepper chips. It most certainly is not a cavity. Right?

Even if it is not, however, I cannot let either of my siblings find my browsing history, and by extension, this chink in my armour, so they can use it to cultivate me. (Get it?)

I also do not want a constant barrage of sponsored ads from local dentists and orthodontists while I pin recipes I am never going to make or click through Pottery Barn furniture I am not going to buy. I get enough ads from St. George Dental as it is.

My incognito habits, much to the disappointment of my seventh-grade self who didn’t want to be ‘like other girls,’ are in no way weird.

Whenever anyone, like you, for example, visits a website sans incognito mode, the website stores small text files on your computer to identify you later. These files, misleadingly called cookies, are what allow websites to remember login details, items in carts, and, more insidiously, your behaviour on the website.

Cookies can remember how long you stayed on the website, what items you examined and for how long, and when you last visited the website. Like the protagonist — or antagonist, depending on how you look at it — of the book-turned-Netflix series You, cookies know that you want to be seen, heard,  and known. Of course, they oblige.

Though every website can only eat, er, read its own cookies, there exist third-party advertising networks that request the cookies from the hosting website. By having possession of these cookies, these third-party networks can track you and your behaviour across multiple websites to build a profile of you. Companies and businesses can then target ads directly at you if the third-party advertiser decides that your profile fits their demographic.

Google is one of the biggest third-party networks and the biggest search engine, which means Google knows what you want before you even know you want it. Say you visit Potterybarn.com and spend a few minutes looking at a gorgeous Persian rug on sale. Based on your browsing history, Google knows you’re in the market for a rug that you can break down on without worrying about getting your clothes dirty or falling off your bed. So naturally, you’re going to see ads warning you about the selling-out of the gorgeous Persian rug you saw.

Oh, hey, the very ad I just described showed up. Weird.

This doesn’t exclusively apply to Google; shopping websites, as well as content-publishing websites, use algorithms to track your preferences to recommend other products, posts, and pictures they think you will like.

Two ways to avoid getting caught with your hand in the metaphorical cookie jar are to routinely clear your cookies and limit the websites that have access to them, or use incognito mode, which doesn’t save website cookies when you close the window.

I sometimes don’t hang up my freshly laundered clothes for weeks — I actually have a pile sitting on my bed right now — so I’ll let you guess which option I prefer.

I summon incognito mode when I need to log in to my parents’ email account and print out a coupon for them. (Side note: Hudson’s Bay has good deals, I have to admit.)

I make use of incognito mode whenever I visit Urban Dictionary, lest a Google ad suggest I buy a mug emblazoned with the definition of “truffle butter.” (Hint: it is not a baking supply, so Google at your own risk.)

I also always creep on my crushes’ social media accounts on incognito, so my logged-out self does not accidentally fall prey to my baser instincts and like their picture no matter how cute they look. (Disclaimer: they look very cute.)

Apart from targeted advertising however, I admit that I also use incognito mode because I feel a certain degree of shame. In an era of online insecurity, I fear that someday, someone will somehow hack my browsing history, discover that I was googling Ariana Grande’s barbecue grill tattoo, and judge me for having such low-brow tastes in reading material.

Or worse, they could unearth my quest for pictures of cavities, discover that I might have a cavity, and force me to go to the dentist for the first time in ten years. Then where would I be? Cemented in a costly cult and addicted to anesthesia, that’s where.

I do not want to end up there, which is why — despite not deleting my browser cookies — I use incognito mode, as should you. Meanwhile, I will maybe click on this ad for a Persian carpet that’s half off at Pottery Barn and see where that takes me.

There is an indoor Chinese market that I frequented as a child, where I could walk through swinging glass doors and be immediately transported to my grandfather’s country. This market housed the barber to whom my mother took me for my first haircut, the stall where my father would buy gleaming tins of fried tofu and noodles for big dinners, the char siu butcher whose stench I could never stomach, and the dress shop that I’d flee from my mother to admire instead.

Worn tarps draped over a pile of cassava buzzing with flies form a makeshift roof. The ground is stained concrete with a slight sheen. Rising and falling above the hum of meat freezers are the abrupt halts and rapid inflections of Cantonese and Mandarin, as natural to the place as any one of the pillars rising to the ceiling.

There are no pretenses here. Everyone is as comfortable in their own skin as they’ll ever be on this side of the Pacific. They speak their language, sell their food, and play their music against the backdrop of Vancouver rain rattling against the grimy skylights. As a little girl, I was perfectly comfortable wandering in and out of the stalls, clutching a sweet-smelling raisin twist from the Asian bakery in my left hand; if I close my eyes, I can still picture the twists and turns of every hallway and stairwell. It wasn’t until I was older that I realized that every sign displayed lettering I couldn’t understand.

When I think about the town I grew up in, this market is one of the first things that comes to mind, because of what it represents. A home away from home for many, I suppose, like the rest of the Chinese-Canadian city rising around it. But to me, it is emblematic of a settling sense of half-belonging that seemed to trail me wherever I went, like I was of neither here nor there, just familiar enough, but never fully able to claim anything as my own. This haze of feeling also hangs over my relationship to the only home I’ve ever known: Richmond, British Columbia.

Richmond rises up from the mudflats of an island named for a showgirl, cradled by two arms of the Fraser River, just over the bridge from Vancouver proper. Its census places it as the North American city with the largest proportion of Asians, prompting the offhand joke or two about Canada’s real biggest Chinatown. Most of its inhabitants hail from the skyscrapers of Hong Kong or the vast expanse of the Chinese mainland, and that heritage bleeds into every realm of the city’s life.

It’s a city of paper-thin cherry blossoms in May and watercolour sunsets in August, but now that I’ve left for the rush of Toronto, I remember home best in the lull of its mid-autumn rain. Come October in Richmond, umbrellas bloom along every sidewalk, and bus windows eagerly fog to play canvas to children’s paintbrush fingers. Most of the trees have already surrendered their leaves, carpeting the streets outside bubble tea cafes in red and gold. And when the rain lets up, the air goes crisp and the mountains in the north come into sharp clarity, peaks dipped in pristine white. These memories, though, are a glass paperweight run smooth by time and distance; they hold the old fluttering sense of disbelonging, forged in my time there, firmly down.

My school years saw me pass through cliques of kids who’d break into their parents’ languages when they were most excited, slinging playful insults at each other high enough over my head to graze the ceiling. Nearly everyone I knew seemed to inhabit their identity with a natural ease that, for me, felt as futile as trying to catch rainwater in open hands. I was never Chinese enough to chime in or even follow along. They knew, and nudged me over that line into another box marked with ‘Filipino,’ after the blood that I inherited from one great-grandparent whose name I never learned. I grew up believing I was ‘other.’ To this day, I wear the Chinese seven-eighths of my heritage like an old pair of boots never quite broken in; after all this time, they still don’t sit quite right, and I don’t know how much further I have to walk before I stop blistering.

It wasn’t any easier trying to settle into the other side of my heritage. Some days, I’d catch friends tossing the label ‘Filipino’ at someone who’d come back too tan from vacation. They’d start when they remembered I was there, eyes wide as they tried to patch it with a quick, “Not like you. You’re… caramel” — as if that made any sense, a sweet for a nationality.

By the time I was nine or 10, I’d already developed the sense that my hometown was a place removed from the real world, and that I was no more than an observer passing through it. Maybe it began when I noticed that my sense of self seemed to drift while everyone else’s appeared anchored, and bled from there to tint my perception of all I encountered. The city around me seemed to stand still, every day running parallel to the ones before it; it was a sleepy, blue-tinged bubble of a world, punctuated by shrieking seagulls overhead and glowing signs at Asian grocers. It didn’t resemble anything I’d ever seen in ink or on screen, or anything that the world had given its golden stamp of approval to. Even the people had different skin. I remember thinking that someday I’d make it out to the real world where the people were. California, maybe, but probably the pulse and grit of New York City. All I had to do was wait; only then would my life begin.

I waited for a long time. Passed the years between the pages of books I’d picked out from the library, inhabited worlds where nobody seemed dampened by the same alienation that I felt. And so, I came to believe that finding someplace like that would finally lend me the sense of comfort that I’d spent my life straining toward. I began seeing the buildings of other cities reflected in the puddles of my own, until the world beyond tiny Richmond captivated my imagination in its entirety. Even the promise of a week spent someplace else was promise enough.

“Hey, Chinita. Chinita linda¡Vete aquí!” I was 17 years old, and it was March in Havana. Wandering the cobblestones under wrought-iron balconies stamped by Spanish imperialism, I had never been more bruised by the colour of my skin. Nagging mutters of “China, China” set racial catcalls to the beat of tropical music that streamed to the street from open windows, while all I could think was that I’d never set foot in that part of East Asia. It was worst in the sightseeing districts, where cars, immaculately kept from the ’60s, gleamed like pastel candies behind drivers hustling for a job. “Chinita, China, just 50 CUC for an hour!” Disillusionment was bitter on my tongue. I had no taste for it, but let it thicken there anyway.

On the flight home, Vancouver’s glass skyscrapers seemed more solid than ever before; for the entirety of the descent, my eyes traced the familiar rivers and roads with a newfound fondness and relief. I’d never been so thrilled to be back in my city, where not once had I been called out on the streets for my features or skin. The thought of the outside world began to lose its shine, and for a few brief days I was jolted out of the suspended state from which I’d always viewed my surroundings. Home was home — but when I recounted the experience to various circles of friends, their response was invariably the same: “You don’t look Chinese, though.”

Their gaze would sweep over my darker skin, coming to rest on my double-lidded eyes. And that was that.

Are there words to describe the way that my voice shrinks in my throat every time I try to describe this rift, that can take every moment of detachment and longing, and string them together in a path we can walk, so I can show you how wearying it is to wander? How wearying it is to always be wanting, always in search of that far-off place where they might see me, and know me, and finally understand. This search that has slipped under my skin, tangled itself in my nervous system so that I feel it always. It has grown more native to me than any place or nation ever could — and still it aches. Is there a way to capture that feeling? I’m still looking for one.

“You speak Chinese?”

“Yeah.”

“Mando or Canto?”

Somehow, even now that I’ve left home, the souls and rhythms of Chinese-Canadian communities never change. Same rivalries, same essential questions of allegiance. Nothing left behind from where we came from.

“Neither,” I always respond. I watch the fleeting confusion cross their face every time, as they try to make sense of me. If I leave it at that, the inevitable conclusion is, “Oh, so not Chinese, then.” Sometimes I attempt to explain my family’s language — an orphan of the diaspora, pulling words from two nations, native only to Manila’s Chinatown. The bottom line, though, is that there are times I may blend in, but I will never be taken as one of yours. No matter where I go, that seems to be the truth of my heritage.

Ever since I began dreaming of the world outside my hometown, I had always thought that I’d leave that sense of disbelonging behind once I made it out, as thoughtlessly as shedding a raincoat and shaking all the drops off, clean and untouched underneath. But I’ve crossed the country to get here, taken my place on one of those airplanes I’d traced from my window as a child, watched the glittering lights of my mountain city fade away beneath the clouds, and everything feels the same. I’m finally out, and I still walk an extra 20 minutes to the Asian grocer where I can’t understand the signs or the cashier’s greeting, can’t stop myself from gravitating toward the familiarity of that nine-toned language that, after all these years, still means nothing to me.

But I think I am beginning to understand that the divide I have always inhabited, that has chafed and pulled at me all my life, is where I feel most settled. It is as though that sense of unease has seeped into me and made me its own to claim and to hold — and it has been there all this time, waiting with steady patience for me to notice.

When I was seven or eight, my grandfather passed away. I remember my father going back to China to visit him, flying across the world from our little town of Normal, Illinois to catch a glimpse of my grandfather’s dying breath, to feel the heat of his smile once more.

I remember seeing my father cry for the first time in my life when he came back. I remember my family, disjointed and punctured by sharp breaths that stood in for a question that nobody dared to ask. Death is such a greedy thing — it takes and it takes from the living, leaving us to clean up its mess.

When my grandfather died, I was playing the piano. My mother walked into the room and took my hands off the keys.

“Grandpa’s gone,” she said.

She wrapped her arms around me, and after my initial shock, tidal waves of mourning crashed through me, beat against my body, until I began to cry — to cry long, shaking gasps.

When I cried, my tears were not weighed down by the same gravity as my father’s tears that fell half a world away; for him, my grandfather’s death was like a universe being swallowed up by the sun. For me, my grandfather was but a couple of distinct memories saved in my mind, pressed between pages. He was the man with creased, milky skin and kind eyes, who gave me a little green purse with sequin flowers when I was six, the very purse that I toted around and stuffed Barbies in.

When I think of him, his face swims in my vision, blurry and snipped from photos I have seen.

When my father thinks of him, he remembers China and the village he grew up in. I imagine that what swims before his eyes is not just his father’s face, but also the sharp clarity of love.

When I cried, I loved. But it was not the same love as my father’s. My father’s love is bumpy, with tired grooves in its surface. Run your hand across it too fast, and you’ll get splinters in your palm. For he loves my grandfather wholly, without filter or remorse. I love him smooth. Well-rounded, light, and small enough to fit in the palm of my hand.

When we picked up my father at the airport, I had to be reminded to be respectful of his privacy. I think back to that day, how he walked to the car, with a brown book grasped firmly to his chest, his back hunched. “Hi,” I said weakly, when he opened the car door. He nodded, and then closed the door behind him. There was a certain quality about him that was worn, filed down to very last grain. I had no other words to say to him.

The rest of the car ride was silent. By the time we had pulled into the driveway of our little townhouse, gravel crunching under the wheels, my father said nothing still. When we unlocked the front door and entered our home, my father moved immediately to prepare and mourn in the only way he knew how: through a ceremony.

His choice in mourning was odd. Funny, even, in a bitter sort of irony. My father is a man reshaped by assimilation and learning to exchange his immigrant past for American horizons. He came here, his fingers entangled with my mother’s, both children of China stepping foot into the Western world. When I envision this, I like to picture them with wild, untamed hair and a gleam of irrefutable spirit in their eyes. It is a beautiful way to think of them.

Yet my father was always the one rooted more firmly in American ways. My mother still retained some of her homeland, wrapping it around herself in a protective shawl. She never gave up her mother tongue. Not my father. When I was a child, I remember hearing him mumbling English words under his breath when he read books. He would repeat words over and over until he could pronounce them right.

And yet, when he returned home from the airport that day, he decided to mourn for his father in the same way that our ancestors would have: through the weekly burning of gifts.

My mother explained this to me in the kitchen, hovering over a counter and peeling an orange. “Bao bei, in Chinese culture, when somebody dies, we honour our dead. We help them transition to the afterlife through gifts, gifts like red paper money,” she said, brushing the soft rind aside and pulling the orange in half.

“By burning the gifts, they can reach your grandpa in the afterlife,” she explained.

“Okay,” I said, nodding. “How long are we doing it for?”

“Depends.”

“On what?”

“What your father needs.”

When night fell, we took a metal bowl, gifts, and a lighter to the backyard. To begin our first ceremony, my father took the first sheet of paper money from the bag and flicked on the lighter. The flames licked hungrily at the fibres, beginning at a corner and curling its blackened edges in. He threw the paper into the bowl, and as the flickers of orange and yellow engulfed the sheet, we continued to feed the crackling fire. Soon, floating embers filled the air around us.

I held my breath. I was terrified by the thought that I might accidentally swallow scraps of a world I did not belong to, as if the blackened paper of the afterlife could forever settle like ash in the bottom of my lungs. The stars seemed brighter than they’d ever seemed that night, sprawled across the Illinois sky like pinpricks of heaven shining through black felt. Of course, the stars are bright there every night, but I wanted to believe that there was something special about that night, something given to the memory of my grandfather.

Under the cover of darkness, the glow of the fire illuminated my father’s face. I remember looking at him and seeing silent tears streaming down his cheeks. I wondered who the man before me was. I remember wishing that I could understand his emotions, hold them as if they were my own, if only for just a moment.

I wanted to run my hand over the splinters, feel his raw love for myself. But grief is a quiet activity. It is a singular one. We may all partake in it, but during the ceremony, my experience took a different shape to my father’s, and my mother’s another shape from ours. In the backyard, the single thread holding my family together was our physical existence in that moment. On that night, we were both strangers and family in a single shard of time.

That time came to a close when the last dying flickers of fire extinguished into embers. We were still for a moment, breathing in the grassy Illinois air mixed with grey smoke. My mother broke the quiet, shuffling around and stooping down to pick up the ashes that blew out of the metal bowl. I helped her, touching the crumbling sheets that didn’t survive the trek to the afterlife. And I thought to myself that, down here, it’s just paper. Just burnt ashes. Not a man’s heavenly ticket.

My father just stood there, motionless. When he finally looked at us, his red-rimmed eyes brimmed with an uncaged intensity. He pulled me to him suddenly and hugged me tightly, crushing me against his chest. I could hear his heart thumping. And after he pulled away and walked back inside, I could still feel his tears pooling on the top of my head.

We performed this ceremony for months, following the same patterns from that first night. Slowly, my father began to cry less, sometimes just staring into the fire, the orange and red dancing in his black eyes.

Though I am not a spiritual person, after those nights, I’d like to believe that when the day comes, I will be. That I, too, will be able to find peace in the ashes. Because what I discovered those nights was that our ceremony was an expression of grief and of love, that burning red paper was a cathartic release. It is the symbolism behind the paper and fire, black skies and tradition that brought my father peace and drew my family together.

The ceremonies tapered off slowly. I can’t pinpoint an exact cause for this — appointments cropped up, groceries were needed, rescheduling became postponing. Life got in the way, I suppose, the way it always does.

But no matter what those nights in the backyard meant for us as a family, they were also meant for us alone. For my father’s sake. For remembrance, and celebration, and reconciliation. I believe this to be true. Because, mourning the dead — that is never for the dead’s sake. It is for ours.

My father’s silence finally eased too. Years later, after we made the trek from Illinois to New Jersey, the first conversation we openly had about my grandfather was in the parking lot of the Millburn Deli. It was a particularly stuffy summer day, and my father looked out of the windshield as he spoke, his gaze trailing off to a point beyond my sight.

“He was different from other men,” my father said. “He was kind to my mom. He was good to us.” His voice trembled and he paused, his grip tightening on the paper bag full of sandwiches. “He loved you, you know? You meant everything to him. I just wish he got to see you more. It would’ve made him happy.” He wiped his eyes, clearing his throat as his voice softened.

“He was the kind of man who was the last person off the bus,” he continued. “Do you understand what I’m trying to say? He was always the last person off because he’d wait for everybody first. He was that kind of man. He helped people, he saw the world as a place to be helped. That was your ye ye.” He turned to face me, his clear-eyed vulnerability smoothing the wrinkles on his forehead, reducing the bags underneath his eyes. “That was your grandpa. That was your blood.”

I still grapple with that idea, to this day. Because I’m trying to understand what that means — family, blood, belonging. I’m trying to understand what it means to hurt together, to be a unit that moves together, knows each other, and loves one another. I’m trying to reconcile that with a past that has isolated us, through a pain that is singular, a mourning that is lonely. And I’m still trying to understand why that is and how exactly we can learn to truly know each other and recover. How we can wring the hurt out of our souls.

I do not have these answers, but for now, I can be patient. I will wait until I do. 

And I will grasp what I do have tightly.

I think back to the black night skies and sprawling stars. I can see the thin ribbon of smoke curling toward my grandfather’s ghostly cheek, tempting the moon to try to swallow it whole. But it is the silence that marks it. It is the vacuum of sound that I remember these nights by. It is the profundity of entire fistfuls of grief and love and melancholy that change a person’s character.

It is a portrait of my family that is permanently etched in my mind, of us standing under the heavens and waiting to heal.

“Cyclops, you asked my noble name, and I will tell it; but do you give the stranger’s gift, just as you promised. My name is Nobody. Nobody I am called by mother, father, and by all my comrades.” — Odysseus, The Odyssey

A few weeks ago, my professor, who shall remain nameless, sent a blast email sporting a foreboding subject line. Accompanied by a cheerful ping, the notification read: “DISCLOSURE.” The email in question let the class know that instructors can view when and how much time you spend on Quercus. As my professor aptly noted, it was “a little Big Brother-ish.” And so, in the interest of full disclosure, he decided to let us know, and reassured us that our participation marks would not be affected. He did point out, though, that if we didn’t log into Quercus in a month, he would start worrying that we were not doing our readings.

A few weeks later, I realized that this knowledge did not at all change how I interacted with Quercus. I still obsessively refreshed my course page to see if my midterm mark had finally come out, and I still logged on at the wee hours of the morning to complete the readings that I should have finished earlier. I did not feel like the fact that my professors (and TAs) could view a log of my activity was a big deal. Should I worry about the absence of privacy? Of anonymity?

Let’s back up a little bit.

In order to understand why some people revere anonymity, we need to understand what anonymity actually is. After all, anonymity has many different meanings and uses. It could be a description for a general group, like anonymous sources or authors. It could refer to properties of objects, such as anonymous tips, message boards, or networks. It could even be an action; phrases like ‘anonymous posting’ and ‘incognito browsing’ are thrown around all the time.

Even though the word ‘anonymous’ may invoke a certain image of a hackerman type, sporting a mask and a robe, anonymity is certainly not a new concept. Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), Mary Shelley, Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens), and even Alexander Hamilton all published under pseudonyms or anonymously. There must be some intrinsic value to anonymity for it to have such an impact.

‘Anonymity’ is often used interchangeably with ‘privacy,’ and there is an undeniable connection there. It is, however, imperative to distinguish between the two. Privacy is the ability to keep some things, well, private, regardless of their impact to society. For example, I close the door of the bathroom when I am showering, not because I am planning a massive art heist or a communist revolution, but because I don’t want to expose the world to my off-key shower concerts.

Anonymity, however, is used when you want people to pay attention to what you do, while hiding that it’s you who is doing it. When Edward Snowden leaked the 41 explosive NSA PowerPoint slides, he wanted the findings to be shouted from the rooftops — his name, less so. In fact, he also used a pseudonym, leaking the documents under the name Verax, Latin for truth teller.

So why would so many people choose to embrace anonymity? Well, first, it provides a measure of security. Whistleblowers throughout history have used anonymity as a way to protect themselves, while allowing their messages to spread. Snowden is among the most famous (or infamous, depending on your view), but Mark Felt, also known as Deep Throat, was crucial to revealing the details of the Watergate controversy. Obviously whistleblowers have good reason to maintain anonymity, since the information they want to reveal is often in direct contradiction to the government’s wishes. Anonymity can encourage and protect whistleblowers when they come forward, and the information gained is invaluable. 

Revolutionaries often hide their names as well. Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, arguably some of the twentieth century’s most subversive thinkers, both sported pseudonyms: their real names are Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and Lev Davidovich Bronstein, respectively.

“Common Sense,” a pamphlet published in 1776, which encouraged Americans to revolt against British tyranny, was penned “by an Englishman.” We now, of course, know that the writer was Thomas Paine.

During the Arab Spring, and now in Iran and China, political activists continue to speak out against human rights abuses without fearing for their lives thanks to anonymous, encrypted communication.

Introducing radical new ideas to the public can be dangerous business, but it is vital to a thriving, free society. It’s also worth remembering that well-run democracies hinge on the ability to have anonymous ballots. Thus, anonymity can serve an invaluable social function.

Anonymity is not only important in groundbreaking events. In the medical field, anonymity can be crucial for getting people to accept the help they need. A promise of anonymity when seeking tests for sexually transmitted infections, mental health assistance, or addiction counselling can be the difference between life and death.

Online, anonymity is an often-sought boon. On blogs, message boards, and social media, people straddle the line between complete frankness and absolute privacy. You can find no shortage of weird confessions and fringe communities whose members reveal no identifiable details. Oh, sure, you can read all about oprah_wind_fury’s relationship with their estranged sister, but it’s unlikely that they will disclose their country, gender, or name. This can be a weirdly freeing experience, as people find communities all around the world without fear of repercussions in their everyday life.

For instance, technology has often been dubbed the LGBTQ+ community’s ‘unsung hero’ for its ability to connect people who would otherwise be ostracized by their physical community. The main benefits of anonymity, then, are the protection of privacy and enhancements for liberty and autonomy, which furthers the existence of a free, democratic society and provides alternative communities.

Thing is, though, anonymity has gotten a bad rep lately.

There is a seemingly never-ending slew of threats sent to celebrities and politicians alike on Twitter. Trolls infiltrate communities and sow discord with their messages, some of which is blatantly paid for by foreign governments. Doxxing, or the release of personal information to the public, has been undertaken by hacktivists to target individuals from the Ku Klux Klan to abortion providers, law enforcement, and even the mistakenly identified Boston bomber. 

Social psychologists have described phenomena related to the effects of anonymity within group settings, including group polarization, bystander apathy, and social loafing. There is no better place to see the detrimental effects of online anonymity than 4chan.

4chan is an image-based message platform consisting of various boards, ranging from ones focused on video games (/v/), to the paranormal (/x/), to the infamous “politically incorrect” (/pol/). These are the people responsible for innocent internet trends such as rickrolling and LOLcats, as well as the multiple suicide attempts of an 11-year-old girl and countless fake bomb threats. It has been, perhaps not unjustly, described as “the Wild West of the internet,” “lunatic, juvenile… brilliant, ridiculous and alarming” and “a perpetually angry frothing mob.” This site, which boasts close to 28 million monthly users, has occupied the spotlight in debates over online anonymity.

What makes 4chan different from other social media sites is the virtually perfect anonymity it offers. Users do not need to create an account or pick out a username. Instead, they engage in sometimes innocent (and sometimes not) conversation under a sweeping ‘Anonymous’ nameplate. As opposed to traditional social media, there are no permanent profiles to record user activity — every new post and every new comment stands on its own. This removes any semblance of systemic or social accountability that may exist on other sites, since even the reputation tied to a pseudonym is gone. It also means that you cannot directly establish a relationship with anyone, since there are no permanent identifiers of different users. Thus, 4chan is a decentralized echo chamber, a free marketplace of ideas.

4chan, then, considers personal identity meaningless but collective identity sacred. This is an invitation to create extremely toxic communities over time. The site is a known breeding ground for white supremacists, incels, and literal Nazis.

Look, 4chan is not inherently evil. What it is, though, is a perfect petri-dish example of the hazardous side effects of anonymity online. Perfect anonymity comes with no accountability, but relying on people’s conscience to guide their actions in place of tangible repercussions can be problematic, to say the least.

Now, the anonymity I described so far is all done with the anonymous party’s explicit consent. Using a pseudonym as an author or whistleblower, when seeking medical help, or turning to complete anonymity online are all undertaken directly by the individual. In some instances, however, you may have anonymity thrust upon you unwittingly.

In small communities, anonymity is frankly impossible — everyone knows your name, face, and habits. It is only in large, urban sprawls that you can feel like you are nobody, like just another face in the crowd. In 1903, German philosopher Georg Simmel remarked that “one nowhere feels as lonely and lost as in the metropolitan crowd.” Given that half of the world lives in an urban setting, this loneliness is a growing epidemic.

Students are particularly vulnerable. A study conducted with more than 20,000 urban subjects found that 18–22-year-olds (that’s us, folks!) are the loneliest generation. This sort of detachment is uncomfortably familiar at U of T — many students lament how their first-year courses are as big as their high schools or how difficult it is to find a common space as a commuter.

This, infused with internet anonymity, where plenty of students spend hours scrolling through and drowning in social media, can be greatly detrimental. Feeling anonymous in a crowd, online or otherwise, can make you feel hopeless, scared, or just plain sad.

This loneliness is also a major health problem. It shortens our lives, weakens our immune system, and makes us more susceptible to mental illness. Maybe taking a closer look at feelings of loneliness and anonymity in U of T’s community can be a good first step, where at least 70 per cent of students report feeling overwhelmed, exhausted, or very sad.

From Odysseus’ clever ruse to the latest post on 4chan, anonymity has always been a constant companion — and it’s not going away anytime soon. It is a double-edged sword, but one that can be honed if we are attentive, reflective, and mindful of it. So, no, don’t freak out about your anonymity being stripped away by Quercus, but do if the government ever asks you to put your name on a ballot. If you need to vent anonymously once a month to U of T Confessions, then indulge, but if you start feeling overwhelmed by just how isolating everything is, take a moment to introspect. Anonymity is a tool like any other, and it’s up to us to determine what it will do.