1 Is There Such a Thing as a Permanently Anonymous Act?

Ira Cohen (2015) observes that even when actors are alone and exempt from the Parsonian “double contingency of interaction”, forms of “delayed monitoring” could eventually assess the results of solitary behavior (p. 78). Acting solo, of course, does not mean acting secretly, still less anonymously. I wrote the last sentence alone, but I’m fully accountable for it, nonetheless. This is less banal if hyperbolically extended, considering the substantial resources that Omnipotence and Omniscience can offer. Abrahamic religions share the belief in the Last Judgment, when an undeceivable audience will evaluate everything done in the history of humanity, so that “each and every act has to be seen to lie adjacent to the final moment of time”, as though “unprotected” (Fisher, 2002, p. 105); a persistent religious motif, anticipated by the Egyptian “Weighing of the Heart” and the Greek kerostasia, differences notwithstanding. Other than the typical do-the-right-thing-even-when-no-one-is-watching attitude, this opens up several possibilities: from cynical wagers à la Pascal to heartfelt daily prayers, from Simony to the desperate search for signs of blessed predestination (but see Riesebrodt, 2010).² It can be weaponized against believers, as epitomized in the first republican Italian parliamentary election of 1948 by the humorist Giovannino Guareschi, who crafted for the Christian Democracy party this anti-communist slogan: “In the secrecy of the voting booth, God sees you, Stalin doesn’t!” It can surreptitiously influence behavior in general: anonymous economic games are played in prosocial ways when concepts of God and the assumption of omnipresent supernatural agents are introduced (see Shariff & Norenzayan, 2007). It can, in sum, make the idea itself of hidden identities a chimera: there’s always an audience that nails (or will nail) us down.

Two additional elements to factor in: (1) Acknowledging the Durkheimian dictum that “Society is God” and anchoring the dynamics to societal expectations (Freud’s superego, Mead’s generalized other, etc.), the pressure intensifies — it concerns both believers and non-believers. For example, the sheer prospect of future exposure restrains even one’s most private (viz., undiscoverable) acts, as perfectly rendered in fiction by Thomas Mann while portraying the relationship between Hans Castorp and Pribislav Hippe (Mann, 1972[1924], pp. 118–128) and studied at length by Erving Goffman (1959). By the same token, the success of censorship also lies in instilling preemptive self-censorship, regardless of how much thought expression is shielded by anonymity.³ (2) DeGloma specifies (2023, pp. 16 ff.) that anonymity cannot be reduced to mere secret, privacy or confidentiality. Anonymity always entails some partial publicity (“controlled exhibitionism”), since it’s about acting openly while blocking audiences from linking actions to personal identities. So, what DeGloma (2023, pp. 16 ff.) calls “the risk of unwanted divulgence — of revealing too much in the process of acting the anonymous role” is ubiquitous. To echo Fine’s (2003) perspective, “as we realize from the strings and trip-wires of social control, actors are embedded, and actions — even seemingly secluded, concealed ones — can be channeled and checked” (p. 654).

Take Alcoholics Anonymous, obviously a recurring example in Anonymous. Doing the 5^th step (“Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs”) and confessing to others what they have been ashamed to confess to themselves, AAs can face the necessity to produce half-confessions, weighing the details they provide and ultimately being reluctant to engage in sincere parrhesia (see Jensen 2000, pp. 105–107). Those with much to lose (e.g., VIPs like politicians) cannot trust the protective space offered by standard AA meetings.⁴ After all, confession par excellence, i.e., the Sacrament of Penance, has been historically used as an impression management tool too (Zampieri, 2024); the very first novella of Boccaccio’s Decameron tells the story of a wicked character (Cepparello, “the worst man ever born”) who, on his deathbed, tricks a holy friar with a false confession, ending up venerated as a saint (see Almansi, 1975, pp. 24 ff.). My point is that hidden identities, because of the more or less conscious feeling they won’t remain so, can be performed as though they are not really anonymous in the first place.⁵ Reading internal documents of the Red Brigades written during their militancy and clandestinity (see Re, 2020), the texts seem to anticipate their own eventual disclosure — one could argue that they were crafted with a view to possible future dissemination from the outset. Also, as DeGloma (2023, p. 189) notes regarding phone calls, anonymizing tools and techniques are obsolescent: what guarantees anonymity today may be ineffective tomorrow. Declassification of state records is just another illustrative case among many.

This leads to the traces left behind while acting anonymously. For example, in my experience, the break of anonymity in the peer-review system is less about questions of hermeneutics (interpreting the expressions of strong opinions or the reference to published papers, as noted by DeGloma, 2023, p. 16) and more about the simple fact that authors’ names are too often unremoved from the document properties (be it PDF, Doc or other file formats). Generally speaking, to handle these traces is not necessary to imagine a totalitarian, Orwellian society of control. Centralized real-time control systems seem unmanageable and unrealistic, but a surveillant assemblage (multiple, scattered, and overlapping: Haggerty & Ericson, 2000) is enough to operate when needed.⁶ Consider the affair of Elena Ferrante, a story (ironically enough, more newsworthy in the US than in Italy) that DeGloma carefully examined. The investigative Italian journalist, based in the US, Claudio Gatti essentially followed the money. He pinned down (to me, beyond any reasonable doubt) the couple Anita Raja and Domenico Starnone because of bank payments and real estate transaction traces. Raja and Starnone bought multiple, astronomical properties in the early 2000, thanks to astronomical paychecks from the (fairly small, back then) Italian publishing house of Elena Ferrante; their work as translators did not justify such compensation.

The “delayed monitoring”, to have it with Cohen, took place some 15 years later — when a full-scale investigation about the whole case was sensational enough to be contemporaneously aired in four different nations.⁷ And the delayed monitoring can amount to a death sentence: it is true (as DeGloma observes en passant [2023, p. 35]) that pentiti and Mafia cooperating witnesses receive new pseudonymous identities via state protection programs, but it is also true that these measures often fall short against the thirst for revenge and the far-reaching networks of mafia organizations. Put differently, the traces connecting them to their previous identities are stronger than the state-issued alias.⁸ My point here is that there’s hardly any covered identity, only insufficient resources (or power) and interest (or willingness) to uncover it. When the CIA is involved, for example, the delayed monitoring can occur surprisingly quickly, no matter how resourceful the anonymous performers may be (e.g., a highly politicized and motivated group of scientists: see Turchetti, 2024). In Murakami’s 1Q84, the protagonist defends herself against the supernatural beings of “Little People” (a riff off of 1984’s Big Brother) by not letting her feelings and thoughts out of her heart (Murakami, 2011[2009], p. 319); Little People cannot go that deep. But anonymity is not secrecy, and to sustain anonymous performances things must go out of one’s heart: the production of traces that associate actions to identities is ineluctable. This contributes to making sense of DeGloma’s conclusions, according to which “anonymity and pseudonymity are increasingly precarious and even impossible to guarantee, yet simultaneously more common” (2023, p. 169). Arguably, the ongoing performance of pseudonymous authors and their enduring allure (to my knowledge, the last one is the bestselling Japanese novelist-and-performer Uketsu)⁹ is fueled in part by the irresistible, and likely profitable, game of trying to investigate and identify the person behind the cover. Literally irresistible: who is hiding their identity may well have something juicy to hide.

Now, I move on to the flip side of the ideal-type I started with: the case of transcendent agents operating always undercover.

2 Weber between Dostoevskian Heroes and God’s Real Name

In the short novel Three Versions of Judas, Borges presents a theological heresy (a “Christological fantasy”) through Nils Runeberg, a fictional Swedish modern-day gnostic scholar. Runeberg goes so far as to trace God’s real, unfathomable name (thus unveiling His/Her/Their actual identity) back to the infamous apostle Judas Iscariot. Moved by “a hyperbolic, even limitless asceticism”, Judas “renounced honor, goodness, peace, the kingdom of heaven, as others, less heroically, renounce pleasure”. He “labored with titanic humility; he believed himself unworthy of being good” (Borges, 1999[1944], p. 165). If virtue “is a near impiety” (ibidem), this is because of the sins engendered by its public attribution to the virtuous — pride, vanity, longing for external validation, hypocrisy. The third of the versions mentioned by Borges in the title is the most shocking: Judas is the pseudonym of God (see also Walsh, 2016).

A quite interesting feature of Anonymous is how DeGloma is careful in stating that anonymous acts are not necessarily so for everyone.¹⁰ In this sense, part of the reward of doing good acts (such as charity) anonymously is that a small audience can doubly gratify the big-hearted donor. That is, these performances are not completely anonymous: “Many anonymous philanthropists are known to be the person behind the act by friends, family, associates, or others in their closest networks, which likely boosts their reputations among those in their close social circles, not only because of their generosity, but also specifically because they shirked public recognition” (DeGloma, 2023, pp. 45–46). But what about complete unrecognition (as Borges’ God hiding behind the most despicable of the pseudonyms) or, to use the expression I employed to refer to supernatural examples, “impossible identification?” This is a central theme in the famous Dostoevskian tale of the Grand Inquisitor, a story (perhaps too well-known to bear repeating) in which Jesus Christ returns to Earth, in 16th-century Seville, and confronts the elderly Cardinal who oversees the Spanish Inquisition. Here, I just focus on how the old Inquisitor accepts a hideous destiny to save the many, unbothered by the stigma that publicly marks his identity: “For only we, we who keep the mystery, only we shall be unhappy” (Dostoevsky, 2021[1880], p. 276). Indeed, the topos of agents who deliberately stay anonymous to take the blame and forgo recognition, even facilitating the public’s misassignment of both, is essentially Dostoevskian.

In June 1880, at the inauguration of a monument to Pushkin in Moscow, Turgenev and Dostoevsky (who was just finishing the Karamazov) were chosen to deliver the commemorative speeches. Turgenev offered a sober and respectful portrait of the author of Boris Godunov and Eugene Onegin. But for Dostoevsky, that was the greatest public success of his career — a moment in which he articulated the ideal of a peculiar form of heroism, which he saw as distinctly Russian and fully embodied by Pushkin, one that embraces suffering and misfortune not only without seeking recognition but accepting that everyone will be misjudged (see Ritter, 2004, pp. 52 ff.). To Dostoevsky, a “pure Russian soul”, as the ones portrayed by Pushkin, would not hesitate, acting this way “even if I alone am deprived of happiness [and] even if no one […] ever learns of my sacrifice or appreciates it” (Dostoevsky, 1988[1880], p. 62). Forms of heroism that go totally unrecognized or, even worse, are misascribed and miscredited, reemerge time and again in Dostoevsky’s narrative, in his diary (see Dostoevsky, 1994[1877–1881], p. 823) and elsewhere. For example, Alessandro Pizzorno (on whom more later) pointed out how “Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground is the most compelling literary depiction of situations in which humiliation is embraced as a form of salvation from the refusal of recognition” (Pizzorno, 2023, p. 262).

The intellectual influence of Dostoevsky on Weber has often been brought up (see, for example, Honigsheim, 2000[1946]; Turner, 1999; Suzuki, 2003; Westerman, 2019; Kemple, 2020). We know that Dostoevsky was always debated during the regular meetings of Weber’s circle in prewar Heidelberg: “I don’t remember a single Sunday conversation in which the name of Dostoevsky did not occur” (Honigsheim, 2000[1946], p. 207). We also know that precisely the Grand Inquisitor is cited in Politik als Beruf. After presenting the polarity between Gesinnungsethik v. Verantwortungsethik, Weber remarks: “Those of you who know Dostoevsky will remember the scene of the ‘Grand Inquisitor’, where the problem is poignantly unfolded” (Weber, 1946[1919], p. 122). Orthogonal to the famous dichotomy conviction v. responsibility, there is another opposition that runs through Weber’s essay. The inadequate politician (a pitiful “parvenu-like braggart”) performs for the public eye, “concerned merely with the ‘impression’ he makes” and tempted to “strive for the glamorous semblance of power”, ultimately hostage to “the vain self-reflection in the feeling of power” (ivi, p. 116). In stark contrast, the genuine politician who has the “calling for politics” must be a “hero”, and “in a very sober sense of the word”: by avoiding “sterile excitation”, making sure that the responsibility for the consequences falls on him/her and not the others whom s/he serves, and having fully realized what s/he is taking upon her/himself (ivi, pp. 127–128). In a way, with some interpretive license, the true political figure is the one who accepts a sort of malevolent pseudonymous identity if that’s what it takes to bring about politically far-sighted outcomes. Weberian responsibility is also the responsibility of eschewing credit, even if this means getting (so to speak) “unfairly pseudonymized”.

Needless to say, this is not intended as a conclusive account of Politik als Beruf, though it is significant how Weber, in that context, also alludes to the view of the “deus absconditus”, the hidden God (ivi, p. 123). Rather, the point is that to the indecipherability of the first link of chains of power, of the authorship of rectors’ rector (I’m adopting the terminology of Reed, 2020), one should add the possibility that such indecipherability is deliberately preserved. And this, not in the sense of the ruthless “boss” who “works in the dark” to seek “power alone, power as a source of money, power for power’s sake” (Weber, 1946[1919], pp. 109ff.), but to keep at bay “vanity”, the enabler of the “deadly sins in the field of politics” (ivi, p. 116). In other words, “constantly in danger of becoming an actor” (ibidem), the figures with the calling for politics should not let their perceived identity jeopardize their real objectives (substantive purpose, forward-looking consideration of consequences, etc.). A performance that should not be seen as such — hence the unrecognition, hence the heroism.

3 How Will They React?, or: How Will I Be Recognized? In Lieu of a Conclusion

I assumed two ideal-typical, extreme scenarios: impossible anonymity (i.e., the eventual, technically inevitable possibility of being identified) and impossible identification (i.e., personalizing the source of certain forms of ultimate authorities). These themes are theological in character — the former intertwined with the question of salvation, the latter with the question of theodicy.¹¹ However, I leveraged them sociologically; that is, in terms of their earthly ramifications and implications for social behavior (whether inspired by faith or not). This was framed to highlight how these cases, although radical, are not disruptive, and basically support DeGloma’s emphasis on the import of the relationship identity-actions. If this relationship remains crucial, it is because the role of the audience, what Taylor (2022) calls “audience agency”, remains crucial. (Even more so, when the attempt is to efface the concept of audience itself, as with Dostoevskian/Weberian heroes). I would argue that anonymity is woven into the category of reaction, how social action is shaped by someone else’s previous or envisioned response to that action (see Brighenti & Sabetta, 2024 & 2025). The process of taking into account the behavior of others and being thereby oriented is continuous. To Weber, this is what makes social action social.¹² In this sense, if reactions are inherently open to nonlinearity, escalation, and fallout (basically, they create unpredictability), the performance of anonymous actions serves to channel others’ replies; it is a reaction-shaper. Without eliminating unintended consequences, anonymity represents, however, an attempt to stay one step ahead of one’s public.

Speaking of the public, audience, and other receivers of our actions, it is worth adding a specification in line with Gary Alan Fine’s call for a “tribal sociology”. His proposal is that “we care about our audience, but not in the amorphous and astructural way suggested by Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), a caring, apparently, for everyone and no one” (Fine, 2003, p. 655). Fine contends (ivi, p. 664) that the interaction order “depends in ample measure on the modest reality that people share their lives”, since the level on which interaction happens is miniaturist and small-scale: dyads, families, inner circles, or niche groups (“tribes”). Mostly, “people matter to their partners” (ibidem). Hence, to mobilize once again an example from the world of letters, consider the case of the two major recluses of postwar U.S. literature — J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon. Their general reception owes much to their withdrawn lives.¹³ However, arguably the individuals most influenced by that performance of (quasi-)anonymity have been those closest to them. That is, those who actually came to know their true identity, either due to circumstances (e.g., living under the same roof) or by choice (e.g., a privilege granted by the normally invisible author). A list of scattered examples: (a) Pynchon’s wife, Melanie Jackson, is his agent and is responsible for handling business negotiations, made especially difficult by her husband’s obscure identity; (b) Pynchon’s exceedingly rare public appearances have often been motivated by the desire to please his son, Jackson: Pynchon voiced himself twice on The Simpsons (his face hidden by a paper bag with a question mark on it) because Jackson was such a fan of the show; also, in 1999 he wrote a short piece, “Hallowe’en? Over Already?”, for Jackson’s school’s newsletter; (c) Salinger’s son, Matt, was assigned by his father the duty of transcribing all his unpublished materials (which is now a full-time job for him); (d) Salinger had several affairs with young female fans, initially drawn in by an “absolutely captivating letter, composed in a voice they recognized as that of Holden Caulfield”.¹⁴

Against this backdrop, it is appropriate to conclude by recalling Alessandro Pizzorno’s lesson on the parallel concepts of “recognition and reception” (see Sassatelli, 2019). His work on the mask, “a metaphor of recognition received or as declination of an identity that is being constructed” (Sassatelli & Pizzorno, 2019, p. 47), “a moment in the function of appearing and of revealing” (Pizzorno, 2010, p. 17), stresses “the essence of the mask in its relation to others” (ivi, p. 24). This resonates with the position of DeGloma and Gary Marx (1999, p. 100): “fundamentally social”, anonymity “requires an audience of at least one person”. Following Pizzorno, the step forward is concentrating on what the audience made of the performance: since “the meaning of an expression or an action is not simply determined by what the speaker has in mind, but rather by the responses it receives from the community within which it is manifested”, sociologists should “give priority to reception in reconstructing to social meaning of acting” (Pizzorno, 2007, pp. 114–115). In this paper, I tried to reflect on how the anticipation of such reception (either immediate or posthumous, certain or hypothetical, favorable or hostile, delusional or strategic, small- or large-scale) informs social action from its very inception. But I’m not sure I pulled it off — perhaps I should have published this paper anonymously.