The Faces and Masks of Anonymity
Associate Professor Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli, UC Davis
Anonymity is considered synonymous with a democratic society, but in the age of ubiquitous computing and social media individual privacy and government and corporate secrecy has been rendered almost impossible to sustain. My goal is to question the zero-sum game logic that contrasts concerns with democracy, privacy and free speech with those for security and control, by analyzing two approaches to collective anonymity— one practiced and sanctioned by advocates of security first, the other by hacker groups like anonymous.
Instead of rushing to accept the need to compromise one’s freedom form one’s security (and thus engage in discussions about what should be the proper balance between democracy and security, or sustainable costs of such a balance) I confront the assumptions behind that seemingly unavoidable quid pro quo, and its empirical applicability to contemporary scenarios. The trade-off between democracy and security has been the centerpiece of traditional political justifications of surveillance, but does it provide the right framework to understand the intricate new scenarios emerging at the intersection among new technologies, mobility and connectivity, global capital, and new forms of subjectivity and citizenship? In other words, is this trade-off between security and democracy part of the problem or the solution?
Associate Professor Kriss Ravetto-Biagioli is a film and media scholar whose work focuses on representations and theorizations of violence in film, media, and social media. She has worked on the question of nation building, ethnocentrism and sexual violence in the Balkans and Eastern Europe; Nazism, Fascism and the Holocaust; Surveillance and social media; Digital art and experimental cinema and the uncanny; and the emergence of new forms of politics through social media. This research has resulted in /The Unmaking of Fascist Aesthetics/ (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001), ISBN: 13: 978-0-8166-3743-0, and /Mythopoetic Cinema: Cinema on the Margins of Europe/ (Columbia University Press, 2017). She is currently working on a new book project entitled Digital Uncanny that examines how digital technologies, particularly software systems working through massive amount of data, are transforming the meaning of the uncanny that Freud tied to a return of repressed memories, desires, and experiences to their anticipation.
She has published articles on film, performance, installation art, new media, and the hacker group Anonymous in Camera Obscura, Film Quarterly, LEA, PAJ, Representations, Screen, The International Social Science Journal, Third Text and numerous collected volumes. She is the coeditor with Professor Martine Begneut of the Edinburgh University Press series in Film and Intermediality. Her interest in the “digital uncanny” and the culture of surveillance has inspired Recoded, the large international conference on the politics and landscapes of new media, and Figures of the Visceral and Gaming the Game. She is co-organizing the Mellon initiative in Digital Culture with Professor Colin Milburn (English and STS), co-organizer with Anupam Chander the Mellon Sawyer Seminar on Surveillance and Democracy is a core researcher on the IMMERSe and IFHA projects.