Have you ever watched an episode of The Masked Singer? It’s this musical competition show on Fox that moms love. The premise: a handful of mostly has-been celebrities don fuzzy, elab- orate, surreal-looking costumes that conceal their identities—a wide-eyed frog, a rose-cheeked piglet, the Sun—and perform in front of a panel of judges. While the contestant’s goal is to win the singing competition portion (their identity is only revealed when they are eliminated), the judges and at-home audience have their own, unofficial mission too: use the performance and a handful of clues to figure out who’s belting pop hits from underneath a giant pig head.

Each week as it’s revealed that gasp it’s former child rapper Bow Wow under that frog head or holy shit former boy band idol Nick Lachey donning the pig snout, or oh my freakin’ god LeAnn Rimes was the Sun!?, millions of people care anew about celebrities they haven’t thought about in decades. They might even throw one of their songs on a Spotify playlist, catapulting them back into relevance. So powerful is the allure of mystery.

In 2014, a Newsweek writer claimed to have discovered who created bitcoin, seemingly ending a yearslong head-scratcher that had captivated (and then consumed) people since someone named Satoshi Nakamoto published a whitepaper, “Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” in 2008. Alas, bitcoin gained a foothold in the world, people wanted to know who they were. Were they a scientist, an analyst, a coder, someone who worked in the financial world or an economist? Were they AI? Who is this person who launched bitcoin onto the world (and who, by owning so much bitcoin, at one time, was one of the richest people in the world,) suggesting who the person (or people) behind the name was. The Newsweek reporter identified him as a physicist living in California; after the article was published, journalists camped outside of the guy’s house until, finally, the alleged father of bitcoin wrote a statement denying it, full stop. (In the interview he called it “bitcom,” as proof he was so unfamiliar with what it was.) There are still theories and YouTube videos and Reddit threads offering up other candidates (including Elon Musk). We still really have no idea who is behind that whitepaper and despite that, or partially due to that, bitcoin still remains a cultural and economic force. Nakamoto’s refusal to reveal has given currency, one of the oldest and most familiar things in the world, a new life, cultivating a sense of mystery, subversiveness, and collectivity that traditional economic institutions could never.

There’s power in anonymity. Frank Ocean put it best when he said, “The internet made fame wack and anonymity cool,” and disappeared. It seems unintuitive to wave off getting credit for creating something revolutionary or world-changing or even just cool, but the desire to conceal one’s identity is almost as in- tuitive as the desire to create it. Nakamoto, whoever they are or whatever they are, is following in a long line of artists, writers, performers, and designers who created something and chose to cloak themselves in a shroud of mystery. By looking at those other examples, across disciplines, outside of just bitcoin, there’s insight into what’s gained by refusing to be known.

Not all instincts to obscure one’s identity are noble. (There’s such a thing as “good” anonymity and “bad” anonymity (to get away with a crime), explains John Griffiths, co-author of an essay called “The Renaissance of Anonymity,” “but there are other people who, in the past, may have had opposing political views, and so they had to protect their identity.” He continues, “Perhaps they were the ‘wrong’ sex, race, or social status to speak about such things. Regardless, anonymity gave them the freedom to say what they thought needed to happen to protect society, while protecting themselves from being burnt on a pyre.”

“How can my face be more important than the sound?”

Underground Resistance member
Mike Banks (a.k.a. Mad Mike)

When Voltaire published Candide in 1759, he did so anonymously, so he would be free to ridicule religious structures, governments, armies, and other powerful entities in its pages. Some might consider talking shit about celebrities the modern-day version of this, to bullying and the spread of misinformation if deployed carelessly—but it certainly earns fans. The anonymous celebrity gossip account @deuxmoi has gained a huge following on Instagram by soliciting blind items from its now 2 million followers. We still don’t really know who is breaking all this news (though last year, one journalist made a compelling case that he’d identified the women behind the account) and fans follow along breathlessly.

As a creator, anonymity can take the burden off the individual by creating a sense of a collective voice. Folk music, for example, “implies some kind of collective authorship; it’s composed by the folk,” explains Griffiths. If no one author can be identified, a work becomes easier to share and participate in—and can be attributed to multiple different people at once, even if they don’t actually exist. The English virtual band Gorillaz, for example, were originally two people posing as four. The Blue Man Group has cycled through a number of different players over the years. And who knows how many members comprised the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous group of feminist female artists devoted to fighting sexism and racism within the art world.

“The Guerrilla Girls’ anonymity allowed them to say things that they could not have said without sabotaging their individual careers,” says RJ Rushmore, a writer who focuses on street art, graffiti, and public art. It also gave them supposed power in numbers. “Any woman in the New York art scene in the eighties could have been a Guerrilla Girl—or, maybe not, but you couldn’t prove it, right?”

Fashion designer Martin Margiela has remained anonymous throughout his career, prefers the collective creative process to the cult of the individual. “While working as a team, you push yourself forward and move outside the boundaries; it’s a great thing,” his team once said. Anonymity was the entire brand ethos. Everyone in the Maison Martin Margiela atelier, Margiela himself included, dressed in uniform white lab coats. Models’ identities were also often concealed with face masks and tape, and clothing tags were left blank. “As much as all this rendered him invisible it made his house stand out as anti- fashion,” writes fashion critic Jeremy Lewis. The brand offered an “antidote” to the “conspicuous glamor” of the 1980s in the form of staunch minimalism.

Collective ownership can challenge any corporate enterprise, not just fashion. The members of Underground Resistance, an anonymous musical collective born out of Detroit, Michigan, in the 1990s militantly rejected the commercialization of techno by wearing balaclavas in public, refusing to be photographed, and never licensing their work to labels. “They approached it in a very specific, very strategic way, with an awareness of how the music industry treats Blackness as a commodity,” says Alexander Iadarola, a music writer and UX designer based in Brooklyn. “They tried to go against the grain of music industry exploitation, which is about cult of personality, and instead prioritized this idea of black collectivity and self-determination in the face of racial capitalism.”

In a documentary on the group, Underground Resistance member Mike Banks (a.k.a. Mad Mike) asks the question: “How can my face be more important than the sound?”

“In our society, the face is a commodity”

In our society, the face is a commodity, and so when a public figure decides to withhold it, it can be seen as a radical, almost anticapitalist act. Rather than promote their work, some artists would prefer to let it speak for itself, whatever that means. “I’m still very interested in testifying against the self-promotion obsessively imposed by the media,” says Elena Ferrante, the pseudonymous Italian author. “This demand for self-promotion diminishes the ­ actual work of art, whatever that art may be, and it has become universal. The media simply can’t discuss a work of literature without pointing to some writer-hero. And yet there is no work of literature that is not the fruit of tradition, of many skills, of a sort of collective intelligence.”

The irony, of course, is that Ferrante said all this while promoting her work. Anonymity makes great fodder for conversation. Anonymity often goes a long way to help bolster one’s public image, even if that’s not the rea- son they choose to be anonymous (and it rarely is.)

“By providing less of a scaffolding for people, or less of a story, people can make their own,” adds Rushmore. In this way, anonymity can be a successful form of myth- making, or spectacle. Some might simply call it a PR stunt. For celebrities like Kim Kardashian, who proved with her “anonymous” 2021 Met Gala look that she will always be impossible to miss, it can be an assertion of cultural power. She transcends anonymity. But for others, anonymity becomes the core of what they create. People spend their entire lives and careers trying to figure out who figures like Banksy or Satoshi Nakamoto really are, and are happy to. “The mystery is so much better than whatever the truth is, and I don’t want that ruined because, at this point, anonymity is a part of the art,” says Rushmore.

Would Daft Punk, Deadmau5, or Marshmello have been as famous if they didn’t wear such recognizable masks? Could they have cultivated such an image of “edginess” without them? Stefanie Kiwi Menrath, author of Anonymity Performance in Electronic Pop Music, concludes that “altogether this self-stylisa- tion as ‘radically anonymous’ served as an effective marketing tool for the whole scene—producing an ‘enigma’ of anonymity.”

Anonymity doesn’t just service the person who creates—there’s a benefit for the person who is listening to the song, or reading the novel, or wearing the Tabi shoes, or yes, buying bit- coin. Take the most famous hidden figures in electronic music, a genre that prioritizes the crowd experience (versus pop, which often prioritizes the idolization of the individual artist). By don- ning costumes that make them appear less human, artists like Daft Punk, Deadmau5, Marshmello, Zomby, become mere con- duits for their work. “Looking at robots is not like looking at an idol,” Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, a member of Daft Punk, has said. “It’s not a human being, so it’s more like a mirror—the energy people send to the stage bounces back and everybody has a good time together rather than focusing on us.”

Satoshi Nakamoto has taken a similar approach with bitcoin, which is not owned and operated by a single authority figure, like a bank, but exists rather via a decentralized, collective digital ledger called the blockchain (an approach that could be consid- ered libertarian or anarchist). Iadarola compares Nakamoto’s role within it to the meme of Homer Simpson dissolving into the bushes. “It’s less about the person and more about the network, or this sprawling technical infrastructure,” he says. “Bitcoin is self-sufficient, and beyond a single person’s control. It’s almost animistic—like this energetic horse, or an animated, energetic force that is not human, but resembles aliveness.”

Bitcoin miners keep the blockchain going, but anyone can create a new bitcoin address, or the bitcoin equivalent of a bank account, and no personal information or credit check is required in order to do so. Your bitcoin transactions can be completely anonymous if you want them to be. No one has to know what you’re buying, when you bought it, and how much you paid for it, or your financial history. (Though it is a public ledger, you’re still leaving breadcrumbs, though just harder-to-follow ones.) Bitcoin is not backed by a bank or a government or a country or one single entity. In a world where privacy is increasingly rare—our faces are recognized, our data mined, and our identities frequently stolen—untraceable purchases have immense appeal for the av- erage person, not just criminals. If someone told you that your recent pharmacy run for hemorrhoid cream didn’t have to haunt you for the rest of your life in the form of targeted ads, wouldn’t you be interested, too?

Read the Whitepaper