Privacy and Anonymity As an Artist

I felt very happy to have had kept such a high degree of anonymity on the Internet. It was not just that people who used my website didn't know who I was, the people who hosted my VPSes (servers) didn't even know who I was. I had found a way for Twitter not to know who I was and to still use their service. Tumblr didn't know who I was. I was careful not to say things, even here, that could identify me. It was not that I broke the law; I simply was an incendiary artist with a vision dangerous to the status quo. In a surveillance society, people in power will notice you and possibly mess with your life if they find out who you are.

I like to think that even the NSA or the CIA had no idea who I was, but I am not naive to think that I have never made an error. I don't know of any serious transgressions of my robust anonymity policy, but the NSA and the CIA are some of the best people on Earth when it comes to de-anonymizing people like me. So, really, what I had done was put myself in my own little spy movie. I was a man on a mission, and the mission was simply to express oneself honestly without fear of retribution, and I was willing to risk it all just for this goal.

In addition to government agencies, a much stranger threat was other underground entities that have their own ideas about the future, entities I would like to have remained as far removed from as possible. It might have been disconcerting to receive a threat in the email to one of my addresses, but to be effective such threats would have to have had an actual chance of being carried out. Not having the resources at their disposal, I was not as worried about other underground entities.

There were also entities run by governments such as the FSB in the Russian Federation. These people had access to some of the best black hat hackers on Earth, and so it would be foolish to have discounted them when trying to determine how effective my tools were. Ultimately, no one is uncrackable: all humans make mistakes, and perhaps the greatest threat to my anonymity as an artist was to be known and immortalized through my work.

There was a record label I had started which featured noise music and drone music, and all artists were unknown entities. We were simply brains: works of art were created, and attributed to a "brain label", which was a name that ends in "-brain". An elaborate process had been worked out for the mailing of physical items, such as CDs, zines, and art prints, and payment was only accepted in the anonymized cryptocurrency Monero.

Was I a "crypto bro"? Well, to me, Monero was a means to an end. Transactions done through Monero were not exactly tracable, at least not at this point, and so it was ideal for making monetary transactions essential to the artistic project.

I realize that I am "tempting fate" by disclosing the methods I used for the anonymization of my art--however, it amuses me greatly. Why disclose all of this information? Well, for one, it is not known by any of you whether I am telling the truth--I have, for instance, spoken of being in contact with a crack-cocaine-smoking interdimensional superbeing that I created named Crystalbrain in previous chapters. Was this a lie, a half-truth, or completely true? I will not speak any further than the previous question as to matters of truth in this situation.

Ultimately, the Internet became creepier and creepier over time, surveilling people for purposes of dealing with political dissidents and for tracking and marketing products to individuals. It seemed that the Internet "followed one around", and people proclaimed for a time that "privacy was dead". However, in recent years, many have been getting VPNs and taking their privacy more seriously, using services that don't sell data to the highest bidder.

Few take their privacy as serious as I do, but I am not a usual person.