Is pseudonymity the answer?

It depends on who is asking the question, and their societal position.

On February 4, BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos published a story that revealed the names of the founders of the Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) NFT collection. They are Greg Solano and Wylie Aronow. That might provoke a shoulder shrug but it’s actually a high-stakes story that centers on the affordance of ‘pseudonymity’.

The stakes? The prospect of unaccountable corporate power, a new twist on the age-old problem of harassment, and the recognition that how we experience technology depends on our position in society. Let’s dig in.

Blockchains record your transactions on a public ledger. But those transactions aren’t linked to your identity — they are linked to an alphanumeric, private address. Anyone can see your transactions but they don’t know that it is you buying those medications. That’s the idea of pseudonymity.

Crypto enthusiasts see pseudonymity as inherently good. Indeed, one venture capitalist called it a “public good.”

Why do they like it so much? Well, some simply value privacy. Others don’t want the government to be able to identify them. Some want status and attention without accountability. Others just really don't want to pay taxes.

Like any affordance, pseudonymity both enables and constrains. For example, it enables “rug pulls,” where a pseudonymous person creates a project, solicits funds for that project, and then disappears with the funds. Or take the crypto protocol Wonderland — investors trusted gobs of money to the treasury manager, who used the pseudonym 0xSifu to hide their identity. Why? Because they had gone to federal prison for fraud.

Pseudonymity also enables unaccountable corporate power. In her piece, Notopoulos asks “How do you hold them accountable if you don’t know who they are?” It was a rhetorical question but to leave no ambiguity: you can’t. Yuga Labs, the company responsible for BAYC, recently raised $450M at a valuation of $4B. The market capitalization of BAYC alone is $2.8B; their cheapest NFT is going for $150,000. That’s real money! I’m sure the original artist has been paid handsomely — except, BAYC’s unaccountability means:

• Seneca, the artist behind the Bored Apes and a young woman of color, hasn’t been adequately compensated or acknowledged.

• The images themselves also have cultural significance, and in some instances, they have perpetuated racist tropes.

• Yuga Labs was also recently accused of fraud and manipulation in the largest ever non-fungible mint of digital land.

But all this is only part of the story. The other part is about the subsequent harassment of Notopoulos, which closely followed what communications scholar Alice Marwick calls “morally-motivated networked harassment.”

“A member of a social network accuses a target of violating the network’s norms, triggering moral outrage. Network members send harassing messages to the target, reinforcing their adherence to the norm and signaling network membership. Frequently, harassment results in the accused self-censoring and thus regulates speech on social media.”

Notopoulos was accused by high-profile members of Crypto Twitter of violating the social norm of pseudonymity. For example, Jordan Fish (AKA Cobie), an influential crypto personality with 700,000 followers, called Notopoulos “a whore for clicks.” The amplification from Fish removed Notopoulos’s writing from its original context and shoved it right in front of an entirely different audience: Crypto Twitter. Thus the context — as Marwick and sociotechnical researcher danah boyd have written — collapsed.

⚠️ If you follow crypto, you know that it has a toxic masculinity problem. Molly White, software engineer and creator of ‘Web3 is going just great’ said “I've been told on more than a few occasions that it's not okay for me to express my skepticism or opinions.” Laura Shin, crypto journalist and host of the podcast Unchained, has also been the target of threats and harassment.

Pseudonymity was acting as a “symbolic boundary” — a value that creates a moral boundary between groups — in the words of sociologist Michele Lamont. In this context, reinforcing the boundary and participating in the harassment becomes a way, according to Marwick, of “signaling network membership” and “enforcing social order.” For example:

• A number of people sent Notopoulos threatening messages, saying that they were uncovering the addresses of her home and place of work and those of her parents and siblings. (“Your parents [sic] suburbs are not that far away actually,” one person told Notopoulos.)

• Robness, an NFT artist, found a photo of Notopoulos as a young child and turned it into an NFT called "VOTED MOST LIKELY TO BE A FAILED JOURNALIST: KATIE NOTOPOULOS.”

Marwick explains that the justifications for this networked harassment are often “scaffolded through […] reframing efforts that label someone or something immoral.” According to Crypto Twitter, Notopoulos wasn’t doing the work of journalism, she was ‘doxxing’ the founders.

“Morally motivated harassment” reinforces the norms of each group, deepening the divide between them. Targets of harassment may also recoil into self-censorship. But Notopoulos kind of did the opposite, as we see here where she makes fun of whoever minted the image of her as a child.

The question becomes: how difficult is it to connect someone’s identity to their private account? You’d expect that finding Solano and Aronow’s real names would be harder than pulling an old childhood photo, but that was not the case: Notopoulos just used public records. Turns out, Yuga Labs is incorporated in Delaware with an address associated with Greg Solano. Even if you don’t leave a trail of bread crumbs in Web2, though, there are still myriad “chain analysis” tools that are getting better and better at identifying people based only on their on-chain transactions.

What would it look like if we lived our lives more ‘on-chain’ and then were identified through our transactions? Maybe you don’t want your date seeing that your last transaction was to a therapist. I mean, the world would be a better place if we didn’t feel embarrassed about working toward self-understanding and growth, but I get it: vulnerability is hard, and harder still if it’s encoded on a (mostly!) immutable public blockchain for all to see. Or what if the issue at stake wasn’t emotional vulnerability but safety — Molly White imagines a scenario when “An abusive partner could trivially see you siphoning funds to an account they can’t control as you prepare to leave them.” Moreover, if blockchains are immutable, then the past is no longer the past — anyone can be harassed for past transactions because they’re now on-chain.

I think a useful way to conclude would be to tell you about how my graduate students respond to this: with every new class I conduct an exercise where one side of the room has ‘agree’ written on the whiteboard, and the other side has ‘disagree’. I then read a statement, and the students move to the side of the room that reflects their initial position. During the discussion, the students can change their minds and move anywhere along the spectrum. For the last few years, I’ve read the statement, ‘we should allow people to be anonymous online.’ At first, it’s one of the more polarizing statements. Students will say things like, ‘well if you don’t have anything to hide, why do you need to be anonymous’. But invariably, someone will bring up that anonymity can protect a bad actor from accountability. Then someone else will counter that human rights advocates need anonymity to stay safe from persecution in authoritarian contexts. This back and forth eventually leads to a conversation about power, and who has it.

Pseudonymity is not a neutral cover from the world. Whether pseudonymity protects your safety or your power depends on your position in society. Perhaps you benefit from pseudonymity; maybe you use it out of necessity. But when it’s taken away from someone, we must ask: does being more visible reveal their power, or make them vulnerable?