Moral policing functions as a powerful form of social surveillance, reinforcing the patriarchal & casteist order.
“You know, I’ve deleted my account three times already”, says Riddhi*, a 26-year-old woman from a small town in Bihar, India. “Whenever a tweet goes viral, I either lock my profile or deactivate it altogether. It’s not worth the risk.” Riddhi’s phone is constantly under suspicion from her family, neighbours, and local gossip chains that act as surveillance machinery. But despite this, or perhaps because of it, she chooses to resist through the only space that allows her some freedom: an anonymous Twitter account. Online, she calls out right-wing propaganda, communal hate, casteist violence, and misogynistic content. She writes about topics she can never publicly discuss in her “real” life.
“This digital person I’ve created — she is my anti-real self,” Riddhi says with an emoji smile, “Everything I’ve been forced to swallow in real life because of fear, I write it here, anonymity gives me a voice, a personality that isn’t constantly being told to shut up.”
She is aware that anonymity is never absolute. “We all know the government can track us down if they really want to. No one is truly anonymous in the data governance world.” But for women like her, “big brother is watching you” doesn’t begin with the state — it starts at home. “We’re not scared of the government first. We’re hiding from our fathers, brothers, uncles, local netas (politicians) and goons. From the men who think our phones are weapons of dishonour.”
Anonymity does more than offer women and other marginalized groups a space to speak, express anger, and assert agency. Online anonymity also challenges dominant data governance models and biopolitical filtration practices employed by both the state and corporate entities to monitor and control populations.
In a country where women are not allowed to have a phone of their own, Riddhi’s story is not an exception. Instead, it reflects the broader experiences of countless women living under layers of social and state surveillance. For many, there is no easy escape from this constant monitoring. Women have been historically denied access to basic education and fundamental rights. Their bodies have long been scrutinized in the name of morality. Such a structure ties women’s bodies to the honour of the community and demands control over bodies that might disrupt the hierarchy between the privileged and the marginalized. Moral policing functions as a powerful form of social surveillance, reinforcing the patriarchal & casteist order.
Feminist scholar Sadie Plant argued in 1996 that patriarchy is not just a system of rules or power. Instead, it functions more like a “speculative economy” where women are treated as commodities, exchanged between men through practices such as marriage or inheritance. This system monopolizes the meaning of “feminine,” entrapping women in fixed roles and ensuring both women and the media uphold male dominance. That is why the patriarchal mindset demands control over women and other marginalised bodies in physical as well as virtual spaces. For any unequal structure to survive, sustained surveillance is not just useful—it is essential.
Cases of online harassment against women continue to rise. In 2023, in India, several marginalized women journalists, writers, and public speakers who spoke out against government policies were targeted in a disturbing incident: their real names and photos were uploaded without consent onto an app called Bulli Bai, where their images were “auctioned” as a form of digital hate and humiliation.
Not just in India, but across the world, recent trends show that as the space for dissent continues to shrink, anonymity is increasingly becoming a necessity rather than a choice. Understanding the condition of global dissenters helps us see how online anonymity has emerged as a vital strategy for resistance and survival . Pro-Palestinian student demonstrators across U.S. campuses, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia, began wearing masks and masks over keffiyehs, though some were later deported. A New York Times feature titled “In an Online World, a New Generation of Protesters Chooses Anonymity” highlights how fears of doxxing, visa revocation, or deportation drove students, especially international ones at Cambridge University, to obscure their identities. Zimbabwe has seen a rise in state surveillance, with widespread deployment of CCTV cameras by police and local authorities, sparking concerns of abuse against dissenters.
Despite this, protestors are finding alternative ways to demonstrate, with online anonymity offering a needed sense of safety. As one protester said, “ I feel safe online because I don’t use my real name, and there are many like me on platforms like Twitter, fighting the regime’s corruption and violence against the opposition.” Many women in Iran who are resisting the compulsory hijab and state-sponsored surveillance on their autonomy are now turning to various forms of virtual protest. These include organizing through anonymous Telegram groups, using encrypted messaging apps, and employing digital safety measures like VPNs to evade state detection. Online anonymity has become a critical tool for expressing dissent without facing immediate retaliation.
In India, a 2020 report indicated that nearly 28% of internet users prefer to interact anonymously online. This preference is driven not just by concerns over privacy, but also by the freedom it provides, particularly for those navigating oppressive gender norms, caste-based discrimination, or political sensitivities. For many women and marginalized communities, anonymity allows for safer participation in digital discourse, activism, and solidarity movements.
Anonymity is not a recent trend; it has long been central to political resistance and social movements across the globe. During the Arab Spring, protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and Syria relied on anonymous social media accounts, VPNs, and encrypted platforms to organize mass uprisings while evading authoritarian surveillance. In the MeToo movement, particularly in India, survivors of sexual harassment used anonymous platforms to share their stories safely, avoiding social ostracism. The Guerrilla Girls, a collective of feminist artists active since 1985, have famously worn gorilla masks and adopted pseudonyms to expose gender and racial inequalities in the art world, ensuring their work remains focused on the message rather than individual identities.
Anonymity as Resistance against Surveillance Capitalism
Anonymity does more than offer women and other marginalized groups a space to speak, express anger, and assert agency. Online anonymity also challenges dominant data governance models and biopolitical filtration practices employed by both the state and corporate entities to monitor and control populations.
In today’s digital world, our personal data is constantly being collected and used, not just by governments for surveillance, but also by companies for advertising and profit. Thinkers like Tiqqun say that these two forces, publicity and policing, work together to make people visible and easier to control. Deleuze explains that we now live in a “control society,” where corporations, not just governments, are in charge of how people are managed. Big tech companies like Google and Facebook turn people into data profiles, or what Deleuze calls “dividuals”—not full human beings, but collections of data points used for targeting and prediction. Often, people give this data away freely while using apps or browsing online, without realizing that even our “free time” creates value for corporations.
Most internet-based movements have, over time, been absorbed into the logic of late-stage capitalism. As Fredric Jameson argues, their visibility and popularity (which often accompany online movements, through names, faces, and viral moments) make them easily commodifiable, allowing capitalism to co-opt movement rhetoric while stripping away their revolutionary core. Visibility becomes a double-edged sword: it garners attention but makes resistance legible, marketable, and ultimately governable. In contrast, anti-identification strategies have become powerful tools for resisting state control, protecting against both the exploitation of identity and the commodification of personal data.
As Adam Morris explains, paraphrasing Tiqqun, “a form of resistance to the state is to eliminate its access to its economic subject by scrambling its ability to identify, categorize, or locate that subject.” The politicization of non-existence, through invisibility, pseudonymity, and anonymity, emerges as a deliberate tactic to resist incorporation into state and corporate systems of surveillance and control. In this context, anonymity is not just a protective mechanism but a political tool, a way to resist classification, disrupt data extraction, and reclaim agency through a refusal to be recognized, categorized, or instrumentalized within the logic of surveillance capitalism. Anonymity offers a mode of resistance that remains outside the spectacle and unassimilated by neoliberal frameworks.
Drawing on Giorgio Agamben, we see how the state cannot tolerate forms of community that do not affirm a shared, visible identity. What threatens the state is not resistance through representation, but belonging without recognition. People coming together outside of systems of classification like caste, religion, gender, and country undermine state control over the collective consciousness. As Agamben puts it, a being “radically devoid of any representable identity” becomes irrelevant to the state, and therefore, deeply subversive.
An online identity is certainly traceable, but the very act of refusing to become an “economic subject”, constantly profiled, targeted, and monetized by corporations on which the state increasingly relies, is a meaningful form of resistance. Online anonymity challenges this system by disrupting the identification, tracking, and classification at the root of its control. Morris cites Tiqqun’s poetic text “How is it to be done”?
Learn to become indiscernible.
Blend in.
Revive the taste for anonymity,
for promiscuity.
Renounce distinction in order to evade repression:
arrange for the most favorable conditions of confrontation.
Become crafty.
Become pitiless.
To do so, become whatever.
“Become whatever” — exactly what Riddhi chooses to be, an anti-real identity, a non-existent identity, one that belongs to a cause without being confined by any fixed label. In doing so, she resists not only social surveillance but also the state and corporate-led mechanisms of control that seek to monitor, classify, and profit from her presence.
Disclaimer:
- Names have been changed to protect the identity of individuals.
- It’s important to recognize that anonymity should not be equated with trolling or faceless abuse. In fact, many trolls derive their power from dominant ideologies, patriarchy, casteism, racism, and often feel emboldened enough to harass others even under their real names. Anonymity, by contrast, is frequently a tool of the marginalized, offering protection, agency, and a space to speak or resist without fear of retaliation.
