On the Internet, No One Knows You're a Sock Puppet
From Dogs to “sock puppets:” anonymity reveals its power to empower voices—or unleash chaos.
In July 1993, cartoonist Peter Steiner submitted a batch of new drawings to the New Yorker. “I submitted it without thinking it was even the best cartoon in the batch,” he would tell the Washington Post 20 years later.
You’ve seen that cartoon, as it has spawned its own sub-memes for decades. It presented a dog, sitting on a chair, in front of a desktop computer. Next to him, another dog is on the floor, looking up and listing. Below the cartoon comes the line that would memorialize it, making it the most reproduced cartoon in The New Yorker’s history:
“On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”
In the days before tracking became standard, the internet provided a veil of anonymity, creating both opportunities and threats at the same time.
Anonymity and Morality
Anonymity, the ability to operate without being identified by name, did not spring up with the Internet. As early as 380 BC, Plato tied it to questions of morality, setting up the baseline for Lord of the Rings.
Plato’s “Myth of the Ring of Gyges” organizing concept centered on a magical ring making its wearer invisible. In it, Plato question how the wearer can resist the temptation of doing evil things (killing, stealing, and worse) if he cannot be detected. Socrates answers that the power of the ring itself is a trap, enslaving the wearer to give in to his basest instincts (Tolkien or H.G. Wells’ readers will recognize the plot line.)
Ancient Greek philosopher may have concepts but no one tested the theory until the 20th century. Phillip Zimbardo, a Stanford researcher, probed the link between anonymity and abusive behavior before his infamous “prison experiment.” Experimenting with students, and later with the military, Zimbardo demonstrated how stripping people of names (and replacing them with numbers) led to individuals administering electric shocks to other participants.
“Any situation that makes you anonymous and gives you permission for aggression will bring out the beast in most people… You minimize social responsibility. Nobody knows who you are, therefore you are not individually liable,” Zimbardo would later remark.
Zimbardo’s experiments showed an increase in aggressive behavior as a result of anonymity. “There’s a group effect when all of you are masked. It provides a fear in other people because they can’t see you, and you lose your humanity.”
The positive side of anonymity
While that lack of humanity had been tested in Zimbardo’s experiments, anonymity also presented some upsides. The great pamphleteers of the American Revolution published their work anonymously so people would focus on ideas instead of authors.
When Martin Luther posted his 95 theses denouncing abuses by the Catholic church and heralding a new era in religion, he did so anonymously.
Common Sense and The Federalist Papers not only allowed their author to present different ideas under the veil of anonymity but also became fundamental to establishing the foundational concepts for what would later become the United States of America. In a time of repression and political oppression, anonymity provided a path for new ideas without a fear of retribution.
Mary Shelley first published Frankenstein anonymously so the work would be judged on its own merit instead of being treated as insignificant because of her gender. The Brontë sisters did the same for Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. Those works would not have seen the light of day in a male-dominated culture had it not been for the ability to provide a veil of obscurity for their authors.
In the 20th century (and now), groups like Alcoholic Anonymous shielded people looking for help when the exposure of their membership may be read as an admission of failure rather than an attempt to seek help. As public support for recovery increased, the organization highlighted the need for anonymity in its community as an equalizer among members.
But up until the end of the 20th century, anonymity had been reserved to small groups. True anonymity, at scale, did not exist. But then, the internet happened.
Anonymity and the Internet
A lack of anonymity dominated the early days of the proto-internet. Email addresses served as de-facto identity market, with context as to your identity and the organization you belonged to: name@location. Social convention dictated the @ sign being preceded by a name (either first or first and last) and followed by an organization. For example, if you read the address tristan@gibbs.unc.edu (an early email address of mine), you were able to infer my name (Tristan) and some linkage to the University of North Carolina (unc.edu). Your email address worked as a set of breadcrumbs connecting identity and organizations.
A 1986 paper from the RAND institute about ethics and etiquette in email noted that while anonymity may arise as a result of such scheme, “the anonymity factor does not appear to be an important one” in electronic communication. We all know things took a different turn.
As the internet graduated from a community of academics and business people to a network where any topic was discussed, the need to protect posters’ identities arose. Johan Helsingius wrote the first anonymous remailer, which allowed people to disconnect their identity from the email they would send. Asked why anonymity on the internet mattered, he highlighted a clear need:
“Who needs this? People who want to talk about things having to do with minorities… for things like [discussion] groups about sexual abuse, people need to be able to discuss their experience without everyone knowing who they are. Where you’re dealing with minorities – racial, political, sexual, whatever – you always find cases in which people belonging to a minority would like to discuss things that are important to them without have to identify themselves.”
In our discussion, I was surprised his own interest did not step from personal use but rather from an interest in demonstrating it as a technical achievement. Helsingius believed protecting the speech of vulnerable individuals was important. His biggest surprise was that the service wound up being used by people who were too embarrassed to publicly ask for help on technical matter.
Pointing to the limitation of his offering, Helsingius told me “it was not true anonymity as you needed an email account to use the service.” At the time it appeared, emails themselves were far from anonymous. Pseudonymity, however, was enough of a veil for most people.
The WELL, on of the first non-technical online communities allowed people to attach multiple pseudonyms to their accounts while retaining visibility of the connection. Larry Brilliant, one of the WELL co-founders told me “it was more of a playful thing, allowing people to present different facets of themselves in this new medium.
Such early curation of digital identity led to what we now witness in how people curate identities on social media. We all wear digital masks depending on the environment we’re in. For example, few people would present the same image of themselves on a network like LinkedIn, where employers are likely to pay close attention to your presentation, as opposed to something looser like Twitter/X or Instagram.
Generation Z, having grown-up as the first always online generation, understands this duality. They often talk about “Finsta” and “Rinsta” accounts (or Fake Instagram and Real Instagram), creating more limited access to loser accounts and more curated experiences for their public face.
Free Emails and Sock Puppets
In the early days of the Internet, emails were only available through three channels: You either received it from your school or work (which came attached with all the social conventions connected to such establishments) or purchased access to the internet through an internet service provider, which linked your email to your payment information, itself attached to a real-world identity.
The internet community being small and largely academic, social norms held maintainers of anonymous remailers to a standard of careful judgement to ensure a balance between pseudonymity and abuses. As the community grew, the volume of users using anonymous remailer made it increasingly complicated to police and nearly impossible to administer on a volunteer only basis. A new phenomenon would put their use to rest.
Free email was not designed to help anonymity. The rise of internet usage meant people wanted to have access to a second email address, detached from their work or school. That “personal” email came along with the rise of internet access from home. But internet service providers attached a single email address to a home account, creating a need for secondary email addresses in a household. At a time when connecting to the internet was still a task requiring a high level of tech savvy, free advertising-supported web-based email addresses were seen as a great equalizer.
An unintended consequence of free email was the rise of true online anonymity. Detaching the creation and management of an email account, which at the time was the main form of identity on the internet, from any traceable concept (work, school, a credit card), email addresses became the first step in a global experiment on anonymity.
Technical people will argue about the possibility to trace the creation of an email address to particular IP address but the combination of technologies to obfuscate one’s online location with the rise of internet cafes, where one could pay in cash to have access to the internet displaced even the most technical means to trace such connection.
The cost of setting up a new email became negligible (all you needed was time to set a new account), giving rise to a new phenomenon (which we’ll explore next week): The internet “sock puppet.”