Will Anonymity Be Our Undoing?

There is so much to think about in this piece from The Atlantic: “The Personal Brand Is Dead.” For someone with a decades-long career in marketing communications, I am a bit surprised to find myself cheering on Gen Zers’ quest for anonymity. Most of the young people in my life are far more careful than I have ever been about privacy. They admonish their parents for filling their living spaces with Amazon Echos and Google Homes, convinced that these devices are intelligence agents masquerading as useful household implements. They avoid social media or limit their use to one or two sites, where they hover as mute spectators or post under a cloak of anonymity, sometimes deleting their posts later the same day. They employ multiple apps to protect their data and scrub the internet of signs that they were there.

I applaud this caution. In my view, it’s far healthier than existing through Insta and living or dying off “likes” and follows. And yet … I cannot help but worry about the eventual price to be paid as upcoming generations become primed to treat virtually every interaction with the outside world as an entry point for “stranger danger.” We already know that millennials and Gen Zers are phone-call averse. The reasoning appears to be a mix of social anxiety, a desire not to intrude, and a preference for to-the-point communication via texting or a chat app. I get it. It’s easier not to have to deal with the chitchat that telephone etiquette seems to demand. The tendency goes beyond that, though—and it’s not limited to youth. More and more, people are holed up in their private spaces, interacting with humanity almost entirely through screens. The additional layer of avatars and fictitious identities removes us still further from one another. Even with pandemic restrictions out of the way, people are opting for digital dating rather than meeting face to face. In the work world, the Great Resignation has been accompanied by the Great Resistance, in which employees have refused to return to the in-office work model.

I am all for personal autonomy and flexibility in work. I do wonder, though, whether our species’ social muscles will atrophy. As I discuss in The New Megatrends, there have been plenty of studies indicating that social media negatively impacts social skills, including people’s ability to decode body language. How much worse will it get as people cease communicating under their true identities online? As we step into the metaverse, will we necessarily be leaving an essential aspect of our humanity behind? To what extent will the quest for privacy further alienate us and contribute to the rise in diseases of despair? Already in the U.S., loneliness has been deemed a public health crisis.

I don’t have answers. Just lots of questions, starting with these: How can we—and by “we,” I mean everyone from tech companies and CEOs to policymakers and parents—safeguard privacy without gumming up the valuable works of the internet? Especially after the Great Pause of COVID, how do we reintroduce people to society, finding ways to pry them out of their cocoons and into the daylight? How can we better monitor and measure social alienation so that we may guard against it? Is it too late? Is the current trend part of an inexorable movement of humankind away from familiarity and real-world sociability?

Maybe I need to step away from my computer and find someone willing to talk about it IRL.

Maybe we all do …