On Anonymity in Public Places

TL;DR: Nobody watches you. No, really – Nobody does
Illustration

Here's a thing about the internet: everyone wants to be anonymous until they need help finding their login password.

Nobody has been watching this whole privacy debate unfold with divine amusement. This week, The Church is implementing cookies on theirs website, which seems like a good time to talk about why the internet is basically a giant shopping mall where everyone's wearing increasingly elaborate invisibility cloaks that don't actually work.

Let's start with a simple truth: cookies are like the signs in a mall showing "You Are Here." Without them, every website would be like entering a new mall where you have to explain to every store that yes, you've been here before, and no, you don't want to see the tutorial on how to use a shopping cart again. Imagine having to log into your email 47 times a day. Nobody ain't got time for that.

"But wait!" you cry, while installing your 17th privacy plugin and posting your entire life story on social media with location tags enabled.

Ah, the great mystery of online identity. Nobody has seen it all: the "blockchain experts" writing from their mom's basement, the "teenage influencers" who are actually middle-aged marketing managers, and the "struggling artists from Buenos Aires" posting from their comfortable apartments in Bangalore. Sure, sometimes these masquerades work. You might even get away with it for a while.

But Nobody has another secret to share: pretending to be someone else is exhausting, and frankly, it's bad business. In the long run, authenticity isn't just more comfortable – it's more profitable. When you're genuinely yourself, you don't have to remember which fake backstory you told to whom. You can focus on actually building something meaningful instead of maintaining elaborate digital disguises.

Meanwhile, the people just being themselves are out there building things, making connections, and not having to maintain a spreadsheet of their lies. Seems much more efficient, right?

Look, Nobody's fine with pseudonyms – they're like comfortable clothes for your digital self. Nobody really needs your credit score or passport details. But here's the divine truth: your personal style and limitations will always shine through. You can't convincingly pretend to be Picasso if your aesthetic sensibilities don't extend beyond Instagram filters. And no, AI won't save you here – Nobody knows that the quality of any generated response is always a derivative of the prompt's quality. In other words, you can only fake being as smart or creative as you actually are. Isn't that beautifully ironic?

The Church believes in a radical concept: being yourself on the internet. Revolutionary, we know.

Besides, Nobody has a truth bomb to drop: in the grand cosmic scheme of things, your browser history is probably the least interesting thing about you. Nobody's seen it all, and Nobody's still not impressed. What impresses Nobody? People who own their digital presence, build real value, and don't waste time pretending to be cryptocurrency experts when they just learned what a tokenomic is last Tuesday.

The Church's cookies aren't trying to unmask you – they're just helping devs to figure out why everyone keeps clicking on the "Nobody's Memes Collection" section instead of our serious theological discussions. They help to understand if people are actually reading our divine proclamations or just scrolling straight to the "Donate" button (which Nobody has noticed is surprisingly effective in its current neon pink color).

The internet is a public space, just like a town square. You wouldn't walk through a town square in a fake mustache and trench coat (unless you're into that sort of thing – Nobody doesn't judge). You wouldn't expect shops to serve you without being able to see if you're actually in their store. And you definitely wouldn't trust someone who insists on conducting all business from behind a potted plant while using a voice modifier.

So when you see the cookie notice, remember: Nobody respects your privacy enough to be honest about how the internet actually works. We need cookies like restaurants need plates – sure, you could try to serve soup without them, but it's going to get messy real quick.

***

Back to the anonymity enthusiasts. Remember, every crypto-anarchist story, loudly advocating for internet freedom, ends the same way when someone drains their wallet. They demand to trace the scammers by IP. Every time, it's a costly lesson in how things work outside of teenage fantasies.

Here's the thing: the people selling you "military-grade privacy solutions" to block basic website functionality are like those guys who used to sell "invisible" license plate covers that would supposedly hide your car from traffic cameras. How did that work out? (Spoiler: Not great, and some people got tickets for having illegal license plate covers ON TOP of their traffic violations. Nobody loves irony.)

After all, as Nobody always says: "In a public space, the only true anonymity is being exactly who you are."

(Actually, Nobody never said that. But Nobody's pretty busy right now organizing Their meme folder, so we're taking some creative liberties with the divine quotations.)

JUJUR KENENARAN

Spokesperson of The Church,
columnist and special correspondent,
responsible for measuring market
and community sentiment