Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
What has to be understood is that most whistle-blowers are not natural activists - this one certainly wasn't. We usually work in anonymous jobs, far from the spotlight. We are not campaigners, or journalists, or wannabe celebrities, craving a platform. Our conscience tells us we have to reveal what we know.
When I'm doing a book tour in the States, I'll wake up in the room sometimes in an anonymous chain hotel, and I don't know where I am right away. I'll go to the window, and it doesn't help there either, especially if you're in an anonymous strip and it's the usual Victoria's Secret, Gap, Chili's, Applebee's.
Back in my days as a children's book editor, my superiors caught on to the fact that teenagers were using the Internet to gossip about each other, and thought it might be nifty to develop a series of books about an anonymous high-school blogger who gossips about her classmates. The concept was passed on to me.
We are at war - undeclared and of such a subtle nature that few have noticed - but war nevertheless. It is a cyberwar on many fronts, in which it is difficult to identify who is friend and who is foe. I will predict now, as unintelligible as it may seem, that Anonymous will turn out to be more friend than foe.
It may sound funny, but it's true: I tried to put myself through the 12-step program. I didn't want to attend a real meeting; my role didn't really require that, and I feel those meetings are sort of sacred, and they're anonymous for a reason. I tried to deal with some of my love of snacks - and I relapsed a lot.
If I changed my name, everyone would have just known that I changed my name. If I had been anonymous, it would have felt pretentious. It would seem like I'm trying to dodge something. I love my family and have such respect for their work, for their career and talents, and I'm very proud to be connected with them.
Handwritten political posters - often composed in an artless and unadorned style, usually just words on plain white paper - were ubiquitous in South Korea in the 1970s and 1980s and were one of the few outlets available for expressing political views. Most posters were anonymous and put up under the cover of night.
Since the advent of the Internet - more recently compounded by blogging - everyone can be a published voice. Any cowardly, anonymous anger-monger can have an audience of thousands. That doesn't make them a journalist any more than my throwing an onion and a few carrots into a pot of boiling water makes me Julia Child.
The original idea of being anonymous - it was a great, naive idea on paper in 2008, not knowing to what degree we'd be touring or to what extent this was going to be a professional operation. That regimen is very hard to live by. What I hadn't foreseen was the fans and their willingness to embrace that and play along.
I wanted to learn how to blog, so I was playing around with Wordpress and Typepad and Blogger, starting all these different blogs just to learn how these things work. I had a fake Sergey Brin blog, an anonymous, fake Ph.D kind of blog. I did it for, like, I don't know, six weeks, and the Steve Jobs one just caught on.
I was really fascinated by some of the things happening with Anonymous, the hackers group. I don't necessarily agree with everything they've done, but I thought it was a really interesting use of technology and the fact that there's a whole group of people who can take over systems and fight things from behind the scenes.
The decentralized nature of online conversations often makes it easier to manipulate public opinion, both domestically and globally. Regimes that once relied on centralized systems of media control can now deliver ideological messages more subtly, with the help of little-known intermediaries like anonymous commenters on websites.
Privacy is an age of universal email collection and spying, with millions of CCTV cameras and warrantless spying pervasive; privacy has become virtually nonexistent and, therefore, extremely scarce and desirable. Bitcoin can be a completely anonymous transaction that maintains the user's privacy beyond the reach of any authority.
I think online, like on YouTube and stuff, people could pretty much say whatever they want. They have no filter in their brain, because no one knows who they are. They're totally anonymous, so they could say whatever they want. But when they're in person with me, they wouldn't say those things, because I can actually see who they are.
If people knew that Burzum was just the band of some teenager, that would sort of ruin the magic, and for that reason, I felt that I needed to be anonymous. So I used a pseudonym, Count Grishnackh, and on the debut album, I used a photo of me that didn't look like me at all to make Burzum itself seem more out-of-this world and to confuse people.
A player checking Twitter at halftime? I've seen it. A player tweeting out a grievance with an organization about playing time or how he is being utilized? I see it far too often. But the most concerning? Watching a really talented player corrupt his mind and confidence by reading all the critiques from anonymous football experts around the world.