Enjoy Your Anonymity

Celebrities envy you. They don’t know what it’s like to stroll anonymously through a market and meet the indifferent eyes of onlookers. They’ve forgotten about those vacations in tourist places where not a single person calls out to them to take a picture or to get their autograph. Certainly, fame has many advantages and probably much more than the life of an average person, but we underestimate the value of anonymity when we all enjoy it to different degrees without knowing it.

Anonymity Is A Luxury

Tech companies make their living using your personal data. In exchange, you get access to free services. Being anonymous on the web means having to pay for the same abuse. In other words, anonymity comes at a cost that not everyone can afford.

The Problem Of The Need To Develop Personal Branding

More and more business influencers are urging us to develop our personal brand. This would allow us to have a leverage effect on the products or services we want to promote if we are an online entrepreneur. [Here is an emblematic and large-scale example of the leverage effect of personal branding: Tesla cars would never have sold so well if they had not been ostensibly associated with the personal brand Elon Musk. If an unknown person had been in charge of the firm, the company’s shares would probably never have risen.

The Problem With Personal Branding Is That It Imposes Itself Head-On To The Search For Anonymity

The Search For Wealth And Anonymity Seem Antinomic

Given the first arguments put forward, it is easy to understand why it is complicated to aspire to wealth while wanting to remain anonymous. Except in some cases, for example those who have rare skills and can work in the shadows as employees of a company that wishes to jealously guard its best elements (in exchange for large salaries), the rest of the people are more or less forced to put themselves on stage, to communicate on their skills and to advance their career.

Anonymity Is A Rare Commodity If You Are Rich

If you live in a developing country, you may have little or no connection. Anonymity is more accessible when you are not connected to the internet. The more money you make, the more valuable your personal data is. This explains in a caricatural way why paparazzi could make a living by selling (data) pictures of celebrities when it was often just an innocent information (the star is shopping, going to the beach, walking his kids). The more you earn, the more people are interested in you and therefore in your personal data.

A Better Sharing Of Wealth Could Alleviate The Problem

Essentially, what makes companies interested in you is that you can buy products and services from them. The better they know you, the better they can coax you into giving in to their commercial offers. An obvious solution would be to dilute the risk by spreading the attention of the prospecting companies. You can’t diminish their effort, but you can make sure that they don’t concentrate it on a limited group of people. These are the techniques of the school of fish: a fish has a better chance of surviving a predator if it is embedded in a group than if it is alone. The problem is that people almost always want to earn more, which makes them want to go it alone and thus lose their anonymity more easily.