When I was a young thing, all I ever dreamt of was seeing my name printed on the spine of a hardback book. That ambition, now, looks rather old-fashioned. These days, to really make it, you need to have your name nowhere near your book. First there was the “Secret Barrister”, whose mysterious social media avatar of a robed bunny rabbit propelled him/her first to the heights of legal Twitter and then to a multi-book deal. Hot on his/her heels came lid-lifting memoirs from the “Secret Doctor”, “Secret Civil Servant”, “Secret Magistrate” et al; now the genre welcomes a volume from the “Secret Head Teacher” (out on 19 August).
Why so shy? There are a couple of things going on here, I think. One being the herd behaviour of trade publishers. The moment you have a secret barrister doing good numbers at WH Smith, everybody wants a slice of that action and they go about signing up secret scaffolders, baristas and chiropodists left, right and centre.
The more interesting phenomenon, though, is the fact that “secret” members of professions have proven such a hit with the public in the first place. It’s not an obvious thing to happen. Through history, signing your name to your testimony was what gave it credibility. Enthusiasts of rhetoric call this the “ethos” appeal: your audience knows who you are and can trust you – or not – based on your public standing.
Now, the opposite seems to hold. We are in an environment where anonymity is not the token of the fink, the weasel, the confidential informer and the nark, but of the brave speaker of truth to power. We are more likely, in the age of WikiLeaks and whistle-blowers, to trust the information that comes to us anonymously than we are to discount it. Here is a 21st-century equivalent of the enduring romance of Watergate’s Deep Throat. Everyone likes to feel that they’re close to a secret. The suggestion is there are some truths that can only be spoken under a cloak of anonymity.
“Anonymous” is even a political movement these days. The Guy Fawkes mask of V For Vendetta is as recognisable a brand as the red rose of the Labour Party or the elephant of the GOP – and rather more exciting a one, at that. By being Anonymous – in the sense of the hacktivist collective – you mark yourself out as egoless, austere in your political virtue and (by implication, at least) the member of a numberless group of the like-minded. You are, so to speak, a digital Spartacus.
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