Want anonymity? Make a persona not a mystery.

Because of my open inbox, I meet a lot of strangers. I love it. Almost everyone tells me who and where they are in the world. If they don’t, I wonder.

Am I talking with someone from Australia? Philippines? Brazil? Are they 20 or 60? Male or female? It doesn’t really matter, but the brain can’t help wondering. It’s human nature to want to know who’s speaking. If they don’t say, it creates a mystery.

Films do that to deliberately engage curiosity. A voiceover on a black screen says, “It took me a long time to get here.” You immediately wonder, “Who is ‘me’? Get where? What happened?”

Once people start wondering, they need to know. Mysteries are intriguing. They’re unsettling.

That’s a problem if you really want to be anonymous. If you defiantly refuse to say who you are, it can make people angry that you’re upsetting social reciprocity. You know who they are, but they don’t know who you are. It feels rude. An obsessive personality might make it their damn mission to figure out who you are! You don’t want that.

So for real anonymity, don’t create a mystery. Create a believable persona. Then nobody will wonder.

If you don’t want any attention, just pick a very common name like Mary Kim or Adam Johnson.

Use an AI face generator to create a completely believable face to match your new name. Download it once and use it everywhere. Run it through face aging software to use this same persona for the rest of your life.

Pick a city and say it’s your location, to avoid that question too.

For email, Mailbox.org is great, and doesn’t care who you are.

Create social media profiles with your new name, email, city, and face.

Nobody will wonder who you are if you answer that question. Instead of block and battle, deflect and settle. That’s better anonymity.

But if you want to be both anonymous and famous, pick a name that is rare but believable. Cool but not too cool. Tom Kahlo. Keaton Carolina. Miles Wenley. Pick a name that has the .com domain available, so you can really brand it.

Now you can create anything online freely, and nobody will doubt your identity. Create and post a back-story to answer (instead of avoid) the frequently asked questions. Then, instead of wondering who you really are, they can focus on what you’re really saying.