Free art idea #62

To some of us, going incognito in our browsers feels like the last barrier to our freedom of thought and expression. However, it isn’t.

This piece is called “Homo Incognitum”.

The incognito screen in our browsers means many different things to different people:

• To many of us, this bland grey screen with a detective icon is what precedes accessing porn websites. For those who share devices or lend their search bar to others and experienced the terror of having their deepest darkest desires exposed as just another browsing suggestion, browsing incognito quickly became the wiser route.
• To others, this is the screen that precedes a familiar yet peculiarly different version of the web. One that doesn’t (necessarily) remember who we are and our login information.
• To some, this a space of safety. One where getting curious about their other identities won’t translate into an auto-suggestion catastrophe. And to head to this browser mode for a search query about an aspect of ourselves (be it our quirky sexual desire, a disease we think we might have or a niche interest we’re not comfortable sharing) is in itself a statement about where we perceive the draw the boundary of what is socially acceptable.

This page embodies that frontier. It is the border of the socially acceptable. Beyond this lies a world of fantasies and weirdness. It is literally a negative space capture of what society deems acceptable.

In a blog, Elie Bursztein shares the following findings about private browsing:

The graph in the middle is particularly interesting. “Prefer not to disclose” has one resounding synonym in our minds and we smile (internally) thinking about the respondent who thought they would actually be disclosing that information by picking that option.

If 35% of us use private browsing (as the first graph on the far left indicates) say 10% of the time we spend browsing, that would mean that 3.5% (some very rough quantification happening here) of humanity’s imagination and desires is self-censored. Looked at another way, if my 10% estimate is accurate, then 10% of us at any time is being asked (or forced) to stay silent, sit in the background and reconsider.

It’s important to note that incognito mode doesn’t actually make you invisible (that’s the second paragraph on that page which I never read until I wrote this piece!). Using a browser like Tor (Tor project) would be a better way to accomplish that.

Nevertheless, incognito mode remains a space of extended identity. A grey bland world where colors can come out.