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Dissolution as a Resource — The Need to Lose Identity — III

By Xscriptor — Óscar Preciado6 min read
PhilosophyTechnologyPrivacyEssayprivacyanonymitydissolutionidentityTorresistancephilosophytechnologyXscriptorÓscar Preciado
Dissolution as a Resource — The Need to Lose Identity — III

It is not that we have no identity. It is that identity, when mandatory, ceases to be a right and becomes a sentence.


There is a philosophical gesture that technology has put back on the table, though few dare to acknowledge it: the need to lose identity as an act of sovereignty. I do not mean accidental loss, data leakage, the carelessness that leaves us exposed. I speak of deliberate loss, the conscious dissolution of the distinguishable self, the decision to become indistinguishable as a form of resistance.

It is a move that nature knows well. Mimicry, crypsis, the ability to blend into the environment is not a gesture of weakness: it is an evolutionary strategy millions of years old. The octopus does not hide because it is fragile: it dissolves into the seabed because it has understood that visibility is a luxury that survival cannot afford.

The politics of anonymity

In 2010, Eckersley published a study that should have changed our relationship with technology forever: "How Unique Is Your Web Browser?". The conclusion was as simple as it was devastating: 94.2% of browsers were unique in his sample. With just a few features — installed fonts, screen resolution, timezone — a user could be identified with a precision no cookie could match.

Sixteen years have passed since that study. The fingerprinting industry has multiplied the number of signals it extracts tenfold. FingerprintJS, the reference library, operates with ~44 entropy sources. The attack surface — because it is an attack, even if it does not look like one — has expanded to cover virtually every interaction we have with a browser.

// Signals extracted by FingerprintJS (44 entropy sources)
const signals = {
  userAgentData,     // brands, platform, architecture
  fonts,             // installed fonts (hundreds)
  domBlockers,       // content blockers
  fontPreferences,   // typographic rendering metrics
  audio,             // audio processing hash
  screenFrame,       // screen dimensions
  canvas,            // graphic rendering hash
  osCpu,             // OS architecture
  languages,         // language preferences
  timezone,          // time zone
  hardwareConcurrency, // CPU cores
  deviceMemory,      // available RAM
  webGlBasics,       // GPU model
  webGlExtensions,   // WebGL extensions
  math,              // floating point precision
  // ... and 28 more
}

Faced with this, the conventional response has been to protect oneself more: more encryption, more proxies, more VPNs, more blockers, more extensions, more layers. But as we saw in the previous part, each layer of protection generates its own detectability. The solution cannot lie in more protection within the same paradigm.

The Tor solution: normalize to disappear

Tor Browser understands something that the rest of privacy tools fail to grasp: it is not about protecting identity, but about making identity cease to be distinguishable. Its approach is radical: normalize all signals until all Tor users look identical.

  • Same canvas output for everyone
  • Same timezone (UTC)
  • Same screen resolution (multiples of 200px)
  • Same fonts
  • No WebGL (deliberately broken)
  • No AudioContext
  • No high precision in performance.now()

The result is that a Tor user among 10,000 Tor users is effectively unidentifiable. But the cost is high: websites that depend on WebGL break, performance suffers, the browsing experience degrades.

Tor:      Total normalization → Maximum privacy → Broken functionality
Proxy:    Partial modification → Medium privacy  → Medium functionality
None:     No protection       → No privacy       → Full functionality

There is no free lunch. But Tor's lesson is philosophically profound: to not be seen, one must cease being unique. Individuality is the price of visibility. Anonymity is the renunciation of distinction.

Becoming no one


"I am not what happened to me, I am what I choose to become" — Carl Jung.


Jung's choice takes on a new dimension when applied to the digital space. If technology imposes an identity on us — a profile, a hash, a vector of features — then choosing not to have that identity is an act of ontological affirmation. Choosing not to be anyone on the web is not disappearing: it is refusing to be reduced.

Research on uncontrollable vectors confirms it implicitly: there are aspects of our digital identity that we cannot modify because they are etched into the hardware. The GPU that rasterizes our canvases, the CPU that executes our floating-point operations, the audio stack that processes our signals — they are fixed, immutable, tied to the physics of the device.

P(unique)=1−∏i=1kN−iNP(\text{unique}) = 1 - \prod_{i=1}^{k} \frac{N - i}{N}

Where NN is the population size and kk is the number of distinct canvas outputs in the sample. The probability of being unique tends to 1 as kk grows. It is a mathematical certainty: in a sufficiently large world, we will inevitably be unique and, therefore, identifiable.

The only way out of this certainty is not protection. It is conscious dissolution: the decision to inhabit a space where uniqueness is not measurable. Not because it does not exist, but because the measurement system has been disabled.

The gesture of the octopus

The octopus does not hide. It becomes the seabed. There is no "octopus" separate from the environment that conceals it: there is a continuity between the animal and its context. The distinction between figure and ground vanishes.

Applied to our digital identity, this means the goal is not to build a thicker shield, but to dissolve the distinction between ourselves and the background noise. Not to be the most protected data point, but the data point that is indistinguishable from all others. To become statistically irrelevant.

It is, paradoxically, a gesture of technological humility: recognizing that we cannot win the battle of identity by playing on the adversary's turf. If the system measures, we must be unmeasurable. If the system classifies, we must be unclassifiable.

In IV: The Right Not to Be, we will close this exploration with a reflection on the right not to be: why privacy, ultimately, is not a right to data protection, but a right to digital nonexistence.

Cross-references with research:

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