A Love Letter to the Other Side of Anonymity
Preserving a banned X thread: personal reflections on anonymous selfless acts of rebellion against our transactional world.
Note: This is a Substack article written by AilliA. I am simply mirroring such article in my self-hosted blog, offering a clearnet and .onion mirror for it, besides main Substack link.
I wanted to preserve this thread from my banned account: it’s one of the most personal and precious tweets and moments I had there. I often wished I could write it better, but I can’t: soul dumps can’t be polished into perfection…
1/5 This morning, I found myself thinking about two people in this world. Two strangers. Two humans who gifted me with something very profound - the space for thought - by anonymously sending me Monero. I’ve been pondering their process: the how and, more importantly, the why.
2/5 Someone, somewhere, deliberately took the time and effort. They opened their device, carefully copied a string (or perhaps found me on cakewallet) and sent a gift of Monero to a complete stranger: a shadow in the digital ether. The sheer poetry of that act mesmerizes me.
3/5 It’s not like charity: I’m not hungry. It’s not like donating to a FOSS project or a cause: it wasn’t about supporting a product or a belief. It’s not like gifting in real life: they’ll never see my happy eyes or hear me say, “Thank you.” It was personal. And yet, it wasn’t.
4/5 I lie with my eyes closed, trying to grasp the essence of it. So much of the discourse around Monero - and anonymity in general - focuses on its darker sides. But on the opposite end of that spectrum lies something pure: an anonymous gift, one of the most selfless acts imaginable.
5/5 The sender seeks no recognition, no reward, no validation. The recipient has no face, no one to thank. It’s a quiet rebellion against the transactional nature of our world and relationships, a whisper of love into the void. So, to the strangers I’ll never know: Thank you.
Short backstory:
AilliaLink on Twitter was my only personal account online: the real me, separated from state / state-issued IDs, those artificial fake concepts, the shells I (we?) need to shield our true selves from the monster(s). I poured my soul into it. It was banned for no real reason. And it did hurt. Almost nothing online can touch me, let alone hurt: IRL is hardcore enough that I don’t take digital things seriously… but this one did.
Like any pain, it taught a lesson: if you want / need an online presence, treat it as mountain climbing: you must have at least three points of contact with the wall to have a chance to survive long(er). It’s good. Lessons that build resilience are good.
I just had a few very personal things I wanted to keep, but Twitter doesn’t make it easy. To download an archive of a suspended account, you have to disclose your country of residence (and possibly ID verification, I didn’t proceed “under penalty of perjury,” lol, to find out).
So… archive your online activity often, while you still can, before you’re banned. And if you do anything even slightly meaningful, you will be banned, sooner or later (a couple examples below). You can still log into a suspended account, but you can’t search. If you scroll to the first tweet of a thread, you can’t expand it: it just says “This post is from a suspended account.”
Replies tab only shows the last two in a thread… so for a 5-tweet thread, there is no way to recover the middle ones. I had archived my account data several times before that ban: that’s the only reason I can restore and share this now.
Now about the experience: it was one of those rare moments that shifted my quite cynical view of life…
I saw Vik’s tweet:
…and I added an XMR address to my profile not expecting anything, mostly to support the initiative, kind of like how some people put pronouns in their bio: to show support/normalize it. Side note: it was hard to find that specific Vik’s tweet because it was a subtweet replying to another banned account (!). While I was writing this, I realized how many old Monero/privacy/”paranoid crypto-anarchist” friends have vanished unnoticed: that one, Rare Passenger, and just two days ago I discovered the original Canary in the Cage podcast account (still listed on their own website) are all suspended… and countless more anonymous friends from the privacy and Monero communities, KIA by the platform without a trace. Sorry, tangent…
…so I added an XMR address to my profile not expecting anything, mostly just to support the movement. Then later, I saw unexpected incoming transactions in my wallet. It was the first time, and it was a shock. I needed time to process it, to meditate on the fact that such people actually exist (and the only place where this kind of anonymous goodness is technically possible is the privacy-by-default Monero community). Another side note: I’m grateful for every bit of help I’ve received IRL; most likely I wouldn’t have survived without it. But in the back of my mind, I always attributed (at least part of) it to so-called “pretty privilege”.
Turns out I was wrong. Not everything is transactional or sub(consciously)-transactional in this world. There is a shred of pure goodness. It’s quiet by nature, no publicity, but that makes it more precious. It balances the scale against all the terrible sub-humans doing terrible things. As long as the real ones exist, there is hope. Whatever happens in this cruel, insane world, there is mathematical proof preserved on a privacy-by-default blockchain that there are still good people out there. This makes me infinitely happy and infinitely sad simultaneously: happy that it proves such people are real, hidden among human-look-alike zombies, and endlessly sad because anonymity is quantum by nature: any attempt to observe/measure collapses it… so it means I’ll never meet / know who you are, anons, likely the best souls I’ve ever (digitally) crossed paths with…
Unfortunately, language is too limited a medium for information, and far more so for emotional exchange, even when spoken (+ voiceprints are real, they were real even before AI). So here is something truer: this is exactly how my thoughts and soul sound right now as I write (backup link in case Substack alters the quality or the embed fails):
Standard markdown way of inserting an image for the embed did not work at the time of transcription. Find mentioned Thank you message in video format on Odysee.
Richter - J.S. Bach: The Well-Tempered Clavier, Prelude No. 1 in C Major, BWV 846
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