Week 7: Anonymity and power

Why blind review exists, what it actually buys, and what it doesn't fix.

5 April 2027

Blind review’s usual justification is that it removes bias about who wrote the thing. It does some of that. What it more reliably does is remove the social cost of saying the specific thing — a reviewer who’d soften a note to a colleague’s face will often write the same note, unsoftened, when the byline is hidden. That’s not a story about honesty; it’s a story about power, and about how much of a specific note gets quietly rounded down to protect a relationship rather than to protect the truth of the claim.

It doesn’t fix the underlying skill. An anonymous vague note is still vague — anonymity removes the cost of specificity, it doesn’t manufacture the specificity itself. And it introduces a new failure: a reviewer who knows anonymity is temporary, or who can guess the author anyway, can use the mask as licence for exactly the un-falsifiable cruelty this course spends every other week trying to train out. Anonymity is a tool for one specific problem — the social cost of saying a true, specific thing to a known person — and it’s worth noticing when it’s being used for something else.

Outline#

• what blind review measurably changes, and what it doesn’t
• power and cost: why the same note is easier to write anonymously
• the failure mode this week’s crit is designed to surface: anonymity as licence rather than as courage