Book Launch | Digital Initiation Rites: Joining Anonymous in Britain

Join us for a book launch event of Vita Peacock’s Digital Initiation Rites: Joining Anonymous in Britain (Cornell University Press 2025).

How do encounters with digital media connect to the deep history of humankind?

One of the most far-reaching effects of digitization has been to transform how people engage politically. Through extensive in-person fieldwork with Anonymous in Britain between 2014-2017, Vita Peacock explores how and why people joined this ‘born digital’ movement, and documents some of its ritual effects in towns and cities across Britain. Narrating tales of transformation from being ‘asleep’ to being ‘awake’, her interlocutors show how digital media have transformed the way some people acquire theoretical knowledge—a process she positions as a new form of initiation—a digital initiation rite.

In this book launch event co-organised by the Department of Digital Humanities and the Centre for Digital Culture, the author will introduce some of the main themes of the book, including the screening of a short film by Kyri Evangelou that was made during the period it chronicles.

The author will be joined by Jonathan Gray and Margaret Cheesman for an evening of conversation, followed by a wine reception in the Anatomy Museum.

Some copies of the book will be available.

About the Speakers:

Vita Peacock

Vita Peacock is a Digital Anthropologist and Principal Investigator of the ERC SAMCOM project in the Department of Digital Humanities. Her writings transect digital and political anthropology, addressing a range of subjects including hierarchy, social movements, online cults, privacy activism and surveillance. She is co-editor of Rhythm and Vigilance: Ethnographies of Surveillance and Time (Bristol University Press 2025) and is currently working on the manuscript Why Privacy is Powerful in Germany. More information about her work can be found here.

Jonathan Gray

Jonathan W. Y. Gray (@jwyg) explores the roles of digital data, methods and infrastructures in shaping how we know and live together. He is the author of Public Data Cultures (Polity, 2025). At King’s College London, he is Reader in Critical Infrastructure Studies at the Department of Digital Humanities and Co-Director of the Centre for Digital Culture. He is also co-founder of the Public Data Lab; research associate at the Digital Methods Initiative (University of Amsterdam) and the médialab (Sciences Po, Paris); and has taught with the School for Poetic Computation in NYC. More about his work can be found at jonathangray.org.

Margaret Cheesman

Dr Margie Cheesman is a Lecturer in Digital Economy at KCL and an anthropologist of emerging technology. She currently leads the AHRC Crypto Without Borders project and the Bosch-funded Digital Sovereignty Observatory. Her books include Aid and ID (Hafan, 2026) and When Blockchain Meets Aid (Princeton, 2027).