I Am Sybil

i am all of them | digital collage | 2024 | inset

Per the internet : 
"A Sybil attack uses a single node to operate many active fake identities (or Sybil identities) simultaneously, within a peer-to-peer network. This type of attack aims to undermine the authority or power in a reputable system by gaining the majority of influence in the network. The fake identities serve to provide this influence.

The name of this attack was inspired by a 1973 book called Sybil, a woman diagnosed with a dissociative identity disorder."

I wanted to make a work that touched on this keystone issue that crypto was essentially built around solving or at least attempting to deal with.  Upon researching it and discovering the Sybil attack's etymological connection to DID I felt a deep well of meaning burst.

It is a strange irony that in a movement so passionate about the protection of privacy and anonymity that the problem of false identities used to hijack & gain a disproportionately large influence, power & rewards seems to be an ever present thorn in the side of various builders in the space of crypto and pretty much all peer to peer networks. 

In a bizarre coincidence of sorts it seems that almost 10 years after the term Sybil attack was coined an expose was published that seemed to show documented evidence that the person who Sybil was written about had confessed to having faked the disorder, hence essentially having created multiple fake identities in order to fulfill a signed contract for adaptation, get attention, get paid, etc...

As a neurodivergent person the concept of masking/unmasking is something that i think about and deal with constantly.  I sometimes feel as though I am creating various false identities in order to assimilate into ""normal"" society and it is often a confusing task to untangle who the real me is underneath the conditioning and various survival tactics I've adopted over the course of my life.

As we start to peel back the onion of identity it starts to feel like maybe like we all wear many masks, in the age of digital identity this becomes a hilarious and even psychedelic labyrinth to navigate.

This collage is an attempt to sew all of these concepts together into a chaotic abstract tapestry. Channeling Raushchenberg's collage paintings (which have always served as a type of north star for me) and combining my love for scientific diagrams and early internet browser imagery I tried to express the challenge of parsing the real from the fake... and every aspect of that challenge makes me simultaneously giddy and horrified.