Corporate Anonymity
Inigo Thomas
The Economist's blog on American politics is called 'Democracy in America', its Asian blog 'Banyan' and its European blog 'Charlemagne' – names with such earnest symbolic authority that you might think for a second that the Economist had launched a fleet of new aircraft carriers. All Economist blogs are unsigned, which is in keeping with a publication that prides itself on corporate anonymity, but many entries are written in the first person. For example, four recent posts include the following sentences:
For the first time so far in my career, I briefly fell for a hoax.
Whoever he or she is, whatever their colleague may have posted and whether they fell (so unfortunately) for a hoax; regardless of what they make of Mongolia or of European 'values' – why is it such a struggle to say who they are? What do 'our values' and your 'real problems' mean if we don't know who you are?
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