When Donald and I started working on Truck Quest, we needed a design for Samson, the eccentric loner who actively opposed surveillance capitalism. It was 2018, more than 10 years since Anonymous made headlines for opposing the Church of Scientology. “Mr. Robot” had also been around for almost half a decade, which gave us some ideas about what Samson would look like and who he would be connected to.
Although the Guy Fawkes mask was an obvious idea, it wasn’t a good fit for our paranoid activist. There’s no way his efforts to undermine exploitative globalization would use a mass produced commodity that generated revenue for a major entertainment conglomerate! Samson might have had some unusual opinions about how society should work, but he wasn’t an idiot.
Instead, we looked at some of 2018’s cutting-edge solutions for remaining unrecognized:
- Anti-identification glasses. Abstract patterns printed on cheap plastic frames.
- Extreme makeup. People were providing advice in YouTube tutorials.
- Custom software filters. (This was the least interesting solution, from an artwork perspective.)
- Hyperface clothing. For overwhelming systems with too many false positives.
Samson ended up with several different disguises to remain incognito.
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