What Internet Anonymity Is, and What It Isn’t
A couple of years ago, the major social media companies were admitted to sharing user data with one another in order to crack down, as they claimed, on misinformation. This ranged from censoring information that turned out to be true about the virus that had them in hysterics at the time, to censoring videos of obvious fraud during the election that took place later that year. Ted Cruz grandstanded with some regularity that year, dressing down the CEOs of Google, Facebook, and Twitter in turn, demanding transparency, and asking, in no uncertain terms, why these sites are still considered publishers.
Cruz’ rhetoric was rewarded with even greater censorship, more content moderation algorithms, and even less enjoyable experiences on any of the platforms that were pointed out. No legislation was drawn up. No social movement spawned to combat Silicon Valley. A few more ‘alternatives’ appeared on the scene, and, as with all such efforts, floundered and went nowhere. The status quo has gotten worse between 2020 and the present day.
All of this, ostensibly, has been over the matter of free speech, but it’s over a more important matter than that: internet anonymity, or in this case, pseudonymity, which affects the flow of information. One’s opinion of internet anonymity is the deciding factor in how one defines what the internet even is, and thus how it is supposed to operate.
Anonymity in Present Discourse
With that in mind, we turn to more or less current events. Elon Musk’s Twitter deal is, apparently, a go. He offered to buy the platform about half a year ago, shocking its board and the entirety of its HR department, but reneged after the board agreed. Then they tried to take him to court in order to force him to go through with the forty-four billion dollar deal. Now there’s talk of indictments over alleged misconduct during the acquisition. Who knows where that will end up?
This deal is both more and less important than certain first appearances might indicate, depending on one’s opinions about the internet and the (mostly) free exchange of information. Those who seek to turn cyberspace into a traced and tracked digital territory of users tied to real identities ironically find Musk’s takeover proposal horrifying. Most of these people are ostensibly liberals, or at least they will self-identify as such when pressed, and tend to use Twitter’s public status as both a shield and a sword. It is a shield when they can conflate the definition of ‘publicly traded’ with that of a ‘public utility’, but a sword when they can fall back on declaring Twitter a corporate entity perfectly entitled to enforce its own terms of service however it pleases—even arbitrarily. Since they hold all the right opinions, parrot all of the correct talking points, and walk in lock-step with all the proper personalities, none of this really affects them, save that it gets some of the less desirable users away from their replies and engagement. They are never in danger of losing their accounts.
These people are worried about Musk’s takeover because Musk has openly said he seeks to restore ‘free speech’ to the platform. How freedom of speech is defined is, of course, the crux of the issue. One user’s flippancy is another’s harassment, another’s joke, and another’s hate speech. This isn’t a problem that can be solved according to better precision in rules, clearer terms of service, or fairer and more evenly-applied moderation. It’s a problem of culture, ultimately, and the difficulties in communication that arise when too many people are expected to behave themselves on the same platform without the option to be left alone.
“Freedom of speech”, for these sorts of people, means the return of Donald Trump. It means more trolls. It means more so-called harassment in their comment sections, all despite the fact that the block and mute functions have existed for a decade or more. Any personal offense dished out upon them, they presume, is a greater offense against humanity at large. They hold all the right opinions, so naturally, anyone disagreeing with them, or calling those opinions ‘idiotic’, must be an enemy of all that is humane. Trolls therefore come across as enemies of the human race, like bullies, or tyrants, or Donald Trump and Hitler. There is no action against them that could be considered wrong, since the modern liberal’s Good Guy dialectic means that they’re always on the Right Side of History. If this sounds like it all contradicts itself, then you have your head on your shoulders. A large amount of blue checkmark verified accounts on Twitter, however, do not.
Freedom of speech naturally terrifies these people not just because of its implications with regard to proving people wrong, distributing disinformation, and making real discourse impossible, but because it opens the door for the sort of vitriol that most of these histrionic losers apparently have no way to process. And if we’re to presume that they’re of stronger mental fortitude than this, we need only remind ourselves that there exist at the highest levels of American government, those unfortunate and mentally unwell citizens who will slip into a deeper neurosis if you so much as suggest that a man isn’t a woman merely because he feels like wearing dresses and being treated like a female.
There is another side of this, however, which is a certain segment of the e-right’s totally unfounded optimism in Musk’s interest in Twitter. Musk has said, in passing, that banned users would get their accounts back. He has said he values freedom of speech. He has also said that the Hyperloop is a good idea, that Tesla is a good car company, and that he could probably build a space elevator. Musk has said a lot of things, but all Musk has proven himself good at is using government grant money on ambitious projects that seem to either go nowhere, as in the case of hyperloop, or simply make life worse for the rest of us, as with Tesla. Liberals also have a love/hate relationship with his personality, since they love his work but disdain what he says.
That said, Musk has also commented at some length on his views about internet anonymity. To him, any account on Twitter without a real and traceable phone number and email address is a bot. It doesn’t matter if you’re using it to maintain some degree of privacy over whatever is left of your internet footprint. Social media is supposed to mean social: and that means its architects want your name and your face and your real world identification tied to your internet traffic. Musk, somewhat predictably, is no different. He does not live in a world that values anonymity, and he never will. That free exchange of ideas runs in tandem with a the guarantee over personal privacy is beyond the scope of his imagination.
This goes for Parler’s present CEO George Farmer as well. Parler rather famously got shut down when it sought to be an alternative platform for ‘free speechers’ during the chaotic 2020 year, ballooning in usership amid the debacle mentioned earlier. After Parler crashed, Farmer bought the platform, and has since renovated it back into working order. Being both a contributing member to the investment banking class as well as the husband of Candice Owens, one can’t help but view Parler as already compromised territory: even if most of its users are sincere, the platform exists to be a rhetorical target to make the right’s presence online look all the more ridiculous. And, like where Musk probably wants Twitter to go, one’s guarantee of privacy is little to none.
This is all, too, being as charitable as possible when talking of Parler, and ignoring that it handed over its user records to feds before it collapsed, and there’s no reason to believe that they aren’t working with them still today. This would be only a mildly worrying occasion were it not for the fact that the userbase Parler openly markets to—MAGA republicans—have been rhetorically declared enemies of the democracy, and by extension, the state, by the current occupant of the White House.
In any case, these types will certainly claim to value freedom of speech, but they want your name attached to your ideas. This will be addressed in greater detail later, but for now, it must be noted that this makes them fundamentally no different from the liberals they claim to oppose. Either they remain willfully ignorant or, perhaps, openly malicious toward those who recognize the realities of America’s current day ideological rifts, and rather than seek to find ways forward, they’d rather make it easier for the managerial class to shut them down.
Anonymity as a Standard of Online Interaction
The internet began in the public presence as a niche connection of computer networks dominated by business, help, hobby—and other, much less savory—forums. Above all was the barrier of access required to access it: you had to have access to a computer, you had to know at least the bare minimum of the basics required to use it, and you had to have a reason to brave the speeds of data processing and networking at the time in order to make using cyberspace worthwhile. Even as technology improved and the internet passed into popular lingo as the world wide web, internet culture crystalized around gatekeeping under the social definition of the term: if you did not have a reason to be on a particular hobbyist forum, you were openly ostracized as a user and, eventually motivated to leave on your own. When ostracization didn’t work, moderation did the rest.
Suffice it to say that the internet came into its adolescence dominated by the presumption that a certain degree of crassness and the disregard for one’s personal ego was expected user etiquette. It wasn’t so much that everyone had to be crass so much as crassness was an acceptable part of internet discourse; it was used to weed out the wheat from the chaff, so to speak, particularly in the efforts to gatekeep niche forums and hobbies from people who sought only a cult of personality.
If you took things personally, you did not belong online. If you could not handle jokes at your expense, or being told as bluntly as possible that you were an idiot for asking a stupid question, you had no place in cyberspace. Users did not often dox one another because for the average user, this was impossible, but moreover, it wasn’t considered necessary or worthwhile. The only people who attracted a given community’s ire were the ones who polluted their forums with their obnoxious ideas—not the ones who may have been using the community out of their own self interest and simply never contributed to it. Lurkers have always been and by design, always should be part of an internet community.
Only by focusing on the subject at hand, removed from the presence of a verifiable identity, was such community building possible. The real world still existed independent of the internet insofar as the cyberspaces where these communities developed pointed towards interests and realities outside of the internet. Anonymity was crucial in preserving this sort of ‘free exchange of ideas’, and the informal gatekeeping ensured that this exchange did not become burdened by repetitious cycles of introductory information. Users new to communities had to keep up; if they didn’t, they left.
This entire model has effectively gone extinct thanks to social media. By the late 00s, the barriers of entry to internet access had dropped to the questions of “can you use a mouse?” or “can you afford a smart phone?” Unfortunately, most people can use a mouse, and as the following decade proved, they will make sacrifices in order to own a smart phone. Suddenly, people who had no business being online found themselves dominating bandwidth. But they wouldn’t have been there had there been nothing to do; it just so happens that the proliferation of the smart phone coincided with the establishment and expansion of social media networks.
As it turns out, social media is predicated on developing and growing internet communities that are the exact opposite of what is described above. Abolition of internet anonymity, although a key component to this transformation, isn’t the whole of the story. It’s the destruction of niche cyberspaces and the forced integration of everyone, everywhere, all at once, onto a handful of controlled platforms. Those platforms are not utilities, either (and for that matter, neither is the internet, despite it being treated as such), but rather corporations with extensive Human Resources departments and the technical resources to develop algorithms to assist in content moderation. Where there are algos, there is trickery, and where there are HR departments, there is cutting edge ‘woke’ ideology.
Internet anonymity is not a politically right or left issue, but rather a mainstream/fringe one. If you are active in politics at anything other than the local level, you are almost guaranteed to be against it, and that’s being generous (even most active in local politics are against it). If your first real exposure to the internet was through social media in the late-00s and the 10s, then you’re likewise, generally, predisposed to be against it. Most of these types are against it because they don’t understand what its use is, do not believe themselves to hold opinions controversial enough to warrant hiding them, and stand on a moral principle that believes one should back up what one believes with his own presence. The latter, especially, is misapplied in reference to the point of the internet.
This principle devolves into various forms online. “Fight me IRL” and, even the right’s own dated effort, “show physique” indicate a desire to attach the ideas presented under pseudonyms to the identities of those operating in the real world. The presumption is that words do not carry meaning when unsubstantiated by physical presence. Imagery, particularly identity, is the next best thing to presence when dealing with, at best, text on a screen. The problem here is that it simply isn’t true. Credibility may be reinforced by a powerful physical presence, and communication is much easier to facilitate in person, but these are tools of rhetoric and conversation—and moreover, means of communication that leverage identity over what is being communicated. It presumes a power game at the heart of internet discourse that doesn’t have to be there, a veiled sort of effeminate passive-aggressiveness that inevitably devolves into a cult of personality.
This sort of thing certainly happened in the old internet, but it was more an anomaly to be ridiculed than expected behavior. You weren’t supposed to dox yourself back then. You weren’t supposed to show off your daily life. You were supposed to engage with what the community was active in, and that was always some sort of specific interest—not, as it is today, some regulated interest run according to the opinions of a specific group of controllers, better known as ‘influencers’.
Unfortunately, this way of thinking seems to be gone, and it probably isn’t coming back. Social media changed all of that.
Saying What You Want Without Consequence
The contemporary left has turned “freedom of speech isn’t freedom from consequences” into something of an empty phrase. For one thing, no one has ever really believed otherwise. Words are supposed to mean things, and meaning carries with it certain power, depending, generally, on situational context. The whole point of speaking is to generate some sort of consequence, be it to affect someone’s mood, to incite action, to garner attention, or for some other reason. Were this not the case, as indeed some seem to believe, words are generated simply to fill an uncomfortable silence and, therefore, have no particular meaning one way or another.
It is true that some at least claim this is the case. “Words can’t hurt you” is a true enough sentiment, at least insofar as they’re incapable of breaking your bones or lighting you on fire. On the other hand, words can and in fact, regularly destroy careers, ruin reputations, and render certain sorts of people socially radioactive. Words distinguish in-groups from one another, draw social boundaries, and delineate ideological territory. Citing the consistency of studies about mask effectiveness in one crowd will get nods of agreement; in another, you will receive shrill cries that you’re a genocide denier and, therefore, an immanent threat to the people around you. All the worse if you bring up FBI crime statistics.
True, as it relates to the internet, there is always a seemingly large segment of vocal commentary too willing to indulge in fruitless insults and aggravation. As discussed above, this is in part due to the very nature of the internet. It should be weathered, shrugged at, and when necessarily, periodically engaged with. Some claim that this shouldn’t be the case and everyone should just be nice, apparently clueless as to the fact that this suggestion has never once worked for any significant period of time in all of history. Others, usually on the right, claim that the internet should instead be dispensed with entirely, and thus fall into the trap of misapplying a certain moral principle of prudence.
For most of us, the internet is not a tool we can simply choose to ignore. Increasingly, for the last decade and a half, it has been welcomed into our lives in ways that have not made it easy to kick out. Even if we were to do so, the internet is now encoded into unavoidable or daily tasks—banking, medical appointment scheduling, bill paying and state fee handling, et cetera—that simply unplugging our modems would be a net negative on our regular performance. In the case of paying bills, this is all the more obvious the less reliable the federal postal system gets thanks to the plethora of ailments affecting it, ranging from DEI initiatives to how typical bureaucratic incompetence has accelerated thanks to declining intelligence. The postal service is but one example, here.
Exiting certain social media platforms, as several vocal ideologues on the right have advocated, is often precipitated by some podcaster or other’s inability to deal with his trolls. Worse still is the attempt to prop up alternative social media sites in order to form ‘echo chambers’ in which no discourse ultimately occurs because nothing of value is being said. It’s again, a turn from the flow of information toward instead the cult of personality. If reality television prompted the world, and Americans in particular, to view daily drama as a consumable spectacle, social media took that spectacle and applied it to their own lives. Everyone is a star of their own internet drama. As the old saying goes that once referred to Americans, everyone with a social media account under a certain follower count is not, as it were, a “nobody”, but rather a temporarily embarrassed internet celebrity.
The critic of anonymity lobs the accusation that one simply wishes to say what he wants free of consequences, and while this is true for some, it doesn’t capture the whole picture. Being ostracized from a community because we said some things that ran directly and rudely against that community’s norms is perfectly acceptable. Being banned from the only place on the internet with relevant discussions left because those other communities have dried up, on the other hand, is not. Anonymity is the last vestige of what made the old internet both appealing and worthwhile to engage with. Trying maintain this is not simply about what should be allowed to be said and by whom, but about trying to keep what is left of the old ethos from slipping away entirely. It may be a wasted effort or a lost cause, but the alternative—capitulation to the social media mindset—seems worse.
Conclusion
One may wonder what the point of all this is. As mentioned above, there is no shortage of advocates a the moment who seem to encourage an exodus from big social media platforms, if not the internet entirely. For some, perhaps that’s the right idea. But for most of us, it has reached too deeply into our lives to ignore. That said, dealing with social media is different than paying an ISP service solely to be able to pay your utility bills and your mortgage without traveling to the library. But it remains the case that all of this is connected in more ways than one.
One’s social media footprint has already been considered within the scope of employment and managerial prospects since the mid-2010s, and although we don’t hear about this trend as often, it’s only going to increase. Lack of such a footprint, like lack of a credit history, doesn’t look good. Proponents of internet anonymity are already behind the ball on this issue, however, as maintaining their anonymity on social media is precisely the point. Furthermore, the consolidation of these companies has dumbed down internet discourse to the point of irrelevancy; it should not come as a surprise nowadays if someone hasn’t a Facebook account simply because it’s too tedious to deal with.
To say that the future seems bleak for worthwhile internet discourse is perhaps being a little hyperbolic. But it’s certainly darker now than it was ten years ago, if only we had realized what was coming. Blogs still exist, as do smaller publication sites, but for how long? The means of promoting them diminishes as the social media giants become ever more limiting in what they allow on their platforms and how vindictive they are against their political opponents. For the last two years, it has been clear: you can follow the rules, but if a member of the right set of protected classes complains about you, you’re off the platform. It makes one wonder how dissident accounts that break five figures worth of followers or subscribers are even allowed to function.
The importance of privacy cannot be understated. Farmer, of Parler, claims that on his platform, you can say more or less what you want and not fear being banned from his platform. That’s well and good, but it isn’t going to stop some vindictive HR rep from recommending your termination because you complained about masks on Parler, much to the adulation of your fellow Parlerites. Likewise, should Musk follow a similar policy for Twitter, it’s great that you won’t be defenestrated by content algorithms, but how many future employers will suddenly be shocked and appalled to find that they just interviewed a guy who thought Donald Trump wasn’t so bad? And this is to say nothing of anyone actually active in pseudonymous spheres; try explaining to a hiring manager who you meant by “Mencius Moldbug” when all they seem to understand is that Tucker Carlson is a robot built by the Kremlin.
It does not take a 1776er to remember that the Federalist Papers, which were used to foist a new government upon disillusioned ex-colonists—particularly those who considered themselves to have been taken for a ride by the Revolution—were written pseudonymously. Intuitively, one would think that this should resonate with the sort of mainstream-adjacent conservative crowd who wave American flags and proclaim themselves champions of the Bill of Rights. Their own alleged heroes, the Founding Fathers, regularly took on pseudonyms within the pamphlet media of their day.
But that was then, when literacy meant something, even if fewer people allegedly had it. As Tocqueville pointed out, Americans were nothing if not jurists, by which he meant inquisitive readers and judges of minutiae, often at odds with how they lived. Now, we’re told, more Americans can read than ever, but we are not longer a nation of cultural jurists or lawyers, but addicts or barbarians. And without addressing the systemic changes necessary at the heart of Silicon Valley’s technical revolution, we will only degenerate further.
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