Anonymous

At first I thought this was mildly interesting. Anonymous was attacking scientiology. I don’t really like scientology, so I thought it was funny. I thought the name didn’t mean much, just something to choose to attack them. Then I found out the culture was from 4chan. 4chan has always been interesting to me. They are the part of the internet that I know is not small, and is influential, but not the part that I am from, or grew up in. I see it maybe like another country a long time ago, when other countries were strange foreign places.

That culture has created nearly every internet meme of the LOLcats style you can imagine. Other, more coherent memes have come from other places, but that was always interesting too, it seemed only that culture could create the truly strange ones.

I watched this video and found something out. They don’t have a strong concept of user names or identity. The name anonymous isn’t a coincidence. Look, if you don’t believe me.

This is very alien to me. I am very much a citizen of the internet, but a very different culture. I started on irc, with bots and nickserv. The most important technology was the technology to ensure identity. On irc you can change your name too easily, and this had to be stopped. Impersonation was the worst crime you could commit. I then moved on to metafilter, kuro5hin, plastic, blogging, and wikipedia. The central aspect of these communities is identity, reputation, and trust. Some software tries to parse these for you. Kuro5hin, plastic, slashdot. Other communities rely on the humans to do that, like metafilter, and wikipedia. On metafilter you could create a new account (if it was open) but you would be treated like a new person. On wikipedia sharing an account will get you blocked immediately, having multiple accounts is ok, though frowned on. We, as maybe the over-culture of the internet, have thought a lot about identity. People are working very hard on federated identity because it’s obviously so important. But what if it isn’t?

4chan and futaba channel post anonymously and they are creative in an almost inhuman way. But it’s not completely anonymous. Some people can delete posts, with a password, and they have irc where presumably they use names. They do use anonymity substantially more than other online communities, and maybe that is for the best, for them. I feel like I finally realize why they are so different, their software is different, which makes their community different. Taking away reputation you don’t just get crap, you get very odd memes that are stronger than usual. Whether you think oh rly/ya rly is a benefit to society or not, you have to admit it is a very reproductive idea.

Maybe we should use anonymity as a tool, when the task is right, when you want strong ideas that are only measured by their quality, and not their proponents. Anonymous people in any position of power is probably always a bad idea, but certain sub-fora, even within a larger non-anonymous community, may actually be very beneficial. This is something that is only recently possible. People 50 years ago working on a project couldn’t go in to a magical room and have their identities concealed from one another, but we can. Maybe for some tasks it would be helpful.