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.