He wrote neither as elegantly, nor as polite.

To be sure, Jim (for I’m not nearly as beholden to patriarchal concepts that demand titles – the new Lords and Barons are Dr’s and Mr’s), you’ve expressed yourself quite completely.

Albeit on the wrong subject.

Not every discussion relates to some inevitable slide into fascism.

To ponder is not to censor, by any means.

Once, I thoroughly posited that Plato stole the character in someone else’s play named Socrates so as to create a mentor out of thin air. This mentor could then bestow upon Plato the status of heir and scholar. The actual argument is not for this topic. A respected Professor involved in the debate retreated to the argument “It’s not the person saying the idea that’s important – the idea sometimes transcends the speaker.

I see veins of that argument in your writing – mixed with the typical paranoia where any sort of societal structure is intended to destroy your free will. Another argument not for this topic.

I once wrote an opinion piece inspired from a shampoo bottle. I have no idea who the person was that came up with “Lather, Rinse, Repeat” so in a true way there is value in anonymous ideas.

From a simple utilitarian perspective – roads are designed to provide lanes, traffic lights, and stop signs on which millions of people can be transported in a relatively efficient manner.

Not all comments are useful. Many are simply redundant. Others are spam (as any blog owner knows from the bots that attempt to drop messages about the newest wonder drug for baldness).

To ponder – again the topic was worded such to incite not fascism, but debate – what valid lanes and traffic lights could be applied to anonymous speech, precisely to eliminate the non-utilitarian comments so as to maximize the sharing of ideas, is both useful and -dare I say it – utilitarian.

That being said, and I apologize for being wordy, there is a place for anonymity – not solely for fear of persecution, no matter how restrictive the current administration is (nor for that matter how economically bad off you are) you are not the property of a cotton plantation owner nor a corporation.

Anonymity can simply be convenience – writers use pseudonyms for such banal reasons as to create a brand identity outside their primary genre so as not to dilute either identity [ex: Stephen King].

But on topic, specifically, is whether a person’s ideas would be more forceful and respected if they came attached to an identity?

Again, fears of fascism, communism, totalitarianism, socialism aside (another longer argument about them all being the same – not for this discussion – damn you, Plato!), anonymity has it’s benefits – but it’s main detriment is that it’s progenitor doesn’t even want to claim it.

Utilitarianism itself calls it spam at that point. Something to read when you may be bored, but surely not as important as ideas backed up by their believers.

Two days late and way too long to be pithy, but I said it. And I claim it.

The police state I grew up in was South Africa – I was 20 in 1994 when we got universal suffrage for the first time. My family, while members of the communist party, were only peripherally involved. Friends of my family were less lucky.

The US is NOT, even slightly, on the way to becoming a fascist dictatorship. If it was Bush would never have lost control of not one, but both houses.

I also note that you pulled the Hitler stunt. Wrong place, it doesn’t scare us and it doesn’t stop the debate.

The point about having opinions is being accountable for them. So, you want to have opinions and then not be held responsible for them. That’s nice.

So what’s the point of them? The opinions you disagree with are voiced by real people. If they become the dominant opinions it is either because most people support them, or because most people can’t be bothered to stop them.

No radical new idea has ever taken on the world when its proponent hides all by himself in a cave and simply carps at the outside world. You may – since that is your approach – attempt to disarm this wing of the debate by declaring that Osama bin Laden hides in a cave. Sure, he does, but his Lieutenants head out into the world and blow things up. They’re even prepared to become martyrs doing so. They don’t care who knows who they are.

Your opinion is being listened to here simply since we, as a collective, want to stimulate debate. We are not interested in being dictators.

No real autocrat is ever interested in stimulating debate. Your anonymity is a wonderful opportunity simply to ignore you. After all, it’s not like you’re ever going to be brave enough to confront me in a public forum. For shame, you may have to take that bag off your head and let everyone know just how shallow your argument really is.

If you insist on the technically accurate salutation, it’s “Dr.” But “Sam” works just fine – if you cared about my PhD you’d be about the only one these days.

I was thinking after my last reply that I’m probably not doing a good enough job of essentializing my argument and cutting to the proverbial chase. So let me have another whack.

As noted, you, Brian and I all share some concerns about those who’d attack our civil liberties. I personally think those concerns are WELL founded. There are people in the world who hate us for our freedoms, and a lot of them were born and raised American. So I get how people might feel safer saying what they have to say anonymously. And as I said before, I’m not here proposing that we legislate that right away.

But I’m a utilitarian. I don’t always care much about the means – my ultimate concern is the ENDS. I want us to get to a point where nobody would ever even have to consider posting anonymously. They’d feel perfectly free to sign their names to everything they said. Properly educated, all those thoughts would be, well, thoughtful. And the rest of us would do as the Constitution intended – consider the ideas on their merit and discuss things intelligently. That’s my utopia.

But how to GET there? I’m painfully conscious of the fact that in a public debate, numbers matter. It does me no good to speak for a silent majority – there’s one of me that’s willing to stand up and be counted and thousands of the rabble. As Yeats said, the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity. In fact, if you look at the last 30 years of this nation’s history you’ll see an ungodly influence being exerted by the noisy fringe. The rambunctious few stood publicly and dominated the process while the anonymous majority had its fate decided for it.

We wouldn’t have a “Moral Majority” running amok in the US if the real majority had spoken its mind. When the best stand and speak and put their reputations behind their convictions, that when good things happen.

It would be interesting to sort of quantify my sense of the value of anonymous comment online. I’d be willing to bet that if you did some hard analysis you’d find that the signal:noise ratio among signed commentary was 30-40% better than among the anonymous legions. Don’t know – maybe more, maybe less.

All I know is that anonymous blog posters aren’t going to deliver us from under the boot of the oppressive Wide Right. They’re not hiding who they are, and if we do then we cede a lot of moral high ground.

The thing is that if we imagine a system where anonymity weren’t taken as a default okay thing, it would afford those who misuse it fewer places to hide.

I think my views are on the record here. I get that the right exists and I wouldn’t act to legally restrain that right. But at the same time we insist on our rights, we frequent refuse to acknowledge that in a functioning society those rights are attended by responsibilities. Not that the state has the power to make you behave responsibly – whatever that adds up to in the context being discussed – but that people who truly value their freedoms FEEL those responsibilities and believe that acting on them, of their own free will, makes the society a better place.

In practice, few things are more dangerous to rights than the irresponsible exercise thereof. God may have granted those rights by Man will damned sure take them away, and the irony in this debate is that you and Brian, though you differ, are ultimately concerned about the same set of rights-snatching people in our culture. I am, too.

I’m more than willing to afford people the benefit of the doubt. But when I look at my online experience – which began in 1993 and has been pretty active in those years – it’s like I said: anonymity is about one part good to 99 parts bad.

I’d like to see more people like us acting to improve that ratio.

You’re pet issue is “can anon’s offer any benefit,” and the answer is obviously “yes.” I don’t believe I’ve ever claimed otherwise. My pet issue is “does the benefit of having anon’s on the Web outweigh the costs, especially regarding illegal activities,” and in my estimation the answer is no. And my solution is to make anonymity available, but more difficult through a variety of methods.

Would you care to explain how this is a “triviality”? The fact that the comments have hit 36 (including this one) in 24 hours indicates that no-one thinks this is a trivial issue. And I’ve said, and will say again, that I don’t have a problem with anonymity for “damn good reasons.”

I call you (and people like you) immoral not because you “put more weight on the message than the messenger,” but rather because your insistance on an unfettered “right” to anonymity makes you an accomplice to crimes like child abuse, assault, stalking, and hate speech.

Finally, I’ll try one last time to make my point about your right to free speech. The First Amendment says that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech”. Nope, nothing in there about having to use your real name. Fair enough. But there’s nothing in there saying that Congress is allowed to make laws barring threatening speech, or preventing libel either, yet it’s happened. Which means that either a) libel and death threats should be protected as free speech or b) the right to free speech is not absolute. If you believe a), then I’ll stand by my “immoral anarchist” assesment and our conversations on this issue are done – you’re beyond help on this one. But if you agree with b), then we have an opportunity to come to an understanding – not necessarily an agreement, but at least an understanding.

Messages matter, but they are always more effective if you’re willing to stand behind them and claim them as your own. That’s called having credibility, something that someone with a long-time pseudonym can build up, but that someone who posts anonymously has a MUCH harder time with.

As for being elitist, fine. You call me (and people like me) elitist prigs, I call you (and people like you) immoral anarchists, we both get angry, discussion ceases, and nothing changes. Gee, that was helpful.

I say require even stricter accountibility in the paid media (which is, after all, someone’s active choice to pay to support), and none in the blogosphere (where people can simply ignore opinions if they disagree with them).

Eric, how do you deal with the people doing things that are downright illegal if there is no accountability?

IMO this is the holy grail of this entire debate. I could care less about opinions if they’re rude. But there’s a difference between rudeness and sincere threats – and until we figure out how to turn the anons who pose a serious threat into the police, we’ve got a fundamental problem.

Everyone reading this thread should read the following: Sex, Drugs, and the Internet. It’s provides much needed perspective, and even if it’s premise isn’t necessarily entirely solid (just because something is logically consistant doesn’t mean it’s factually correct, for example, although I tend to agree with his perspective in general terms), it points out some of the serious problems with anonymity taken to an extreme.

Anonymity is presently built into the system of the Web. IP addresses and emails are inherently easy to forge and redirect, names can come and go at a whim, websites can be put up for free with a poorly programmed bot, etc. This needs to change. Why? Because for every person who legitimately uses a pseudonym or needs anonymity, there are probably 100 people who are simply jerks and have some psychological need to spout venom. Worse yet, the anonymity of the Web enables crimes such as cyberstalking, trade in child pornography, assault, etc. Because you and I are able to hide our identities, there are precious few social limitations on our behavior. So we act without thinking about the consequences, and in the process, people get hurt. Livelihoods are ruined, bloggers are driven off their blogs by death threats, people have nervous breakdowns.

Fundamentally, our legal system is based on a simple principle – your rights end where my rights begin. There has always been tension in this, since there has to be compromises between the rights of one individual and the rights of another, and between the rights of a society and the rights of the individual. In addition, our legal system says that, if you use your rights to infringe upon mine, then you are responsible for the socially-defined consequences of that infringement. In the case of free speech, you have the right to say anything – so long as it’s not libelous or threatening. Fundamentally, our responsibilities are defined by the explicit and implicit social contracts which we are beholden to as citizens of the United States and our various communities.

This fundamental relationship between rights and responsibilities has been totally thrown off kilter on the Web. Because anonymity is so easily acquired and so difficult to penetrate (we can change our identities every time we post or send an email if we wish to), we effectively have rights without any requirement that we use them responsibly. Theoretically the Web could police itself, and to one level it does – the obvious idiots get ignored and the trolls get collectively stomped on. But the Web as a community appears unwilling or unable to police itself when it comes to things like posted death threats, cyberstalking, and pedophilia.

If the Web collectively is unable to police itself, there are two solutions – give everyone the tools necessary to perform the policing, or take away the right of self-policing. However, if the Web collectively is unwilling to police itself, there is but one solution – take away the right to self-policing. From what I’ve read in this thread and in countless others on similar topics around the blogosphere, the Web collectively lacks both the ability and the will to self-police, leading me to a single conclusion – it’s time for someone else to enforce order. And one of the first logical steps is to eliminate the easy anonymity that the Web offers.

Ultimately, I’m a bit of a responsibility fundie – if you have a right to something, you have the corresponding responsibility to use it, well, responsibly. If you have a right to online anonymity, you have the corresponding responsibility not to abuse it. And right now, it’s being abused left, right, front, back, and center. So if you or your various fellow Anons can give me a way to stop the abuses and outright illegalities without eliminating anonymity nearly entirely, I’d be willing to listen to it. I haven’t been able to come up with a means to that particular end, but maybe someone else can.

But if not, the Wild Wild Web is going to have to be tamed.

1. validity of anonymity in print
2. validity of anonymity on Net

and newly arisen in string
3. differing obligation of the journalist as opposed to the commentator
4. the code of morality for those intent on overthrowing the system from their keyboard.

1. yes, re print – without the linkability that allows a personal assessment of the writer’s credibility, although there can be exceptional contextual circumstances, anonymity in print will weaken the potential impact or plausibility of most articles.
2. Nothing posted here so far convinces me otherwise regarding previous opine on net-anonymity/use of tag.
3. Mr Finnegan – good call, but I think it is also contextual and the only hard and fast rules should be common sense, credible research, and respect for the reader. That said, Seymour Hersh, for example, would be dismissed if filing anonymously but that reflects point 1 more than it affirms the unacceptability of adaptation to technology through the consistent use of a trackable-to-source online i.d.
4. Brain Angliss, you seem to be inadvertently creating a spin zone. “with every right comes an equal responsibility”. Your logic seems to follow that because we have the right to post anonymously, we have the responsibility not to, and to do otherwise on the basis of personal judgment is therefore unethical. I think that saying ‘the level of anarchy’ is akin to the notion of ‘half pregnant’. I would rather read a well-considered comment from an anonymous poster who actually seems engaged with the key words on which their argument depends – e.g. responsibility, ethical, reprehensible, anarchy – than a self-righteous and un-conscious demand for an unjustified morality from a poster who attaches their name, address, and place of birth.

I say require even stricter accountibility in the paid media (which is, after all, someone’s active choice to pay to support), and none in the blogosphere (where people can simply ignore opinions if they disagree with them).