The internet is serious business

Today, I came across two stories arguing, quite poorly, that anonymity on the internet is bad and something should be done about it. The first is from the October 15 issue of Forbes, focusing on the unstoppable spread of information online and the pervasiveness of incivility and deception. The second is a scatterbrained PC Magazine column that might as well have been written by a grumpy old man hollering at those damn kids to get off his iLawn. Both writers make the mistake of attacking the concept of anonymity itself by generalizing, rather than those who choose to use it for illegal purposes. Instead, they treat every anonymous user as "stupid", a "creep", "criminals" and "cowards" who engage in "worthless, childish behavior". And both display a frightening fixation on unmasking anonymous users in order to supposedly hold them responsible and accountable for what they say, and make them face "real consequences" to discourage undesirable behavior. Neither elaborate on what these consequences would consist of. Why, exactly, do you need to know who I am?

Are you going to come to my house and shoot me?

They're talking about using fear of punishment and retaliation to control what people say and prevent us from exercising our right to free expression as enumerated in various declarations of human rights. When they seek to silence others with the threat of reprisal, is it any wonder people want to remain anonymous? In their rush to condemn the lies propagated by certain anonymous users without consequence, both writers failed to acknowledge that the converse is also true: the freedom supplied by anonymity enables honesty, precisely because there's no risk of backlash from what you say. And neither of them seems to have realized that the proper response to an exercise of free expression that you disagree with is not to suppress it, but to utilize your own free expression in response. That's why I'm writing this instead of demanding Forbes and PC Magazine retract their articles and apologize. Sascha Segan treats anonymous expressions as inherently worthless:

Those who truly require it, the few Deep Throats, are outnumbered by self-serving agenda-pushers, cowards who don't live up to their words. Opinions worth having are worth putting your name to. Do you see people walking down the street in ski masks and wigs to hide their identities and calling themselves "xxLuvNKisses906xx?" I don't, and I live in New York City.

Is he somehow unable to evaluate a statement on its own merits without being aware of its source? Putting a name to a statement has no effect on the veracity of the statement, and believing it does is just a precursor to an ad hominem argument. If I posted this as Mike Bradley, the content would be neither improved nor inferior; if Segan wrote his column as xxLuvNKisses906xx, I'd still be calling bullshit on it. His myriad implicit and explicit value judgements are staggering. Why are message boards lazy? What's considered a stupid thing to say? What behavior is worthless and childish? What makes someone a jerk, loser or idiot? These aren't easy questions! And if those anonymous expressions are worthless by their very nature ("strangers who don't matter"), why is he so outraged by them? I take hundreds of photos of the inside of a single Wal-Mart. Many would consider these worthless. Does that mean I shouldn't be allowed to publish them? Segan actually attempts to determine who deserves anonymity: Whistleblowers, teens seeking counseling from Planned Parenthood, citizens living under oppressive governments, and anyone outside the US and Canada. The rest of us just don't qualify. Internet, meet Sascha Segan, official arbiter of your rights.

The Forbes article, while nowhere near as angry, contains numerous flaws both superficial and significant, and it seems they either neglected to perform the most basic research, or intentionally omitted some important details. The alt.* Usenet hierarchy is referred to as the "suffix .alt" and "dot-alt tag". There's no mention of the business relationship between Tim O'Reilly and Kathy Sierra; O'Reilly owns and runs the company that publishes four of Sierra's books, and the only reason her story became so widely known is because she's well-connected to him and other "internet superstars". Someone photoshopped her face into various crude and threatening situations, and sent her death threats. Hey, I've had that happen too. But when it happened to her, she decided it was too frightening to risk even going outside, and the blogogogospheric echo chamber got all self-righteous and launched the same fallacious attacks against anonymity itself. Thousands of nobodies were convinced that this molehill was their own personal Mt. Everest. They tried to put together a halfhearted code of conduct for the internet. Some guy who's famous because he used to work at Microsoft decided to stop posting for a week, expecting the rest of the world to care. And for all the impotent outrage, all that came of it was free publicity for a woman who experienced something the rest of us ignore.

Forbes also mentions ReputationDefender near the end without spending any time to cover the details of their operation. ReputationDefender attempts to have legitimate, truthful information about its clients removed from third-party websites that they have no control over, because it makes their clients look bad. Their entire business revolves around attempting to pressure other sites into taking down completely legal content, and it's fundamentally flawed because once something gets onto the internet, it'll never go away. Attempting to suppress information just encourages people to spread it further, due to reactance. And that should be the incentive to behave yourself online: Not the threat of punishment, but the potential for your words and actions to be stored forever. It's like trying to get piss out of a pool full of piss, it just doesn't work. And ReputationDefender has some rather unsavory clients, like Sue Scheff. Her daughter was practicing Wicca, so she sent her to Carolina Springs Academy, a prison camp where children are physically and mentally abused. Many children have been murdered at such camps. She also recommends companies that transport children against their will to these camps—kidnappers for hire. Living up to her name, she sues anyone who speaks ill of her, files false complaints to have sites shut down, and with the help of ReputationDefender, she's set up several self-promoting spam sites and convinced several media outlets that she's the victim of an online smear campaign. And they've decided this person's reputation deserves defending.

The worst aspect of these stories is they've chosen to focus on coddling bruised egos, rather than confronting any serious dangers presented by anonymity. How about untraceable botnet operators, the actual criminals who can take down any number of sites and interrupt critical internet services at a whim? When they finally manage to do some serious infrastructure damage, you won't be worrying about someone being mean to you on MySpace. And if any site adopts a mandatory identity verification model, they'll spawn a rash of competitors offering easy, anonymous access. If ID verification somehow becomes widespread, the only thing it will achieve is further incentivization of identity theft. Unlike those pushing for the abolition of anonymity, I'm not even offended by all the flawed arguments they present nowadays. Their ideas are ineffective, and just wrong.

On the topic of bad ideas, remember Fabuloso, the cleaning fluid that looks like a sports drink? Well, now there's TerraCycle, which recycles by accepting used two-liter soda bottles, filling them with drain cleaner, and reselling them. This is an excellent example of an anti-pattern, meaning that it flagrantly violates people's expectations, and teaches them the exact opposite of what's right. In this case, everyone expects a two-liter soda bottle, with its distinct shape and size, to contain soda. And when it doesn't, you might inadvertently drink drain cleaner, especially if you're a young child, or the label comes off, or you're just not thinking at the moment. Soda bottles should contain soda, not caustic chemicals.

Also, we stopped by the Orland Town Center yesterday, and the south portion of the Zone B strip mall up to a few small shops next to Office Max has been completely demolished. Gymboree has moved into the new Zone C strip mall. And people around there can't drive. Wise Bread, inkycircus, Practical Environmentalist and this person have used my Wal-Mart photos. Thanks, internet!

Update, 22 January 2008: Two links pertaining to Sue Scheff have been updated, thanks to Michael Crawford of Sue Scheff Truth. One of them was a Blogger-hosted blog by Carey Bock, whom Scheff sued for $11.3 million. Unfortunately, Scheff won, and she's taken possession of Bock's Blogger blog to serve as yet another self-promoting spam site. Scheff would do well to remember that the truth is not so easily edited. Then again, we're talking about a woman who sent her own daughter to a torture camp.