In Defense of Anons

The growing need for pseudonyms

Out of curiosity, I recently logged onto my personal twitter account that I first signed up with over a decade prior. I had abandoned it years ago, finding that posting under pseudonyms was a much more enjoyable experience with less downside.

Logging back on in 2023, I found nearly all the people I knew IRL from high school and college had also stopped posting. A lot of these people I know still lurk the site regularly. Over texts they’ll sometimes share a screenshot of a news story they saw or a funny image from the website formerly known as Twitter. But nobody really wants to post their thoughts under their own name.

With good reason, to be honest. Upon entering the workforce anything you post online can and will be used against you by an HR Department. Unless your “shooting for the moon” and making a personal brand out of things there’s not a lot of upside to having an archive of musings floating around which may potentially fall slightly outside the orthodoxy of the day.

The public internet is much less of a two-way street than you would think. It’s mostly a small vocal group shouting to a silent majority.

To the extent people I know use social media to share things broadly, they mostly do so on Instagram. The app is seen as something of a “safe-space”. Life updates, birthday posts, weddings, travel photo dumps. Stories of conspicuous consumption, images of occasional bacchanal but never in overly poor taste. It’s this kind of hilarious feed of people flattering themselves for their brand of unique normalness, done so through highly curated images.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with it I suppose, but there’s a real plastic feeling to the app. Behind every post is the tacit understanding that you should only be posting content that is in some way “promotional” or positive, that isn’t going to cause you any blowback. It’s no surprise that corporate advertisers love the app.

Death to Anons?

Clean your room, wash your penis, post on the internet under your legal identity. Such goes the doctrine of Dr. Jordan B. Peterson.

There are many prominent people that agree with him. They’re tired of “trolls” and anons that spew an endless stream of hatred. But, if you got rid of anons you’d effectively be silencing any honesty that may come out of the working class and petit bourgeoisie. Every social media app starts devolving into a LinkedIn style performative song and dance.

Ban the “anonymous troll-demons” and who would be left posting publicly? Probably just a few different classes of people.

• The Already Famous: Celebrities, journalists, notable writers, politicians, business leaders. People who have notoriety and are simply extending their reach into cyberspace.

• The Social Parrot: Folks who enjoy simply toeing the established lines. Virtue signalers. Social climbers with an agenda.

• The Unhinged ‘DGAF’ Guys: Log on to Facebook and you encounter this fringe character. He rants and raves and gets into e-fights under his own name. You look at his feed and kind of shake your head at the posts.

You’d wind up with a more or less barbell distribution of the upper crust and lower crust of society dominating the online discourse.

The pseudonymous or anonymous shield is what empowers any sort of input from the sane “everyman”. It protects them from downside. From the information police apparatus which the corporate structure indirectly enforces.

The ideal balance may be some sort of zero-knowledge proof way of confirming that you are a person without disclosing any identifiable information. This would safeguard against the internet just turning into bots and AI accounts social engineering each other.