We Need to Get our Anonymity Back

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

-Oscar Wilde

Back when I was in elementary school, when many of my peers and I were first getting access to the Internet, the adults in our lives gave us the same set of bullet points on how to behave online. The thing that they stressed the most is to never under any circumstances give out personal information, like your name, birth date, address or phone number. This was great advice: it kept a nice clean separation between real life and the web, kept people safe from digital stalkers and harassment, and allowed the free exchange of ideas without having to worry about real-world backlash. Over the past several years, however, this advice has fallen out of style. Nowadays, the expectation is that people go by their real names online, or at the very least have a pseudonym that they go by on all the sites they frequent. As this trend continued to grow, so too did the trend of targeted online harassment campaigns against specific people, as well as the increased spillover of Internet drama into real life. I believe that many of the social problems that have arisen in relation to the internet over the last few years are directly correlated to this loss of anonymity.

In the old system, where one's real life identity wasn't attached to their online persona, the greatest countermeasure to online harassment and bullying was just to make a new pseudonym. You could tell your friends that you've made a new account, and leave the bullies to endlessly spam an account no one checks anymore. You never had to worry about your family or boss judging you for the things you say online, because they couldn't be connected back to you and used against you in the future. We live in a world now where every stupid thing that you said or did as a teenager is permanently on display for your future employers to see. And while this definitely stops some of the more visible trolling and harassment online, it has a lot of dangerous implications. It prevents people from arguing for unpopular opinions, and also causes people to bottle up their feelings out of fear that their words will come back to bite them in the future. And when people have no outlet to freely express themselves, they keep building up internal pressure, anger, and resentment until they can't take it anymore and have to lash out, which may explain the recent rise in school shootings.

If you're still not convinced, I suggest to you an experiment. On some website you frequent, or even better yet, on one you don't, try creating a new name. Don't associate it with any of your other accounts online, or with your real life identity. See how it feels to be able to say whatever you're feeling without ever fearing it will be tied back to you. It's an amazing feeling, and after a week you'll never want to go back. We need to reclaim the Internet's culture of anonymity, and it all starts with you.