The Internet Is a Series of Lead Tubes (opens in new tab)

> by mandating the abandonment of all online anonymity

So instead of "Troll 001", you have "John Smith" or any number of a million other common names shared among millions of people. When you're talking to folks who don't live near you, there's no real accountability.

Abandoning anonymity has another side effect - it makes the minorities with defining names easier to pick out and harass. Jessica, Abdul, Monique, Bo and Priyanka would love to have their identities immediately made available to the masses.

The author seems a bit focused on trolls and general obnoxiousness, but for me the real problem with such widespread, constant communication is something else. That lends itself to two of the most dominant features of current human culture: the suffocating smallness (or, more properly, sameness) with which it imbues our world, leaving the probably accurate sense that there's nowhere to run to or hide if you don't like what you see, and the vicious "outrage cycle" that reinforces a particular and very narrow ideology. If you don't happen to agree with that ideology, and there's nowhere you could go instead that's any different (and certainly not any that's better), what's left to you?

It's not entirely fair to blame "the Internet" for this; as Tom Standage has described, earlier forms of communication started these trends. But it really hasn't been until the last 30 or 40 years that communication has been both universal and instantaneous, and those attributes are essential to the kind of feedback loop that creates what we have now. And the worst part of it is that checking out of it yourself doesn't help. The author of this article is absolutely correct on one thing at least: the abandonment will have to occur en masse to make much of a difference.

If you abandon anonymity, you open up despised minorities to real-world harassment any time they reveal that they are in such a group online.

Now, you may not care about this. You may think some despised minorities should be despised and harassed and so on. However, how do you know you're not in such a minority group?

Only one death threat? That might actually be enough to drive some people away, but I think the article was talking about people who get death threats on a regular basis. Sometimes just being who you are is enough to "attract that stuff".

The most vulnerable are the ones who don't have friends or a support system nearby. Their only options are to put up with being constantly harassed, or cut themselves off from their community entirely.

https://amazon.com/The-Internet-Garbage-Sarah-Jeong-ebook/dp...

Different people have different experiences, and it's not so simple as "don't chat with neo-nazis". Women, particularly, tend to get a lot more harassment than men do.

The human platform is inherently flawed. We need to build something better.

This actually is a pretty good analogy given that highways have been a key contributor to climate change.

When you factor in the number of people who are going out biking/hiking/vacationing/etc. so they have something to show off to their friends, I think Facebook probably has a positive effect on our collective health. (Present company excepted of course -- we all just love to get outdoors.)