In defence of (online) anonymity

“On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”

— Peter Steiner, The New Yorker cartoonist, 1993

One of the most impactful movies I’ve seen recently is a documentary called “The Remarkable Life of Iberlin.” It tells the story of a young man in Norway who lived with debilitating muscular dystrophy and spent much of his time playing World of Warcraft.

In WoW he could be the brave, handsome (and able-bodied) Iberlin, a respected member of his guild. As Iberlin, he found friends, respect, compassion, even love. But he never revealed the nature of his illness even when pressed or after long periods away in the hospital.

The documentary doesn’t answer whether it was right for Iberlin to stay silent about his health, but it does show both sides of the struggle: between the disabled young man who needed an escape without risk of judgment or pity, and those who genuinely cared about him and were hurt by the barriers be erected.

It is an incredible film, and I will guarantee that you will cry. It also led me to think deeply about the nature of internet, relationships, anonymity, and how I’ve seen things change, albeit in a much less important way.

My family signed up for “1p-a-minute” dialup internet around 1999. I would ask my mum if I could use the internet on the family PC*. And she would say “Okay, 30 minutes! Put a timer on the oven!” I dragged the long telephone cord from the nook under the stairs with the PC to the phone jack in the kitchen. Anyone who tried to call us during those 30 minutes would be met by the infamous screeching of a modem.

Web adoption was well underway. Underway enough that my elementary school held an assembly, telling us to “never share your name or location” and “never ever meet someone from online.” My parents, ever cautious, had already taught me this.

This didn’t stop my big brother and me from killing time while we slowly downloaded MP3s from the original Napster. We joined IRC chat rooms which looked dark and scary to a pre-teen, but were actually filled with hordes of like-minded kids who chirped “a/s/l?” (”age/sex/location”) as if it were a greeting. Armin Meiwes’ Cannibal Cafe, this was (hopefully) not.

As a slight aside, “a/s/l” is interesting because it represented a rebellion against the best practices we were taught, with an undercurrent of wanton disregard for one’s safety that only an adolescent would find appealing. Usually (and hopefully) it was a friendly opening to better understand the person we were talking to; but it was also a window of opportunity for creeps with ulterior motives to mislead and take advantage.

Had you spent the years between 2000 and 2020 under a rock or in a coma, imagine the shock of using Uber to share your name and location so you can get into a stranger’s car. Or taking a picture of your face and ID to book an Airbnb or verify a Facebook account.

Things have become very different. And not always for the better, I think.

When forums like PHPbb or SimpleMachines were the best way to have public online discussions, each post showed a user’s details on the left, such as:

• username
• avatar (always square, often 128x128, animated GIFs were sometimes allowed)
• location (always vague, to the city or country)
• last seen date (the last time the server saw your account do anything)

And that was the extent of what you knew about a person.

Some people would share details about their life, and you may remember that as you saw their username or avatar in posts across the forum, and sometimes even on other forums or chat rooms across the web.

And most importantly (for me) no one intrinsically knew that I was a stupid teenager. Until I posted dumb shit and made it obvious.

But that was the beauty of this wild web, in which we were viewed only by the content of our posts and no one was prejudged for their immutable characteristics or held in a different regard because of bias. It was the closest thing to true meritocracy we will ever likely see.

But a few things have changed.

The first is the rise of bots and fake accounts. These allow bad actors who have been banned to create new accounts and continue breaking rules or harassing others. And thanks to VPNs, VMs, and AI tools our trust that the username on a screen is a real person has been shattered. The bot situation has become so bad that almost all major social media services now require personally identifiable information to create an account or unlock all features.

The second is a cultural shift we saw throughout the early 2010s in which people, especially younger people, identify more heavily with pluralistic group memberships and prefer to celebrate those memberships rather than (pseudo)anonymity. I’ve met people recently who find the very idea of eschewing mentions of their identities as an offensive or harmful denial of who they are.

The sociology of pluralism is above my pay grade, but it is a fascinating shift in how people choose to communicate online and what they value. The idea of sharing your ethnicity, sexual orientation or preferences, health conditions, or any other personal information in a public profile is anathema to most who grew up on an earlier internet, but completely normalized today.

Except internet oversharing did have a place in my childhood, and that was on messaging apps like MSN Messenger and the earliest incarnations of Facebook and MySpace. Our feeds would popup with “in a relationship with” and our messenger display names should show hearts or roses next to the name of our current short-lived high school romance, cringey song lyrics and a “now playing” on iTunes. We did tell the internet everything, but under the assumption that it was only shared with a subset of our peers. Perhaps this was always the case, and it is the distinction between private and public that changed.

I would be remiss to not mention the phenomenon known as the “Eternal September” - in short, the early internet (1980s through 1993) was mostly accessibly through academic institutions. Each September, new students would join the university, join online spaces such as bulletin boards, not understand the culture of the existing community, and frustrate the existing users. After a few weeks these newcomers would learn the culture and etiquette so balance was restored for another year. By 1994 so many people were connecting to the internet from home that the cultural conflict with new members was ongoing and never settled down as it had in years prior.

Call this gatekeeping, enshittification, democratization, or anything else. Whatever the causes, as the internet has grown and the barrier to entry reduced, the internet has changed. And I miss that older internet, or at least my nostalgic memories of it.

• Windows 98 (first edition) on a AMD K6-2 300MHz CPU with a Voodoo Banshee graphics card. No USB ports. For a few weeks we had to use the number pad as MouseKeys until we found an adapter to allow the mouse and the dialup modem to both be connected simultaneously.