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I will add, for those that lost the plot: the goal was, and still is, to build a world where anyone can communicate with anyone else without exposing their phys

I will add, for those that lost the plot: the goal was, and still is, to build a world where anyone can communicate with anyone else without exposing their physical identity and location, and therefore people cannot be physically persecuted for what they think and say. We're far from achieving this goal, and we underestimated our opponents by a lot. But it would be foolish to blame the Barlows of the world instead of blaming the tyrants and corporate opportunists that go to great lengths [0] to sabotage and interfere. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Snowden#Revelations

BlackFly 5mo ago
The unfortunate reality of the internet is that anonymity is abused by troll farms and genuine human interaction is corrupted by their astroturfing and political propaganda. Anonymity in the hands of the powerful is so much more corrupting than the liberty it imparts to the weak.
- AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
  Shills don't need anonymity. They can troll and astroturf just fine under their real names, or the names of the people they're paying to shill for them, because there is no one who comes in the night to put a bag over your head for shilling for the establishment. The people who need anonymity are the people who would be punished for saying things people in power don't like.
  - vga1 5mo ago
    With anonymity, they can 1000000x their presence and thus the effectiviness of their message.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
      How is that supposed to work? The average person is not going to read 1000000 separate posts. They want someone to go on Reddit and see that 10 of the 13 replies to a post about their subject are favorable. They don't need 1000000 accounts for that, they need 10, and getting 10 IDs is elementary for anyone with a corporate or government budget.
  - TFNA 5mo ago
    Shilling by nation-level actors often involves paying South Asians or Africans to create profiles claiming to be an ordinary person from somewhere completely different. Or people in said countries may not even be paid by a geostrategic rival but are shilling because they identified profit potential in e.g. selling MAGA merchandise. Obvious what they do depends on pseudonymity, and would fall apart if their real names were shown.
    - dgellow 5mo ago
      > would fall apart if their real names were shown I don’t think that’s true, unfortunately. You have lots of cases of major propaganda accounts found to be foreign actors and pretty much nothing happened to them
      - TFNA 5mo ago
        I am talking about the psychological effect, not the accounts being banned. Accounts pretending to be e.g. bona-fide Red State MAGA Americans are not going to successfully manipulate the American populace or move MAGA merchandise if the name "Ramesh Sharma" or "Goodluck Ngozi" or whatever is shown on every one of the account's posts.
        AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
        Wouldn't "Ramesh Sharma" just file a name change form with the government and hence be known as "John Smith" when they create their account? And even that is assuming they need the same person to be writing the posts as lending their name. They could also pay a homeless person or food service worker in Kentucky to sign up for the account and still have a troll farm in another country writing the posts.
  - dgellow 5mo ago
    The astroturfing relies mostly on anonymous users. The vast majority of trolling and shilling on Twitter and similar platforms is done with fake identities. So you have a few open shills who are using their real names, with massive campaigns enabled by anonymous/fake users
    - AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
      What part of that requires anonymity? You pay some broke college students or unemployed dog washers to shill (or let someone else shill) for the big accounts under their name. There is not only a massive supply of such people, they have high turnover as the seniors graduate but the new freshmen are broke again and the unemployment rate is fairly stable but the specific people distressed enough to sign their name for a buck are constantly in flux, so it doesn't even matter if they get banned.
- trhway 5mo ago
  >Anonymity in the hands of the powerful is so much more corrupting than the liberty it imparts to the weak. Even if it were so, it is still a win. Without anonymity there is no liberty to the weak at all. And thus for that liberty we must endure all the crap.
- txrx0000 5mo ago
  Bots are only an issue for public posts, not chat groups and DMs where the most valuable interactions happen. Ideally chats would be encrypted, untraceable, and anonymous, except to the people you're talking to. Anonymity is an overwhelmingly positive feature there. For public feeds, you seem to assume that only the propagandists can leverage bots effectively, which is the right assumption for the centrally-controlled social media platforms of today. But if we make a platform that is just some protocols that can't be controlled by anyone, you and I would be able to spin up anti-propaganda bots to pwn the propaganda bots without fear of repercussion. Anyone can try to push public opinion in a specific direction, but someone else will simply go the opposite way. There would be no moderator or algorithm to artificially boost one type of noise over another, so we would actually get a less corrupted feed that accurately represents what people are thinking because the noise cancels eachother out. And if you want to customize the feed, we could make client-side filters and algorithms. There could be an open-source algorithm called "Hacker News" that you can just download and install into your open-source social media client. As for keeping the powerful in check, don't forget that we've kind of lost equality before the law at this point, as shown by the Epstein saga. If we try to remove anonymity from the Internet right now, it will only be used to surveil regular citizens but not the people we need to keep in check. I would happily support a law that selectively enforces the other way around, though: let's mandate real identity for all government personnel online and expose their Polymarket accounts.
  - Arainach 5mo ago
    > Anyone can try to push public opinion in a specific direction, but someone else will simply go the opposite way. There would be no moderator or algorithm to artificially boost one type of noise over another, so we would actually get a less corrupted feed that accurately represents what people are thinking because the noise cancels eachother out This has never been true and never will be. Entities with more resources have dramatically more ability to put their perspective out and dominate the messaging.
    - Certhas 5mo ago
      This is so blindingly obvious just by looking at what is happening... It's like the believe that markets are inherently efficient and we just need to get rid of all the government interference that distorts the free market. There is no evidence for it, the theoretical argument is so flimsy it falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, the various ways in which markets are inefficient are several entire subfield of economics. Yet the idea persists... The notion that you just need a proper free market of ideas and then the best ideas will automatically win, and we just need to get rid of everything that interferes with this free market of ideas is cut from the same cloth... Maybe it has the same attraction as "blame the immigrants". It gives you an immediate automatic scapegoat for everything you see in society that you don't like.
vga1 5mo ago
It was probably a bad goal anyway. Anonymity turned out to be a great tool for fascists, and privacy is not going to save anyone if the fascist shit properly hits the fan.
- trhway 5mo ago
  The opposing voices is what stops fascism. Without anonymity there are no opposing voices.
  - vga1 5mo ago
    My point is that once we reach fascism, the opposing voices stop mattering. I think it's naive to think that anything happening in the digital world can properly fight that. And since technological anonymity and privacy are clearly moving us towards fascism, it's not a net good anymore.
    - trhway 5mo ago
      >technological anonymity and privacy are clearly moving us towards fascism looks like we're talking different fascisms. I don't want to offend you, it is just that your phrase is like straight from "1984" (or from Russia today) - "war is peace" and the likes.
      - vga1 5mo ago
        >looks like we're talking different fascisms. Okay, what fascism are you talking about? I'm talking about the actual rising fascism that we see right now and which has boosted its influence via social media by a lot. >I don't want to offend you, it is just that your phrase is like straight from "1984" (or from Russia today) - "war is peace" and the likes. No worries, I've learned not to be offended by people being wrong.
    - lukan 5mo ago
      Hah, as if the fascists themself are in loving unity. (Or clear on the term itself) There were and will be opposing voices also in deepest fascism. More broadly, totalitarism is rather the term, where the whole society is total under control of one ideology. That can be fascism, but also other ideologies strive for that. But yes, allowing anonymous voices is one way to counter it.
overfeed 5mo ago
> the goal was, and still is, to build a world where anyone can communicate with anyone else without exposing their physical identity and location Whose goal is it? The article notes that the goal is immediately dropped whenever it's more profitable to do the opposite. We got tracking pixels, browser fingerprinting, and privacy-focused companies that talk big game about supporting (/selling you?) anonymity online but won't accept anonymous payments. The anonymous online communication dream is dead. It died after 9/11 when the US government doubled-down on rolling out a panopticon to prevent future "intelligence failures."
- txrx0000 5mo ago
  It's Barlow's goal as I understood it. The article criticizes corporate opportunists, which is fair. But there are also plenty of other people willing to put short-term profit aside to fix problems and build the future we want to live in. The free and anonymous Internet is not a dream and will be built. It may have been half dead at one point post-911, but it was revived by Snowden and will strike at the panopticon until it shatters.
Certhas 5mo ago
You don't actually engage with the point of the article at all. Why is that a desirable goal? What are the societal implications of this? What implicit assumptions is your framing hiding, and are they true? (All communication is good! All opposition to communication is oppression!) I don't want a world where everyone can send me any ad they want without my consent. Where Billionaires and Autocrats can use their money and power to amplify their lies. Where utterances that no court has ever recognized as protected speech dominate all carefully stated opinions. Just retreating to exactly the catchphrases and naivete of the 90s is not cutting it anymore.
- tpmoney 5mo ago
  You already live in a world where anyone can send you any ad they want without your consent, paid for by your tax dollars. The postal service had been trafficking ads direct to your door since before Twitter was a thing. Billionaires and Autocrats by the very nature of having massive amounts of money can use their money and power to amplify their lies no matter how easy or not it is for normal people to also amplify their own lies. Again, Disney was buying swamp land in Florida through shell companies long before the internet decided forcing Elon Musk to buy twitter would be funny. Or see also that insider trading is illegal for you and me, but if you're a congressman, that's just a perk of the job. As far as "utterances that no court has ever recognized as speech", I'd be interested in what you think qualifies here, because the recent history (where by recent I mean over the course of the 1900's) has been an ever expansive definition of what sort of things constitute speech. Tinker v. Des Moines found wearing a black arm band is speech. Texas v. Johnson found burning a flag was speech. Brandenburg v. Ohio found advocacy of force and law violations was broadly speech, leaving only a small exception against speech that would induce "imminent lawless action". Hustler V. Falwell found parody of public figures even when that parody intends to cause emotional distress of the person being parodied were speech. Snyder v. Phelps found posters saying things like "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" and "God Hates Fags" outside of a funeral were speech. And let's not forget National Socialist Party v. Skokie, finding that a literal Nazi rally was speech.

BlackFly 5mo ago

The unfortunate reality of the internet is that anonymity is abused by troll farms and genuine human interaction is corrupted by their astroturfing and political propaganda. Anonymity in the hands of the powerful is so much more corrupting than the liberty it imparts to the weak.

AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
Shills don't need anonymity. They can troll and astroturf just fine under their real names, or the names of the people they're paying to shill for them, because there is no one who comes in the night to put a bag over your head for shilling for the establishment. The people who need anonymity are the people who would be punished for saying things people in power don't like.
- vga1 5mo ago
  With anonymity, they can 1000000x their presence and thus the effectiviness of their message.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
    How is that supposed to work? The average person is not going to read 1000000 separate posts. They want someone to go on Reddit and see that 10 of the 13 replies to a post about their subject are favorable. They don't need 1000000 accounts for that, they need 10, and getting 10 IDs is elementary for anyone with a corporate or government budget.
- TFNA 5mo ago
  Shilling by nation-level actors often involves paying South Asians or Africans to create profiles claiming to be an ordinary person from somewhere completely different. Or people in said countries may not even be paid by a geostrategic rival but are shilling because they identified profit potential in e.g. selling MAGA merchandise. Obvious what they do depends on pseudonymity, and would fall apart if their real names were shown.
  - dgellow 5mo ago
    > would fall apart if their real names were shown I don’t think that’s true, unfortunately. You have lots of cases of major propaganda accounts found to be foreign actors and pretty much nothing happened to them
    - TFNA 5mo ago
      I am talking about the psychological effect, not the accounts being banned. Accounts pretending to be e.g. bona-fide Red State MAGA Americans are not going to successfully manipulate the American populace or move MAGA merchandise if the name "Ramesh Sharma" or "Goodluck Ngozi" or whatever is shown on every one of the account's posts.
      - AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
        Wouldn't "Ramesh Sharma" just file a name change form with the government and hence be known as "John Smith" when they create their account? And even that is assuming they need the same person to be writing the posts as lending their name. They could also pay a homeless person or food service worker in Kentucky to sign up for the account and still have a troll farm in another country writing the posts.
- dgellow 5mo ago
  The astroturfing relies mostly on anonymous users. The vast majority of trolling and shilling on Twitter and similar platforms is done with fake identities. So you have a few open shills who are using their real names, with massive campaigns enabled by anonymous/fake users
  - AnthonyMouse 5mo ago
    What part of that requires anonymity? You pay some broke college students or unemployed dog washers to shill (or let someone else shill) for the big accounts under their name. There is not only a massive supply of such people, they have high turnover as the seniors graduate but the new freshmen are broke again and the unemployment rate is fairly stable but the specific people distressed enough to sign their name for a buck are constantly in flux, so it doesn't even matter if they get banned.
trhway 5mo ago
>Anonymity in the hands of the powerful is so much more corrupting than the liberty it imparts to the weak. Even if it were so, it is still a win. Without anonymity there is no liberty to the weak at all. And thus for that liberty we must endure all the crap.
txrx0000 5mo ago
Bots are only an issue for public posts, not chat groups and DMs where the most valuable interactions happen. Ideally chats would be encrypted, untraceable, and anonymous, except to the people you're talking to. Anonymity is an overwhelmingly positive feature there. For public feeds, you seem to assume that only the propagandists can leverage bots effectively, which is the right assumption for the centrally-controlled social media platforms of today. But if we make a platform that is just some protocols that can't be controlled by anyone, you and I would be able to spin up anti-propaganda bots to pwn the propaganda bots without fear of repercussion. Anyone can try to push public opinion in a specific direction, but someone else will simply go the opposite way. There would be no moderator or algorithm to artificially boost one type of noise over another, so we would actually get a less corrupted feed that accurately represents what people are thinking because the noise cancels eachother out. And if you want to customize the feed, we could make client-side filters and algorithms. There could be an open-source algorithm called "Hacker News" that you can just download and install into your open-source social media client. As for keeping the powerful in check, don't forget that we've kind of lost equality before the law at this point, as shown by the Epstein saga. If we try to remove anonymity from the Internet right now, it will only be used to surveil regular citizens but not the people we need to keep in check. I would happily support a law that selectively enforces the other way around, though: let's mandate real identity for all government personnel online and expose their Polymarket accounts.
- Arainach 5mo ago
  > Anyone can try to push public opinion in a specific direction, but someone else will simply go the opposite way. There would be no moderator or algorithm to artificially boost one type of noise over another, so we would actually get a less corrupted feed that accurately represents what people are thinking because the noise cancels eachother out This has never been true and never will be. Entities with more resources have dramatically more ability to put their perspective out and dominate the messaging.
  - Certhas 5mo ago
    This is so blindingly obvious just by looking at what is happening... It's like the believe that markets are inherently efficient and we just need to get rid of all the government interference that distorts the free market. There is no evidence for it, the theoretical argument is so flimsy it falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, the various ways in which markets are inefficient are several entire subfield of economics. Yet the idea persists... The notion that you just need a proper free market of ideas and then the best ideas will automatically win, and we just need to get rid of everything that interferes with this free market of ideas is cut from the same cloth... Maybe it has the same attraction as "blame the immigrants". It gives you an immediate automatic scapegoat for everything you see in society that you don't like.

vga1 5mo ago

It was probably a bad goal anyway. Anonymity turned out to be a great tool for fascists, and privacy is not going to save anyone if the fascist shit properly hits the fan.

trhway 5mo ago
The opposing voices is what stops fascism. Without anonymity there are no opposing voices.
- vga1 5mo ago
  My point is that once we reach fascism, the opposing voices stop mattering. I think it's naive to think that anything happening in the digital world can properly fight that. And since technological anonymity and privacy are clearly moving us towards fascism, it's not a net good anymore.
  - trhway 5mo ago
    >technological anonymity and privacy are clearly moving us towards fascism looks like we're talking different fascisms. I don't want to offend you, it is just that your phrase is like straight from "1984" (or from Russia today) - "war is peace" and the likes.
    - vga1 5mo ago
      >looks like we're talking different fascisms. Okay, what fascism are you talking about? I'm talking about the actual rising fascism that we see right now and which has boosted its influence via social media by a lot. >I don't want to offend you, it is just that your phrase is like straight from "1984" (or from Russia today) - "war is peace" and the likes. No worries, I've learned not to be offended by people being wrong.
  - lukan 5mo ago
    Hah, as if the fascists themself are in loving unity. (Or clear on the term itself) There were and will be opposing voices also in deepest fascism. More broadly, totalitarism is rather the term, where the whole society is total under control of one ideology. That can be fascism, but also other ideologies strive for that. But yes, allowing anonymous voices is one way to counter it.

overfeed 5mo ago

> the goal was, and still is, to build a world where anyone can communicate with anyone else without exposing their physical identity and location Whose goal is it? The article notes that the goal is immediately dropped whenever it's more profitable to do the opposite. We got tracking pixels, browser fingerprinting, and privacy-focused companies that talk big game about supporting (/selling you?) anonymity online but won't accept anonymous payments. The anonymous online communication dream is dead. It died after 9/11 when the US government doubled-down on rolling out a panopticon to prevent future "intelligence failures."

txrx0000 5mo ago
It's Barlow's goal as I understood it. The article criticizes corporate opportunists, which is fair. But there are also plenty of other people willing to put short-term profit aside to fix problems and build the future we want to live in. The free and anonymous Internet is not a dream and will be built. It may have been half dead at one point post-911, but it was revived by Snowden and will strike at the panopticon until it shatters.

Certhas 5mo ago

You don't actually engage with the point of the article at all. Why is that a desirable goal? What are the societal implications of this? What implicit assumptions is your framing hiding, and are they true? (All communication is good! All opposition to communication is oppression!) I don't want a world where everyone can send me any ad they want without my consent. Where Billionaires and Autocrats can use their money and power to amplify their lies. Where utterances that no court has ever recognized as protected speech dominate all carefully stated opinions. Just retreating to exactly the catchphrases and naivete of the 90s is not cutting it anymore.

tpmoney 5mo ago
You already live in a world where anyone can send you any ad they want without your consent, paid for by your tax dollars. The postal service had been trafficking ads direct to your door since before Twitter was a thing. Billionaires and Autocrats by the very nature of having massive amounts of money can use their money and power to amplify their lies no matter how easy or not it is for normal people to also amplify their own lies. Again, Disney was buying swamp land in Florida through shell companies long before the internet decided forcing Elon Musk to buy twitter would be funny. Or see also that insider trading is illegal for you and me, but if you're a congressman, that's just a perk of the job. As far as "utterances that no court has ever recognized as speech", I'd be interested in what you think qualifies here, because the recent history (where by recent I mean over the course of the 1900's) has been an ever expansive definition of what sort of things constitute speech. Tinker v. Des Moines found wearing a black arm band is speech. Texas v. Johnson found burning a flag was speech. Brandenburg v. Ohio found advocacy of force and law violations was broadly speech, leaving only a small exception against speech that would induce "imminent lawless action". Hustler V. Falwell found parody of public figures even when that parody intends to cause emotional distress of the person being parodied were speech. Snyder v. Phelps found posters saying things like "Thank God for Dead Soldiers" and "God Hates Fags" outside of a funeral were speech. And let's not forget National Socialist Party v. Skokie, finding that a literal Nazi rally was speech.