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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

On top of that: anonymity should not be required to explore controversy at all. That’s the chilling effect. The issue is that as a society we have failed royally to internalize tolerating freedom of expression. Instead we choose to censor and silence people who wish to explore controversy even though we have laws in place that protect one’s freedom to express themselves however they desire without damaging recourse to their life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness.

Anonymity is certainly a tool that can be used in dire situations when there are real credible threats and the stakes are high. However it takes a certain type of courage to express oneself freely which would be really nice to see in the majority of all other situations. Instead of exploring controversy anonymously, we should aim as a society to explore it normally and simply build up the intellectual maturity and capacity to tolerate controversy like adults and not children…

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In short, I don't want to live in a society where everyone is anonymous. That doesn't sound very social at all and doesn't work at scale. I want to live in a society where I can build strong respectful adult relationships with people and not immediately judge, shun, and twitter mob someone who says they don't 100% agree with my lifestyle. Tolerating differences in viewpoints and lifestyles is true diversity. Diversity is not finding people with different physical features who all actually think the same and putting them on a magazine cover or in the same office together.

> In short, I don't want to live in a society where everyone is anonymous.

You wear a name tag to the pub, or supermarket?

You don’t keep your phone with you?

Or always pay cash?

That doesn’t help if every other phone in the vicinity of the business gets a ping from your phone.

Being gratuitously anti-social in a pub or supermarket already has consequences, name tags or not (you'll get kicked out). It doesn't matter if people know your name or not, they'll recognize your face, and you might not be welcome back.

Being gratuitously anti-social online might also have consequences (your account gets banned), but if creating another anonymous account is free and easy, then the consequences are trivially ignored.

You could make a distinction between anonymity and ease-of-creating-new-accounts, but usually the two are tied together.

No, but I also don't wear a mask that covers my face and I don't use a voice changer to scramble my speech.

In meatspace, people use different modes of identification than just a name, so names aren't as important to figuring out who's who.

the cameras that track your every movement inside a supermarket (plus the software that labels your image with a unique identifier) have you pinned down pretty well already, no need for nametags.

Only in some places.

more places than you would expect though.

Don’t forget the Bluetooth beacon trackers.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/14/opinion/bluet...

I don’t, yet I am still not anonymous. If someone at the supermarket asked me my name I would tell them.

> You wear a name tag to the pub, or supermarket?

Yes, but I don't realize it.

I wonder which elements of your "lifestyle" would get you shunned, or disinherited, or imprisoned, or killed for your family's honor. I enjoy almost perfect intersectional privilege, and one of those privileges has been to use my full real Googlable name on all my social media accounts, specifically because I want to be accountable for what I say, and because I've always believed that nothing about my real identity imperils me. (I'm a little less sure, recently, that liberal atheists and our allies will be safe from the American pogroms to come. Too late now!)

I don't want to live in a society where exploration and discussion of taboo ideas risks my livelihood. Short of somehow inducing massive change in the way most people think about things, anonymity is the only way to achieve that.

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