> You don't know who I am from this comment (unless you stalk my bio and find me on Twitter). If you like it you'll upvote it. That's exactly (one of the many reasons) why I love the Internet.
That's the one sad thing, though: as you yourself point out, the Internet is moving in a direction where this concept of an anonymous meritocracy is already becoming more and more difficult - and, eventually, likely impossible.
Piecing together most of my "online identity" for example is easy, because I don't care. My id here is my first name and last initial. My name is all over my blog which I've acknowledged ownership of in many contexts, even where I use user names that does not match my name in any way, for example. But there are the odd pieces you likely won't find, because I don't want you to find them.
People just need to, and will, learn to curate their identity more.
Incidentally, things like Google's attempt at a real name policy for G+ in some ways makes anonymity easier: It makes people trust names that have not been verified - just eyeballed for "looks like a real human name". Everyone knows that "chimeracoder" is not likely to be your real name. But if you posted as pjohnson (just to pick something at random), people would be likely to assume it is your actual name and be none the wiser.
I would argue that's already not possible anymore, with today's Internet.
Being completely anonymous, including to Google/Facebook/your ISP is much more difficult than you think. You essentially have to write off large parts of the web as unviewable, which to me only confirms that anonymity on the Internet is all but a thing of the past.
Instead of seeing the change in the way most of the web is used as invading this anonymous meritocracy, perhaps it would be more reasonable to say that the meritocracy is now surrounded by settlers who are using the land in a different way.