Sad … And Predictable

I agree. More regulation is not the answer. Neither is “stop cyberbullying”. I think that we need to put forward a positive alternative. Beth Kanter has a good graphic on a related post, that says “Choose Civility”. I like it. It’s kind of like creative commons where you have a positive alternative, not just a “stop copyright” reactionary position.

Yeah, Harold. Ultimately you cannot regulate peoples’ heads, hearts and words … and IMO (and I think yours) it is so much more positive to offer people their own decisions about what kinds of people they choose to be.

Anonymity has a real and essential place if we do not want to live in totalitarianism or fascism .. and it has often been pointed out by now that the laws of our societies apply to the Web, so there are capabilities (and precedents, and lessons we have previously learned) that apply here.

You’re right, eliminating anonymity from the Web is a police statist’s wet dream. It fits right in there with proposals for “smart stamps” and ID requirements for P.O. boxes. The state is like anyone else–it doesn’t like its property running around loose where it can’t keep track of it.
It would have another huge effect, though. The Cluetrain Manifesto (irony alert) was quite eloquent on the potential for frank, unmediated conversations between employees and customers as a way of building customer relationships and circumventing the consumer’s ingrained habit of blocking out canned corporate messages.
From the employer’s perspective, though, such conversations are potentially disastrous if his employees are disgruntled. The anonymous Web has made possible what the Wobblies called “open mouth sabotage,” but several orders of magnitude greater. In an age when unions have virtually disappeared from the private sector workforce, and downsizings and speedups have become a normal expectation of working life, the vulnerability of employer’s public image may be the one bit of real leverage the worker has over him–and it’s a doozy. If they go after that image relentlessly and systematically, they’ve got the boss by the short hairs.Given the ease of setting up anonymous blogs and websites (just think of any company and then look up the URL employernamesucks.com), the potential for other features of the writeable web like comment threads and message boards, the possibility of anonymously saturation emailing of the company’s major suppliers and customers and advocacy groups concerned with that industry…. well, let’s just say the potential for “swarming” and “netwar” is limitless.
If the litigation over Diebold’s corporate files and emails teaches anything, it’s that court injunctions are absolutely useless against guerrilla netwar. The era of the SLAPP lawsuit is over, except for those cases where the offender is considerate enough to volunteer his home address to the target. Even in the early days of the Internet, the McLibel case (a McDonald’s SLAPP suit against some small-time pamphleteers) turned into “the most expensive and most disastrous public-relations exercise ever mounted by a multinational company.”
But if the authoritarians try to lock down the net, you can be sure one of the first items on their agenda will be to help employers put that genie back in the bottle.

Keen’s misanthropic, punitive software solution can be dismissed out of hand. If the enormous scale of the project didn’t do it in, the cracks that came a few days after its release would. It’s completely unenforceable. He must realize that.

Characterizing himself as left wing and O’Reilly as right wing doesn’t do him any good either. It’s nothing but emotional hyperventilating, and that strained set of analogies is tediously hyperbolic. Why not compare computers to nukes and go for the full rhetorical monty? He did leave out Hitler, for which I am grateful, but the stupid, dishonest binary composition throughout the article comes close to making up for that.

Fortunately for him, an expansive view of free speech allows almost any aggrieved idiocy to be posted on the web.