Anonymity.

Posted by Pointman on September 13, 2018 · 9 Comments 

Some people have this innocent assumption that anything they say or do on the internet is untraceable, because they’re using an invented name or handle, and that combined with a second email address not in their real name means all rules of common civility can be abandoned. They say things on the internet they’d never dream of saying face to face in real life. I think it’s a combination of a rather bland daytime nobody in reality becoming this enigmatic powerful mover and shaker at night on the internet, and a sprinkling of mean and frankly spiteful character flaws.

All their assumptions are wrong. Conceptually, the internet is just one big tape recorder and anyone determined to find you just replays the tape enough times until they locate you and you get that knock on the door from the police or whoever. Just look at all those oh so slick hackers doing time in prison. It’s possible to be nearly totally anonymous on the internet, but 99.875% of people using it wouldn’t have the first clue about how to do it. Even then, notice the nearly in the previous sentence.

The essential phenomenon is that when some people think their true identity isn’t known, they feel freer to getting up to doing bad things.

We’ve all seen enough cowboy movies where the stagecoach gets robbed. All the robbers have their neck kerchiefs pulled up to conceal half their faces. That’s the same phenomenon at work. Parades originating in the times of the Spanish inquisition, which are still annual events to this day, have hundreds of people marching in costumes but with a cone-shaped hat entirely covering their head.

The KKK wore that same kind of pointed hat, though whether there’s any connection with Spain I seriously doubt, but the same phenomenon kicked in; they did terrible things. Murders, lynchings, brutality, arson – all to terrorise the newly freed slaves in the aftermath of the Civil War. At its height it had an estimated 100,000 members across America. What’s not commonly acknowledged by liberals was that it was the para-military arm of the Democrat party for decades.

Thinking in generalities is useful because you start to see patterns emerging, but there’s a subtle difference between doing that and allowing yourself to get stuck between the railway lines of stereotypes. For the vast majority of its members, the KKK was more like a lodge they and their neighbours belonged to. Sure, there was a portion dedicated to stringing up Negroes, but it wasn’t as representative as people think. This opinion of it as more a social club than a vigilante group is illustrated by the incident that caused its downfall.

In 1925 the abduction, rape and torture for three days of a young woman by the Grand Dragon or head of the organisation, caused an immediate plunge in membership from which it never recovered. She died within days of her ordeal, her body covered with bite marks, which is common psychopathic behaviour. The social club element of its membership simply didn’t want to have anything to do with such an organisation, but the hardcore element remained. There’s only an estimated 5,000 members around nowadays according to FBI estimates, and that looks to be more of a social club grouping than a string him up lynch mob.

The final nail in its coffin was the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. What was left of it had fallen deeply out of public favour and although there was nothing any city or town could do to prevent its provocative marches, it could pass a simple city ordinance forbidding mass gatherings of people whose faces were concealed. With the consequent loss of anonymity, that was the end of the KKK marching.

I’ve no doubt all those city ordnances are still on the books, since legislators attract a lot of publicity passing new laws, but never for combing patiently through old cob webbed statute books weeding out obsolete ones.

In the last few years we’ve seen the rise of organisations like antifa and others of a similar ilk who take great care to conceal their faces when they do mass demonstrations and the anonymisation produces the usual results of civil disorder and violence. You might think the people concealed behind their masks are just young thugs, but not so. One who was convicted of hitting a Trump supporter over the top of the head with a motorbike chain turned out to be a university professor in his early thirties.

In passing, he got off with an amazingly light sentence for doing something that should have left him facing a much more serious charge. Instead he was charged with what amounted to a misdemeanor, did a plea bargain and swaggered out of the court with what amounted to a slap on the wrist. The chance to make an example to reassert public order was missed. I can’t help but feel that if a Trump supporter had committed that crime, he’d have been charged with attempted murder and dealt with a lot more harshly.

The saying that history repeats itself is very true. The parallels between antifa’s relationship with the Democrat party and the old KKK’s are striking. Like the KKK, antifa is a secretive para-military organisation whose deniable activities work to undermine the Dems political opponents, in this case Trump. The same methods are used; violence, intimidation and stifling the opposition’s voice, while the police look on and do nothing.

The simple solution, and the way to stop the situation escalating into even more violence, is to pass the same type of city ordinance that finally tamed the KKK. March as much as you like, demonstrate as much as you like, because you have the right to do so, but you can’t do it with your face concealed. My feeling is that people like professor motorbike chain would definitely think twice before indulging in thuggish activities because they’d know their face would be on camera.

The other thing to be done is to stop policing being driven by purely political considerations. If the local police won’t enforce the law evenly, then you do what was done in the 1960s; you take the job off them and send in the National Guard to restore order.

As with most things, anonymity can be used in positive or negative ways. You can use a hammer to build a house or to bash someone’s skull in with. In this article I’ve talked about the negative aspects of it, but there are positive ones. My experience over nearly two decades of using the internet and especially interacting with others using it, is that you’d be very rash to do so using your real name.

I initially started contributing to the global warming debate under my own name, but quickly found it was being used to target me and my family, so I had the choice; stop commenting, which is what the intimidators wanted, or go the anonymous route. I chose the latter and have never regretted it. It gives me and mine protection and I’ve never abused it. In certain ways, it allows me greater freedom of expression.

Anonymity in cyberspace I’ve no problem with and indeed encourage it as a prudent measure, but the masked anonymity of huge mobs in the street can only lead to civil unrest and violence. That’s what must be tackled.

©Pointman

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