No one truly knows the limits of human stupidity. But, through the man-made miracle of the internet, we have a better measure of our collective foolishness than ever before.
The amount of free-ranging idiocy on the nets is known by all and lamented by many. And often it is the very lamentation of stupidity which brings the stupidity to greater heights.
A fine example of this is Dennis Prager's recent column “How to Get Moron's Off the Internet.” Prager seems to believe that he has a clever solution to the problem of bile and ignorance on the internet. Simply ban anonymous posting, he says. If the operators of websites would require all commentors to state their real names and locations, discourse on the internet would magically elevate itself.
This kind of simplistic reasoning is standard for Prager, whose career as a social pundit centers around an ongoing attack against a homogeneous “liberal” strawman that exists only in the minds of himself and his talk-radio colleagues. Among Prager's more ridiculous positions are that politicians who stand opposed to gay rights, though they may be secretly gay themselves, ought not to be exposed as closeted homosexuals; that Judaism and Christianity, taken together, are “the finest system of values ever devised”; and that public swearing somehow causes injury to our general culture. Dennis Prager is essentially a mouthpiece for the “traditional American values” crowd. If social conservatives as a group have any position on any given issue then, right or wrong, Prager is there right along with them.
Not satisfied with mere redundancy, Prager does go off the talking points with some regularity. Most recently, Mr. Prager has made an expedition into the chaotic subject of internet culture. He is absolutely correct in saying that the internet is overrun with hateful jackasses, but he loses all credibility when he proposes eliminating anonymity as a solution.
The problem with eliminating anonymity on the internet has nothing to do with issues of free expression. The problem, which defies any workaround, is nothing more than simple practicality. It can't be done. Anonymity is as much an ineluctable part of the internet as wetness is of rain. Which is to say that anonymity is built into the medium.
As anyone who knows a little history may remember, the internet grew out a United States military project to develop a communication system that could withstand a nuclear assault. Much has changed since the original AARPA days, but the decentralized quality of the internet persists. Along with this quality, the internet is also open to including any machine from any location. It is possible to link an iPod to the internet, as well as an Xbox or any other electronic device that can run software. If it can be programmed, it can be connected. More than that, any machine that can be connected can be rendered anonymous using any of a wide array of software applications.
This means that it is not possible to completely exclude anonymous users from the internet. Of course, the owners of specific websites could easily require that visitors identify themselves in order to leave comments. This already happens quite a lot to discourage spam artists who try to use comment services for advertising purposes. It isn't unusual for websites to ask users to register in order to use their sites, but many of these internet services find that requiring registration actually decreases their traffic, as users are reluctant to have to remember one more password, or to give their email address to one more organization who may send them unwanted messages.
As Prager himself says, there is a financial price for a website that might want to eliminate anonymity. That price is irrelevance. There will always be websites willing to allow anonymous posting, which would create a total competitive disadvantage for websites that do not. Because of this, anonymity will always exist on the internet, and to expect anything else is naïve.
It may well be that Prager proposed this “banning” of anonymity from the net as a way to vent his frustration against the hordes of trolls who have been leaving rude comments to his grandmotherly internet columns. Still, the idea is so outrageously dimwitted that it begs for a response. Prager shows a hopeless misunderstanding of the world that he lives in, not realizing that vitriol on the internet is something that he is just going to have to learn to accept. Anonymous comments may not be pleasant, and they may not be “good” for society, but in the long run they are essentially harmless. Rather than trying to design a hare-brained solution to a non-problem, Prager would do better to spend his time reconsidering his own misguided view of the world, and getting comfortable with the unalterability of reality. Once he has done this and begins writing columns that make practical sense, he may find that the rude comments do not come with such regularity.
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