“The dual nature of anonymity and shared identity can allow a new reserved civic participation that can make us more comfortable interacting with fellow community members who can otherwise seem very different or foreign to us, which can perhaps also increase our tolerance of diversity.”
This reads like some kind of cathedral psyop to accomplish pre-canned regime priorities, like the “misinformation” thing from a few years ago. Increasing tolerance of diversity isn't a good thing. Diversity, even when it isn’t a stand-in for savages terrorizing normal people with impunity, is a complication and friction of all social processes. In fact, i would say the great value of anonymity is the ability to decrease our tolerance for diversity. On the internet, no one knows you’re a dog, and no one knows where you live, so you can be held to a common meritocratic standard without special treatment backed by intimidation. This is evidently contrary to the aims of diversity-pushers.
This kind of document always comes across as a bit tone-deaf. “We need to break up these self-sorted local social groups” and then in the very next sentence “we have unfortunately experienced a decline in participation in fraternities, churches, etc”. Does the author stop to wonder whether the latter is an obvious and direct consequence of the former? Forcing diversity into specialized local contexts just fucks them up causing people to leave.
I propose the opposite plan: let us use anonymity, local sorting, reputation systems, and digital mechanisms to create spaces that can be maximally hostile to diversity, maximally specialized into a particular worldview and way of life, and utterly without imposed fetters. I have a dream of armies of anonymous frat bros reared on out-of-control “filter bubble” forum discussions spilling out in a great jihad across the known universe, terrorizing cowering masses of overly diverse and therefore weak normie schoolmarms. This would totally solve the “bowling alone” problem and use much digital democracy to solve many other social problems, but it wouldnt be at all to the liking of people like the OP author.
>>2396 I had been assuming that "sharing is not endorsement" is to be assumed. But I definitely have been lazy when it comes to contextualizing the information. My objective was to see how others saw that book, and thank you, 0x3f6 for your opposite plan. In return, I propose to think about how to formulate your plan in the body of a working document that would do better what the digitalist papers try to do.
To dive deeper into the approach, anonymity and reputation are antithetical -- but maybe the extropian or cyberpunk communities have a solution.
There's much fascinating history of how the Freemasons brought the current order (that's now struggling) through their own period of subversive cryptography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copiale_cipher
>>2435 Why are anonymity and reputation antithetical? If you track them socially of course they are, but if you have some system of automated reputation tracking that can be kept secret, you can have social anonymity with reputation. I always distinguish social anonymity from technical anonymity. I think social anonymity is more important, and technical anonymity only matters as a species of social anonymity. Social anonymity is the ability to speak without being widely known. Technical anonymity is the ability to speak without being knowable by anyone. The only actors in the difference there are state actors, police, hackers, and the administrator. Those are annoying, but you can basically work with that. But because of social anonymity without technical anonymity, we are already having interesting conversations here we could not otherwise have.
I look forward to your anonbro jihad plan.
To confirm, sharing is not endorsement, but if you share something from stale trust and safety types, i will dunk on it. If it spawns a good discussion, post it, even if the discussion is going to be making fun or contradicting it. Your reputation is not negative affected.