On Friday Gawker’s Adrian Chen dropped his much-anticipated article exposing the IRL identity of star Reddit troll “Violentacrez.” The article raised some interesting questions about how Reddit is managed and its close ties to some unseemly characters. But even more interesting is the debate it has ignited over whether internet users have a right to their own anonymity.
This is a a topic we’ve debated here before and it really is a subject worth discussing (especially since Crasstalkers rarely agree on anything). That’s why I particularly enjoyed the comment that former Gawker writer (and longtime Friend of Crasstalk) Richard Lawson posted in reply to Chen’s article Friday.
As someone who’s existed on both sides of this coin, anonymous internet person and public internet person, I have to say that it still remains, five years since I (perhaps foolishly) wandered into the basement that is the internet, thoroughly shocking how for-granted people take the idea that because they want to be anonymous and completely unchecked for the things they say while anonymous that that should then be an irrevocable and indisputable reality.
It’s like the people who show up to movies two minutes before it starts and are simply shocked that there are no good seats left. I know that you think you are entitled to something because you are you and the world should bend to meet your expectations of it, but unfortunately there is, y’know, the rest of the world to be considered.
Did this guy embark upon all of his awful nonsense with the self-made and perpetuated assumption that he could do so with impunity because he would like that to be so? Yes, he most certainly did. But his wanting does not, and likely will never, make that an actual reality. People claiming that Adrian (a friend, yes, whatever) did something remotely analogous to what Violentacrez did and is therefore a hypocrite is patently absurd. There is no concrete right to anonymity on the internet. That anonymity is largely maintained by privately owned websites is simply evidence of social contracts at work. But that social contract is not binding to the rest of us who did not enter into it.
Adrian found information about this guy and, being that this guy is a festering loser with a moral compass pointing south, Adrian decided to share what he found. That this asshole and his defenders think that some sacred promise was broken — that the not wanting to get caught somehow guarantees an absolute freedom from getting caught — is the height of stupidity and really tells me that people fundamentally do not understand that the internet is not something owned by one’s experience of it.
Could someone find my OK Cupid profile (please don’t go looking, it’s sad) and make wild fun of it? Of course. Would I prefer that no one share its sad, gory details with the rest of the world? Certainly. But that does not mean, in any way, that I am inherently protected from anyone doing that. Hopefully people wouldn’t do that because (arguably) a dumb OK Cupid profile isn’t doing any harm. We’re not talking absolutes here, after all. Some social contracts on the internet are well worth upholding. But the backlash to this story is like someone getting caught (by a civilian, the police are a different matter) jerking off behind a tree in the park and then indignantly saying “But I was standing behind this tree! You weren’t supposed to see me!”
I feel bad for this guy in that I am a human being who can’t help but feel some measure of empathy for someone who’s in a bad way. But, frankly, he got exactly what was coming to him. He acted foolishly and abhorrently and without any thought to anyone else’s experience of the internet or their lives outside of it. I’m sorry that he, and his apologists, are now realizing that the expectation of a consequence-free world doesn’t then magically make itself manifest, unquestioned, by sheer dint of that expectation.
ETA: I realize that in certain instances, like with illegal hacking and email and whatnot, there is a reasonable expectation of privacy and protection on the internet that can be unjustly violated. But in cases like these, when things were willfully done in public forums that are, by definition, universally accessible, crying foul because someone did the (completely legal) legwork of figuring out who is behind the username, especially when that someone was doing invasive and extremely hurtful things, seems totally childish.
Well put, Richard.
