> Here is the long promised article.
> On how incivility has destroyed Usenet :
> -----------------------------------------------------------------
> March 2007http://discovermagazine.com/2007/mar/jarons-world-internet-and-the-wa...
> Jaron's World: Sex, Drugs, and the Internet
> Does anonymity breed nastiness in the online world?
> by Jaron Lanier
>
> Allow me to advance a radical thesis: Today's outbreaks of nasty online behavior are directly linked to the history of the
> counterculture in America, and in particular to the war on drugs.
>
> In order to build a bridge over what might at first seem like a huge distance, I'll need to go over some background. It is widely
> perceived that the problem of uncivil conduct online has reached epidemic proportions. Michael Kinsley, a pioneer of confrontational
> political debate on cable television, recently wrote in Slate, "When you write for the Web, you open yourself up to breathtakingly
> vicious vitriol. People wish things on your mother, simply for bearing you, that you wouldn't wish on Hitler." David Pogue echoed
> this sentiment in The New York Times: "The deeper we sail into the new online world of communications, the sadder I get about its
> future. . . . What's really stunning is how hostile ordinary people are to each other online these days."
>
> But it's not true that people are universally nasty online. Behavior actually varies considerably from site to site. There are many
> reasonable theories about what brings out the best or worst online behaviors; demographics, economics, child-rearing trends, perhaps
> even the average time of day of usage could very well play a role. My opinion, however, is that certain details in the design of the
> user experience of a Web site are the most important factors.
>
> People who can spontaneously invent a pseudonym in order to post a comment on a blog or on YouTube are often remarkably mean. Buyers
> and sellers on eBay are usually civil, despite occasional annoyances like fraud. Based on those data you could propose that
> transient anonymity coupled with a lack of consequences is what brings out online idiocy. With more data, the hypothesis can be
> refined. Participants in Second Life (a virtual online world) are not as mean to each other as people posting comments to Slashdot
> (a popular technology news site) or engaging in edit wars on Wikipedia, even though all use persistent pseudonyms. I think the
> difference is that on Second Life the pseudonymous personality itself is highly valuable and requires a lot of work to create. So a
> better portrait of the culprit is effortless, ­consequence-free, transient anonymity in the service of a goal, like promoting a
> point of view, that stands entirely apart from one's identity or personality. Call it drive-by anonymity.
>
> Anonymity certainly has a place, but that place needs to be designed carefully. Voting and peer review are pre-Internet examples of
> beneficial anonymity. Sometimes it is desirable for people to be free of fear of reprisal or stigma in order to invoke honest
> opinions. But, as I have argued (in my November 2006 column), anonymous groups of people should be given only specific questions to
> answer, questions no more complicated than voting yes or no or setting a price for a product. To have a substantial exchange, you
> need to be fully present. That is why facing one's accuser is a fundamental right of the accused.
>
> Drive-by anonymity scares me because people connected over the Internet have significant power. That power can be beneficial, as
> when customers band together to force companies to act more ethically or when bystanders document bad behavior on YouTube.
> Unfortunately, scary outbreaks of online mob behavior also occur. Recently, a series of "Scarlet Letter" postings in China have
> incited online throngs to hunt down accused adulterers, to the point that some ­individuals have had to barricade themselves in
> their homes. It's not crazy to worry that, with millions of people connected through a medium that sometimes brings out their worst
> tendencies, massive, fascist-style mobs could rise up suddenly.
>
> This new style of anonymity has actually been incubating for a while. Before the Web, there were other types of online connections,
> of which Usenet was probably the most influential. Usenet was an online directory of topics where anyone could post comments,
> drive-by style. One portion of Usenet, called "alt," was reserved for nonacademic topics, including those that were oddball,
> pornographic, illegal, or offensive. A lot of the alt material was wonderful, such as information about obscure musical instruments,
> while some of it was sickening, such as tutorials on cannibalism.
>
> To get online in those days you usually had to have an academic, corporate, or military connection, so the Usenet population was
> mostly adult and educated. That didn't help. Users still turned into mean idiots online. That is one piece of evidence that it's the
> design, not the demographic, that concentrates bad behavior. Since there were so few people online, though, bad "netiquette" was
> then more of a curiosity than a problem.
>
> Why was drive-by anonymity supported by Usenet? You could argue that it was the easiest design to implement at the time, but I'm not
> sure that's true. All those academic, corporate, and military users belonged to large, well-structured organizations, so the hooks
> were immediately available to create a nonanonymous design. If that had happened, today's Web sites might not have inherited the
> drive-by design aesthetic.
>
> So if it wasn't laziness that promoted online anonymity, what did? Here's where I think the war on drugs has left us with an
> unfortunate legacy.
>
> The Internet's foundational design (going all the way back to its 1960s origins as the Defense Department's Arpanet) was initially
> motivated by the cold war. A decentralized communications network was supposed to have better odds of surviving a massive nuclear
> weapons attack. The next layers of code built on top of that base, including Usenet, were created mostly in the countercultural
> climate of the 1970s and 1980s, and particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area, which includes Silicon Valley. For that generation
> of digital designers, fears of a foreign attack were supplanted by fears of an overly intrusive government at home.
>
> I often found myself a little out of step with my peers in those pre-Web days. One notable example occurred at a lunch with a few of
> my Net-philic buddies in San Francisco in the early 1990s. This lunch turned out to have been the founding event for an admirable
> organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)-and I declined to become one of the founders. The hot issue of that
> moment was encryption. The EFF's initial top goal was to ensure that everyone would be able to use what was then thought of as
> "military-grade" encryption to communicate. I couldn't sign up for that mission. The thought of everyone communicating in absolute
> secrecy seemed lonely and scary to me.
>
> Well, I had never been worried about being arrested in America! I suspect that all the others at the table had experienced that
> worry, though. Experimentation with illegal, mind-altering drugs was the rule, not the exception, in computer culture at the time.
> For some reason I was never interested in drugs, so that fear wasn't something I knew directly. Many influential engineers were also
> a few years older than I was, the right age to have faced the draft to fight in Vietnam.
>
> My worries weren't entirely different; they just weren't prioritized in the same order. I was more afraid of what ordinary folks
> like us were capable of than of the police. The notion in the air those days was that the good, enlightened people would use digital
> networks to evade the bad enforcers, who answered only to an evil elite that was trying to oppress everyone else. I was more
> concerned that "the people" could suddenly get nasty. (My mother was sent to a concentration camp when she was only a little girl by
> a society that went mad en masse within a remarkably short period of time.)
>
> It's strange to think of all those brilliant engineers, who understood they were building the greatest source of new wealth in a
> generation, worrying about getting busted. It's even stranger to think of China's self-appointed antiadultery militias being enabled
> by the same privacy-seeking behaviors of America's old hippies. This all comes down to a question of balance: Techniques that help
> repel the power of one mob can become the source of excessive power for a different mob.
>
> The idea that freedom meant protecting the privacy of bands of bad boys was not just part of the character of coastal, liberal
> America-it swept the whole country. In the 1970s there was widespread discontent in the heartland with the newly imposed
> 55-mile-per-hour speed limit. A populist outlaw culture rose up around a media technology, and that technology was CB radio.
> Truckers and those who idolized them would make up untraceable names, or handles, and warn each other about where the police were on
> the freeway, waiting to issue speeding tickets. In short, the CB craze was another source of the allure of instant easy anonymity.
> Today's anonymous screen names and e-mail addresses even resemble those old CB handles.
>
> Now that most of America, and much of the world, has Internet access, it really matters if online design is bringing out mean and
> irresponsible aspects of people's personalities. At the same time, the fears of the EFF types are still worth considering. If
> anonymity were banished today, would some company or agency compile a dossier on what each person had said or downloaded online,
> simply by watching? That information would be so valuable that it would probably be collected. Then we would have to deal with
> record companies suing over each song a kid downloaded improperly, marketers targeting each of us with ...
>
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