George Dafermos' Weblog

Wednesday, February 18, 2004

The End of Anonymity

no offence meant to seth godin, but it seems he's not done offering excuses to marketing for more spam, worse, he's now taken to turning cyberspace to a government+business haven.

anonymity online may seem like an uneccessary burden, an obstacle that ought to be overcome, for secure e-commerce transactions to take off. as everyone who's ever read larry lessig's code, which remains the best book, inho, on this matter, an architecture that enables anonymity may have certain downsides (especially from the point of view of governments wishing to keep an eye on citizems, and wishing to continue getting their taxes from commodities sold and bought online, etc)but it also undermines malicious control. we accept that anonymity may hinder the growth in e-commerce, and it may prove a pain in the ass for governments wishing to track dissidents, and so forth, however, we, as activists, also value the contribution of anonymity in our communications.

a good example that comes to mind is remailers. say i work for a powerful and unscrupulous corporation and i want to alert a senior state officer to some wrongdoing, but i fear that my employer might retaliate. what do i do? do i use my *legitimate, corporate* email account? no i use a remailer instead. the list of examples is dramatically long, from reporting abuses of human rights, to organising revolutions.

to godin's credit, many of his ideas are brilliand, and this is why i have a problem with some of his ideas = exactly because his ideas are so influential. so, when godin says we need to put an end to anonymity online, people listen. and his arguments are so well articulated, that many people fall prey to his extraordinary literary wit and opinionated arguments. well, let it be heard, not everyone immersed in cyberspace is obsessed with buying stuff securily and upholding the illegitimate governemt claims to playing big brother.

via joi ito

9:42:58 PM

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