There’s a serious problem when the degree of attention becomes asymmetrical. Many more people can focus on you than you can focus on in return, and flood every line of communication you have (digital or in real life) with hateful or harassing messages. Our infrastructure isn’t built for this; you can’t sort through emails or texts fast enough to eliminate the unsolicited ones, your voicemail will run out of space, and your ability to walk to the store may become literally impossible when a mob of people surround you. We are also not built psychologically to be okay having to monitor literally millions of potential threats or allies. There is a reason celebrities have to hire people whose sole job it is to protect them from this sort of harassment, and those are people who have already opted out of privacy.
Does not seem like an intractable problem: penalize obstruction of free movement, mandate cryptographically signed approval of email contact for organizations, filter the rest with a whitelist.
Not saying it is easy, but definitely not impossible.
On the other hand, I use my real full name here and most everywhere else. I agree that explicitly rejecting anonymity is a solution, but strongly disagree that it would work for everyone or should be forced on anyone.
I agree it wouldn't work for everyone but I actually find using True Names a good filter for my own actions. When I write something, it forces me to ask whether I'm OK with people associating it with real me. And if I'm not, with fairly rare exceptions, that's probably because it's something mean, snarky, or offensive that probably doesn't really improve the Internet in any way.
OK – you first! Everything you do or say in public will now be documented and that documentation easily searchable under your real name. Have a nice day!
Village is a close-knit community where everyone else may easily punish you if you abuse the system of communal knowledge.
In a wider world people can abuse it but won't get any consequences at all because of enormous resources needed to monitor for relatively minor things. So the example is quite irrelevant.
I grew up in a village and I think it was worse. Every mistake and misstep was known by all. Prejudices existed before you were born and couldn’t be escaped. “Close knit community” is a nice wa my of saying lots of busybody assholes (and also some kind and caring folks too).
There was a whole different set of pressure and I’d take internet shaming over not being able to live in certain areas or date certain people any day.
I empathise with your emotion but that has more to do with how closed groups work, local culture and basic human nature. It's not about abuse of uncontrollable information flow. Try to leak some villager's "public secrets" to "outsiders" while still living in the village and see for yourself what will happen to you.
Interestingly, there was a complex set of layers about what secrets were leakable (“Betsy is a whore when drunk”) vs not (“Joe is a pedarast and don’t let your kids be alone with him.”).
But my point is that villages suck too. I voted with my feet over the problems of a giant crowd of people potentially knowing your business, vs a small group always knowing your business and constantly interfering.
And I don't judge the choice. But implying that by switching one problem for another makes either of them not worthy of solving or considering on its own, because the other seems bigger, just feels wrong.
