“Don’t post anonymously unless you really might be in danger,” he advises, because you dehumanise yourself too. And it must be a principled stance you take. Everyone has an “inner troll”. No-one, given the right circumstances, can otherwise resist the pleasures of “drive-by anonymity”. It’s a serious issue, he believes. Two factors came together to allow the rise of Nazism in 1930s Germany: economic humiliation and adherence to a collectivist ideology. “We already have the ideology in its new digital packaging, and it’s entirely possible we could face dangerously traumatic economic shocks in the coming decades.”
Indeed, the new ideology is already entrenched. Web 2.0 culture is embedded in the most celebrated internet phenomena of our times: Open source, Wikipedia for example, aims to be a single book containing all knowledge. It lacks the context that informs reader discernment, and the authorship that informs reader trust. Compare that with a lesson of history: societies that follow a single book are totalitarian. “Any singular, exclusive book, even the collective one accumulating in the cloud, will become a cruel book if it is the only one available.” Our civilisation is built on libraries and authors, not portals and fragments. Web 2.0 puts both of the former under threat.”
Mark Vernon quotes Jaron Lanier
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