Future World III - Big Brother

Follow this link for part I on this series.
Follow this link for part II on this series.

I was amazed by my own brilliance. The solution seemed so obvious and functional. Of course it would be difficult to implement and lots of scenarios would have to be thought over and over. Creating a system to identify everybody in the Internet is a Herculean job, worthy of big company (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and others at the same level) efforts.

There was also potential to earn some money with it. Placement of ads in the website, a fee to obtain the IIN (Internet Identification Number), synchronization of data through the IIN and the works. This potential made my plan even more brilliant and I was enthused about it. I had to share it with people. I had to have external feedback. Not that I would pitch the idea to anybody and I don't even know if this is the first time someone thinks of it. I just wanted to know what other people thought about it.

So I mentioned it to a friend who's also been a netizen for a long time and happens to work in a field closely related to it (he runs an amazingly popular website and makes tons of money). He listened to my idea with his usual attention and he also seemed amazed. He had a look of astonishment in his face and I thought that, after overcoming the brilliance of my idea, he would embrace me and say something like "Let's make this happen and make money together!"

Instead, what I got was his disappointed face and the words "You're getting more and more conservative with age."

I confronted him with my examples of suicides (described on part I), how children were using the Internet and that we should make it a safer place. He argued that although dangerous, since the Internet is a place like anywhere else, the weak will always suffer and the strong will always prevail. Those children, in his opinion, would have failed anyway. Furthermore, he said people should have the right to anonymity, otherwise we would have this Big Brother controlling what everybody does.

Funny thing, I concluded. I thought I was being innovative and promoting a safer Internet, but my friend thought I was just being conservative and maybe advocating a state of absolute control in the virtual world. A dictatorship, shall we say.

I understand his arguments and they're not completely lacking in merit. After all, the real world provides us with opportunities for anonymity. I can send a letter and not write down my name and address. I can also write stuff in somebody's walls. I can make prank calls. I can place an anonymous ad on a newspaper. I can drop a letter in somebody's front lawn.

Probably there are lots of other things I could do and still stay anonymous, but the point here is that there's a lot of work involved in the process and there's always the chance of getting caught in the act (in at least one of the cases I mentioned, I can go to jail if I get caught). In the real world it's not easy to be anonymous, not mentioning the fact that people who want to stay anonymous are probably involved in suspicious affairs, like crime.

My friend and I didn't have much time to talk on that day so what he probably didn't get (and I didn't have the smarts to explain) is that there's a difference between privacy and anonymity. I'm all for privacy. If there's somebody smoking weed or jerking off to a picture of Hyori Lee in the privacy of their homes, I have nothing to do with it.


(By the way, Hyori is looking damn good in that picture. I may have to exercise my privacy later.)

So in the Internet, I'm also all for privacy. As far as I'm concerned, if you're there downloading all the porn that you can take or reading the most offensive material in the world, I have nothing to do with it (as long as it doesn't involve pigs and/or eels). But if you're there writing offensive posts or hate mail maybe somebody should know who you are just in case you cause some serious damage.

While privacy is good and should be respected, anonymity can be very dangerous. And in the Internet, doing things anonymously doesn't require work like in real life. On the contrary, in the Internet, anonymity is facilitated and even encouraged.