Don't Wear a Mask on the Internet

In almost all circumstances, anonymous online writing is wrong.

It’s hard for me to remember if it was sixth grade or seventh when I built my first website. I'm going to assume that it was sixth, because I know for sure that I made my second website in seventh grade.

The first one was on “Geocities,” one of the first platforms to enable people to build and host websites for free. The user had to have some basic understanding of HTML in order to properly position the various elements on the page. I still don't really know HTML all these years later, even though I have to go in and make fixes to it with articles. On HTML I'm akin to a mechanic at a chain shop; I can do the equivalent of an oil change, I suppose.

I'm pretty sure that first website was all about “Star Trek.” Sixth grade was probably the peak of my Trekkie phase. My first online handle was “Spock13D” — 13, my age, and D for my name. But by 7th grade (1997,) we'd switched to America Online and I could use their built-in website software.

It was much easier than Geocities, and the site I made on my DMS4Christ account (an email formulation soon imitated by others in my youth group) appeared much more colorful and vibrant. I called it "A Young Christian's View," and wrote short essays about current events and cultural matters. If I go back into my files, I can probably find some of these still saved somewhere. I certainly still have documents from those years in other files.

Dear God, and then it drops down on me like a wheelbarrow's worth of red bricks:

I've been writing "controversial" material about religion and politics since I was 13.

And posting it on the internet under my own name.

Almost 30 years later, I'm still fucking doing it. I'm still writing about these subjects, using the word "fuck" in order to do so with proper accuracy, except now it's become a career. Writing crazy shit on the internet that pisses people off: That's just been life. "Oh, here we go; before breakfast let's knock off a polemic raging against this terrible film or that bonkers theology or this corrupt politician."

And yes, of course there are consequences to it. Certainly I've burnt bridges before with what I've written. But you know what, though? I don't regret it for a moment.

Has this cost me some "professional opportunities?" Most definitely. Years writing the truth about Islamist terrorist groups and antisemitic movements from far right to far left has its consequences. There are certainly plenty of publications which would not want to publish me and companies which would not want to hire me.

But why would I want to work for them? Any doors that have closed to me because of the truths that I feel convicted to write are ultimately doors which I would never want to pass through in the first place.

Why would anyone in their right mind want to work with and associate with those who do not respect them?

Well, a lot of people aren't in their right minds. They're in their money minds. And that's why they want to hide behind a mask in their writing online.

A whole lot of people out there using the internet want to write and rant about subjects far more controversial than what I've built a career on, and then they want to suffer no consequences for it. They want to put on a mask and then spray graffiti all over the walls everywhere. And then they want to be respected, like those of us who have written under our own names and with our own words beside our own faces.

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I have had this argument so many times with anonymous "commenters" and faceless critics responding to the articles I write under my own name.

They want to insist that anonymous writing is legitimate, that there are plenty of scenarios justifying their behavior.

Sure: In cases in which the author would be in danger of being murdered by an authoritarian government, criminal gangs, or terrorist groups, then yes, we can have that discussion.

But you, dashing off a tweet about how there are only two genders under the hallowed username “007catturd69"—are hardly the Founding Fathers strategizing under the pseudonym "Publius.” You're just an asshole without the courage to stand by an opinion that remains entirely commonplace. Nobody is going to "cancel" you for having the party-line position of Fox News.

If you are a serious person who wants to be taken seriously, you need to be honest about who you are, and you need to stand by what you say. Communication can only function if people are willing to take responsibility for what they have to say.

And henceforth: I am not taking seriously anything written by an anonymous person online anymore. If someone is not willing to stand by what they have to say, then I am not interested in whatever that might be, because the truth is, we have no idea who is saying it or what their real motives for doing so are.

Every anonymous account should now be assumed to be a bot, written with AI, that is only here in order to stir up cultural divisions at the direction of foreign espionage agencies.

I am going to start blocking and un-subscribing from anonymous substack accounts.

Anonymous accounts can certainly still comment, and I may still answer them, but at the first instance of any trolling, they're blocked.

I urge everyone else to adopt a similar policy:

• Write under your real name online.

• Don't write something online that you wouldn't say in real life and wouldn't defend.

• Ignore anonymous people on the internet because, for all we know, they are a 13-year-old in their parents’ basement, or Igor, FSB disinformation operative extraordinaire.

The ethos of anonymity in early internet culture from the 1990s was never an absolute value. It was one component of some communities, and it was isolated to groups where that sort of chaos and deception was simply the norm.

The internet as a whole, and the culture flowing from it off of our devices and into our brains, didn't have to go this direction.

And you and I using these technologies don't have to keep going this way, either.

So here—I am giving you permission now:

No more anonymous internet culture. We've had enough.

NO MORE MASKS

It's time to start more aggressively blocking and cutting out the viewpoints of anyone who will not take responsibility for the "controversial" ideas they feel so compelled to write on the internet.

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