Thursday, August 13, 2009

Arguing about morons

Here begins the newest, most amazing musing from The Loudest Fan. Bow appropriately:

Recently, I have taken up the habit of perusing bulletin boards of awesome similar to my own. Most recently, Rachel of culture.spawn has caught my ever-brilliant eye with this post: READ THIS.

While her other posts are devoted to the archaic (read: useless) medium of literature, this one touches on my area of expertise: morons of the interwebs (read: you). Her rant essentially suggests that otherwise decent human beings abuse the gift of anonymity provided by the interwebs, thus dis-entitling them on a moral level to the privileges of privacy and protection from retaliation.

To this, I have a rebuttal: we are not dealing with otherwise decent human beings, and this is nothing new or specific to the internet. Who hasn't experienced bathroom-stall graffiti? Even better, how many of us have never contributed? My point is that those who have a proclivity for abusing anonymity are the ones who do so. I don't imagine that everyone who visits a bathroom is a closet white-supremacist, itching to scrawl swastikas and "Fuk the Joos and Blax" everywhere, but any space surveyed would certainly suggest so. The internet is simply the flame that such moths are drawn to (just insert "lolz" in front of the messages you'd find in a restroom, and you'd be surprised how similar it is to any given comment thread), and it also happens to have other redeeming qualities that draw the rest of us, allowing a different kind of interaction than the bathroom stall example (in that people largely ignore bathroom stall communication).

The only solution (one which I support 100%) to the abuse of anonymity is a plutocratic exclusion of access to the internet of everybody whom I choose is unworthy.

P.S. Rachel specifically mentions the abuse of gossiping anonymously: "If I'm out with my friends, they will not tease me in front of strangers about scandalous things." I think I'll turn the tables on that one. For some juicy scoop on the sordid life of Rachel, click here: JUICY GOSSIP.

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