This is probably obvious, but if you’re not revealing your public or “meatsphere” identity in blog and internet discussions, then you have no business participating in these discussions. I’m pretty lax with this rule. So long as you’re civil, respectful, and play above board, I care little about whether or not you reveal your identity. However, if you wish to engage in any sort of critique, snark, insult, or attack, I take it as a basic principle that you’re obligated to reveal your identity. Why? Because you should have an existential stake in what you say. The rest of us do insofar as we speak through and in the name of our own meatsphere identities, so there’s no reason this shouldn’t be requested of the rest of you who would like to participate. The very fact that anyone speaks without revealing their public identity reveals that they are either ashamed of what it is that they are claiming or that they realize what they are claiming violates norms of civility and public discourse. Just as Kant recognizes that the person who wishes to tell a lie recognizes that they would like to make themselves an exception to a rule such that they want others to recognize that truth telling is a readily recognized condition of honesty, those who participate online in an abusive and combative fashion without revealing their identity would like everyone else to recognize norms of civil discourse without themselves obeying those conditions. You would like to attack the credibility of others without putting your own credibility on the line (and oddly those who have contested this obvious principle have often been among the strongest defenders of deontological Kantian ethics in this domain… this begs the true psychological and political motives of such people). So hey, critique and attack all you want, but at least have the guts to put your own name on the line professionally. What are you hiding? Why are you ashamed of what you say? In the meantime, if you are a coward and have no stake in the game, if you are only concerned with my stake in these communications or dialogues without putting yourself in them, then I feel no obligation to post your comments. What is it, again, that you’re hiding? C’mon folks, fess up, let’s see you put yourself on the line. Oh that’s right, you had nothing to offer to discussion in the first place. If you did you wouldn’t be hiding who you are. Your secretive identities reveals the truth of the position from which you argue.
April 11, 2011
Internet Blogosphere Participation Conditions
Posted by larvalsubjects under Uncategorized[14] Comments
Larval Subjects . 
April 12, 2011 at 4:10 am
Are we talking about academic affiliations? If so, I guess I should declare I don’t have any. But then — what sort of public identity would you like me, and people like me, to declare? Is it a matter of posting full names?
I ask knowing well that, in the posthuman world as you describe it, machines can transform honest curiosity into ad hominem attack.
April 12, 2011 at 6:20 am
@Stan I don’t even think Levi wants last names and such. I think this might be good in respects where it is an academic thing. The way I perceived this post was a calling out of those who post comments essentially anonymous that are nothing more than snakry and/or rude comments (aka “trolls”).
@levi- I understand the desire to have people reveal themselves, it is very frustrating to have to deal with trolls. However make sure this specific frustration doesn’t cloud thinking about invisibility and anonymity on a more critical/meta level. Many times the mystery and anonymity of an author has a very powerful effect on the content of the writing. Two of the good examples i have on the top of my head right now is The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection, and also may ’68 graffitti (in this case small, snarky, disrespectul comments “posted” autonomously did have critical force in rupturing the status quo at the time.
April 12, 2011 at 6:29 am
I personally believe that if one participates in a trollish manner anonymously they are to be immediately excluded from discussion. It’s just too easy to shoot spitwads from the back of the room without having any stake in the discussion whatsoever. As I said, I only think this principle holds in those instances where the person comports him or herself in a trollish manner. Otherwise it’s irrelevant.
April 12, 2011 at 7:44 am
The very fact that anyone speaks without revealing their public identity reveals that they are either ashamed of what it is that they are claiming or that they realize what they are claiming violates norms of civility and public discourse.
Is that what ‘Dr Sinthome’ was doing?
If you don’t like what people are saying, by all means tell them to fuck off and don’t come back; it’s your blog, so that’s your prerogative. However, I think it’s a bit of a stretch to say that anybody who doesn’t reveal their RW identity is somehow out of order. It doesn’t seem to fit very well with arguments for posthumanism, etc.
April 12, 2011 at 8:08 am
Johneffay,
Your reading comprehension seems to be wanting. I said that if one behaves in a trollish, snarky, or intensely critical way then they should be obligated to reveal their real world identity. They should have an actual stake in what they’re saying and doing, especially in that instance where they’re addressing someone who is “out”. There is a disproportionate and unequal power relationship in these instances. The person behaving in this way risks nothing in their engagement while nonetheless striving to damage the person they are addressing, while the person who is out risks a great deal. That said, if a person is not behaving in that way, there’s no issue. I’m not sure why you would see this as somehow at odds with posthumanism. That’s a rather bizarre conclusion to reach that seems to be based on a pretty thin understanding of what posthumanism is. I am rather curious as to why such a ground rule would be upsetting to you, unless, of course, you wish to benefit from such abuse without risk to yourself. You do tend to engage online in a rather truculent way.
April 12, 2011 at 8:32 am
Levi,
As my comprehension is wanting, perhaps you would explain what the sentence by yourself that I quoted means. I know you said you were lax in enforcing if – fair enough. My question was why you hid your identity so carefully for so long, but now expect others to be upfront about theirs (although you generously waive this demand so long as they are polite).
Posthumanism – As I’m sure you’re aware some posthumanist theorists celebrate the use of the Net as a breakdown of the reified humanist subject by means of human/digital hybrids, avatars, what you will. This includes the construction of multiple identities, sexes, etc. allowing participants to extend the possibilities open to them beyond the RW. Anonymity is one of the features some of these theorists lionize in this regard.
You already know who I am, as does anybody else who can be bothered to stick my moniker into Google. I use the name I do to distinguish myself from other John Applebys. I have no stake in being anonymous, and I serioulsy doubt I am any more truculent than yourself.
April 12, 2011 at 8:41 am
John,
Like you my identity was easily found by anyone who cared to search for it when I went by Sinthome. There was no care taken in hiding it at all. I regularly talked about my book, location, articles, presentations, etc. There’s nothing about a position that is ontologically posthuman that entails that one must celebrate digital/human hybrids, avatars, etc., etc., etc. When I evoke the term “posthumanism” I am referring to an ontological framework that isn’t humancentric. It sounds like you’re running posthumanism together with postmodernism, though admittedly in a number of theorists the two get run together. Returning to your point in an earlier post, you said that being my blog and all I’m free to say someone is an asshole, etc. I’m also free to say that I believe the price of admission is that people who are being particularly combative and snarky should be upfront and public as to who they are. If one isn’t I believe there’s no place for them in public discussion.
April 12, 2011 at 3:06 pm
I just started following you via feed reader recently and really love the academic content. I wanted to note regarding this post that you came out a little heavy handed at the start. By the end I realized you were primarily talking about trolls and other poorly mannered denizens of online spaces, but you started with a really strong claim regarding use of real identity in “blog and internet discussions” more generally. While I can generally get behind that claim in the specific context of academic (or other professional) interactions online, there are definitely many forums where anonymity is of great value for people who are not trolling (say women avoiding gender based attacks on their positions), and for that matter online spaces where anonymity is part and parcel of participation.
April 12, 2011 at 5:46 pm
Good points Moses.
April 13, 2011 at 12:45 am
Levi, you’re absolutely right to hold contributors accountable for the things they say. This community is in your stewardship. As a reader of blogs we necessarily measure the ethos of the blogger. Either I have faith in your intellectual commitment to this blog, which includes your monitoring of the comments, or I don’t, in which case I wouldn’t be here at all.
April 17, 2011 at 1:58 pm
The timing of this post after the long discussion on Marxism makes me wonder if you were referring to me, Levi. Especially since you were talking about those who “critique, snark, insult, or attack” in thread posts. But I assure you this is my true identity.
April 21, 2011 at 6:22 am
Well, if we agree to bypass the highly irritating t word, we still have the death of the author to deal with. There’s something ‘good’ to the liminality of names’ proliferation on the web. There’s also creativity going on. More could be said of these names we choose. As many of the comments note, it’s not that difficult to clarify who such and such is. In the object case, writing “under” a different name helps the object think. ‘the object’ not hiding. ‘the object’ writing out from under the author’s death. As Ecology Without Nature has noted, ‘the object’ need our mojo back! However, as EWM has also more recently noted, there’s an anxiety about this disclosure: (a)”If you think withdrawal is spatial, material or temporal, you are smuggling an ontic prejudice into an ontological realm…(b) Our culture privileges extraversion over introversion. We don’t like things that are hidden. Everything must be visible (Twitter, phone cameras, etc.). Queer theory (and queer ecology) must redress this (frankly) violence. I respectfully suggest that the anxiety that everything must be seen fuels some of the anxiety about withdrawal.” Personally, the object found ‘dissapearance’/and death of the author subject=helpful in some ways, but it was wanting. The Lampost’ experience of OOO suggests that OOO sorts this old chestnut out, if only because it balances out subjects and objects, rather than focussing on the poor old, correlatively trapped subject with all its woes (no wonder we had woes–ignoring and effacing the objects came at a price). the object digress. (Here the object is following EWN’s suggestion to replace “I” with ‘the object’. In the Taoist poem EWN does this to, it works brilliantly. BTW: ‘lovely comment thread. cheers, from Daz Hastings.
April 21, 2011 at 6:30 am
One question: was that typo “we speak through and in the name of our own meatsphere identities” intentional? I’m not being meta here. I just hapen to like the iddea of “our” Meatsphere Identities. It feels like a good concept.
April 21, 2011 at 7:57 pm
Copy that Levi.