Robert Hettinga wrote:
I'm sitting here listening to Rush, and he's talking about Pierre Salanger's recent "discovery" ;-) of the anonymously posted friendly-fire TWA800 internet message of a few months back.
I must say I was pleased (and, I'm sorry to say, surprised) not to hear people talking about that "conspiracy" on this list. I gave a friend at the Merc hell for publishing a story saying that maybe there was something to it because there was some web site with "details of possible trajectories and everything." Morons.
In the process of discounting the story, and praising FBI pal Kalstrom, he bemoans the anonymity of the net, calling it a "nest of kooks", (mixed in with all the other "right thinking people", of course...).
Given this, and, of course, our own fun and games with anonymous, er, slander, on this list, I'm frequently tempted to agree with him.
You people are wimps. The only real effect of the good doctor's rants has been, as Mr. May indicated, to get the good doctor on the "don't hire" list.
After all, if someone says something wrong about you, how do find them and punish them? How do you know what the truth is, unless you know who said it?
You get off your ass and find out directly. How about if you know exactly who it is, but you know him to be judgement-proof, since he's already saddled with over $12 million in libel and wrongful-death suits? It's called "reputation capital."
Until, of course, I remember that anonymity is unpreventable, and, frankly, economically necessary for true internet commerce.
Remember what agrarianism did to try to stop industrialism (up to, and including, socialism <he said, trolling for leftists>), and expect the worst, folks.
People are just going to have to be smarter than they've ever been. The Net enables sharing and verifying real information just as it enables disinformation. Sure disinformation will always be cheaper to produce and more appealing to the eye (fact is harder to accept than fiction because fictional plots are written to make sense), but disinformation tends to cancel itself out. Work on archives, reputation control, and openness. Disinformation, to be truly effective, requires a monopoly on information. More speech, not less. (Keep in reserve the retort that anonymity is quite big in "the mainstream," too. How many key stories cite "well-placed administration sources"?) The opposite of the Black Unicorn approach to nym safety is the Liz Taylor approach: "As long as they spell my name right, I don't care." Nobody I care about is going to listen to some crank, or if they do, they'll email me to check the facts, or if they don't, I have alternative outlets for information. As long as I live in a free country with a free Internet, they can't touch me. Oh, btw, it's helped that I've resigned myself to forever working for decent people who don't give in to such bullshit. -rich