Adam Back wrote:
Anonymous writes:
There is a cost with anonymity: people take you less seriously, none of your reputation is on the line. Anonmous persistent personas might be better as they allow reputation to be tracked.
True, if your concern is to be listened to by those concerned about reputation. If your aim is for your post to stand upon its own facts and logic, however, then a 0-reputation persona may be preferable. There were a series of "Jim Bell is a loon." postings which I found to be uninformative in regard to the points they seemed to want to ramrod past the readers by virtue of discounting the message via slamming the messenger.
So the end result might well be, not the assassination of those involved, but the lessening of their power by virtue of depleting their funds, which leads to a more equal playing field.
I'm not sure this follows.
If a corporate can use it's wealth to influence other groups, for example by assasinating key employees of opposition company, it may well get richer as a result.
I see the value of AP not in the assassination of others, but in the potential for a wide-ranging group of individuals to drain the assets of their oppressors. Large grocery chains have a history of moving into an area, then undercutting the little guys until they are forced out of business, whereupon they raise their prices outrageously, unfettered by competition. AP might well serve as an avenue for the little guys to band together to target these operations and remove the profitability of this mode of monopolistic attack. The TruthMonger multi-user persona might well serve as a similar example of raising the cost of doing "character assassination" business. I might well be Jim Bell, himself. However, rather than saying, "Jim Bell is a loon, so we can discount all of TruthMonger's arguments.", one is forced to deal with the validity of the arguments, facts, and logic in the posts. Certainly a persona with built-up reputation capital can be an asset in many situations, but there is also a time when anonymous communications can serve as a conduit for weaning out those enamored with personality issues, and who lack the discernment to judge the true content and logic underlying a message. TruthMonger