HERE’S THE ANSWER
Gleaned from this thread as of 8/18 2:18PM
At least I think this is the answer. Or answers.
-
Because when you take the IRL identity stuff out of the process it makes communication smoother.
-
Tradition. Yes, we do it this way because it’s the way we’ve been doing it for a long time. Since the birth of Facebook or whatever.
-
So crazy people won’t track me down. Which seems crazy. But that’s just the kind half-acknowledged half-conscious consensual fantasy that people seem to buy into. So maybe it’s true.
Individual data points like “I take pilates”, “I work nights and weekends”, and “I live in Smalltown, ST” might not mean anything on their own, but if you can connect this data to a single person, then realize there’s only one pilates studio in Smalltown, then look up their hours and notice there’s only one day class on weekdays, you can make a reasonable guess as to a regular time when a person is away from home. This is called data brokerage.
This is a comically contrived example; the real danger is in the association of countless data points spread across millions of correlated identities. It’s not just your data, it’s the association of your data with that of your friends and family. Most people are constantly streaming their location, purchases, beliefs, and affiliations out to anyone who cares enough to look. Bad actors may collate their data and use it to take advantage of them, and the only move they have is to ask for prohibitive legislation. As if we don’t already have prohibitive legislation.
Anonymity is expensive, inconvenient, and fragile, but it’s the only mechanism that protects individuals from the information economy, which I would put right next to ecology in terms of critical 21st-22nd century social problems. It also helps us resist censorship, but that’s a different essay.