Amitai Etzioni posts on the benefits and (mostly) the hazards of online anonymity. The point is, in one sense, well taken. Anyone who’s watched online fora degenerate knows that without some sort of accountability, online conversation follows a discursive variant of Gresham’s Law: bad posting drives out good. But Etzioni closes his plea for less anonymity (possibly a good idea for at least some fora, if that’s the policy moderators want to adopt) with the claim that this will make the cyber-culture (increasingly indistinguishable from culture, period) “more honest.”

Now, I guess you could call it “more honest” that people are revealing who they are when they post, though I don’t know if explicitly and obviously posting under a pseudonym is ipso facto “dishonest.” (As opposed to, say, pretending to be someone else.) More importantly, though, we’ve got to weigh in the extent to which an inability to post anonymously discourages the airing of honest opinions. Etzioni does mention political dissidents, but there are plenty of people beyond, say, Chinese democracy activists, who might have contentious (even if nonpolitical) opinions they don’t necessarily want their parents, spouses, employers, neighbors, children, or other people to know about. We can all rest assured that, barring some accident destroying Google’s cache, I am effectively barred from ever seeking a career in politics (or writing for certain publications) on the basis of this blog alone.

One of the features of a full blown “community” is that people who have to live together take pains not to step on each other’s toes. That tradeoff, that self-censorship, may well be worth it when you’re talking about people you do have to live with; it may not be desirable for every kind of quasi-community, especially those in which membership is potentially so fluid. One way of looking at the function of anonymity online is as an enabler of multiple discrete communities. That is, the pseudonym allows one’s membership in the online foot fetishist community to be distinct from one’s membership in a political discussion group, and keeps both separate from one’s real life community. The effect of this is to create the virtual equivalent of Nozick’s “framework for utopia,” in which a liberal supra-state allows small geographical communites to emerge, each governed by its own set of rules. If exit/entry costs between these physical communities are low, ran Nozick’s idea, we need not figure out what kind of one community is best for everyone, since each can choose the sort of life she finds most satisfying—whether religious kibbutz, hedonistic artists’ colony, or something in between. The proliferation of online communities, so long as anonymity preserves the “rule boundaries” of each, makes it possible to create the same effect not just between persons, but within individual lives. Each of the multiple selves we all harbor, then, is able to seek out its own (virtual) utopia.

Update:Henry Farrell blogs on the same Etzioni post, with several links to the comments of others.