@rusty__shackleford Broadly speaking? For most people, the wall between online and offline life thinned and disappeared. There became more advantages to self-representing as who you were IRL than in keeping your dog-anonymity.

The threats didn't change, but the boons turned out to be huge. People collaborated online and that success transitioned to their real lives. Folks met other human beings in chat rooms and fell in love and got married. Bloggers parlayed their words into TED talks. People found business required them to represent themselves accurately for legal (or simple common human behavior in the offline business world) reasons. Facebook gave a generation of college students an opportunity to self-represent as themselves and their world didn't spontaneously combust as a result, on average (I think of all of these things, that's the one that had the largest impact on shifting online culture).

There's still an underground that stays anonymous, and God bless 'em. But as with most human societies throughout history, we tilted toward "reputation matters" and began to assume those who stay anonymous have something to hide that they don't want attached to their reputation, which is default-suspicious.

@mark

Disregards networks of trust. If this were the case, open source would have fallen apart decades ago.

Through networks and chains of trust we create an ecosystem without deanonymization.

If devs were forced to register government IDs and faces, the ecosystem and landscape would be vastly different.

Besides this, these are subjective perceived norms. Take note of how many Japanese interact with SNS & notoriety. Oftentimes covering their face, using pen names. Similarly to radio hosts.

@mark

While few may absolutely need this, as they market themselves as individual spearheads, see; Hideo Kojima, Cory Doctorow, etc.

The rest who appear in the credits may hide their presence, either by using a pseudonym; publicly or online.

Either way. The lack of separation between real life and the internet has not resulted in a boon for the majority of people, only for a very small percentage.

Meanwhile many doing real work remain anonymous, or at least attempt to.

@mark

For example, mathematicians have famously worked in anonymity, either by choice to avoid fame, through the use of pseudonyms, or by withdrawing from public life. Ex. the secret Bourbaki group, William Sealy Gosset, and Grigori Perelman, who solved the Poincare conjecture. 

So broadly speaking, these parasocial walls have thinned for most people, at great cost, with little to no objective benefit to the masses.

I understand the sentiment. But our logic seems fucked.

@mark

Google openly admits to reading all of your email, meanwhile Android System SafetyCore is staring straight at your COCK.

Again. We have come an exceptionally long way in terms of how we approach the internet as individuals. The modern day shows a gross erosion between users trust, rise of complacency, and the unchecked abuse of power by service providers like Google.