Title : Why Anonymous Content is Bullshit
link : Why Anonymous Content is Bullshit
Why Anonymous Content is Bullshit
Two years ago, someone (a stalker, more or less) tried to get me fired for my blog. It was one of the most terrifying and depressing experiences of my career.Although she didn't ultimately succeed, at the time I wasn't sure she wouldn't. She wrote to and persistently called the newspaper, her legislators, and my employer. I had to get a lawyer. It lasted months. Throughout the entire difficult and humiliating ordeal, there was one thing I could be proud of, which is that I stood behind every word I had ever written, with my name attached to it. I own my writing, whether I'm dashing off a blog post or signing a pleading in court.
This complainant's screeds to Anyone Who Would Listen™ included a smug revelation of my identity, as if I'd ever tried to hide who I was for even one second. My professional life and my life as a blogger are two separate and distinct parts of my existence, with the former, fortunately, protected by the First Amendment. It wouldn't take anyone more than two clicks to "figure out" who I was. My blog was never a secret to anyone. My identity has never been a secret.
And that's because anonymous writing (in my opinion) is a coward's endeavor. And if it's one thing I'm not, it's a coward. As a general rule, I do not believe in anonymous writing. Not on the internet, not in comment threads, and not in newspapers. If you have something that's important enough to say, and demand anyone's attention to read, you should sack up and sign your name to it.
I thought about this again when reading today's anonymous op-ed in the New York Times from a "senior Trump administration official" assuring the country that there are "adults" within the administration working to save the country from Trump's worst impulses. The Times defended the "rare step" of publishing anonymous content:
[A]t the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers.Predictably, ten zillion hot takes followed. Anonymity was good because otherwise we would be focusing on the author and not the content, and this person would be sacked and no longer able to "protect us" from Trump.
Put aside the fact that it's decidedly un-democratic and terrifying that we have the nation's top elected official being controlled by unelected officials. That's called a coup, and simply "waiting out" Trump's presidency while the "grownups in the room" save us all is a failing that everyone now serving in Congress will have to live with--for the rest of their lives--as an abdication of their office and its own form of cowardice.
The more cynical (and to my mind, accurate) view is that this person is protecting him or herself. Their career, their reputation, and their future. They want their cake and they want to eat it too. They want to have plausible deniability when this national nightmare ends and the inevitable reckoning comes. They want to pull an "I told you so" without having to accept their own complicity in what has happened and continues to happen.
That's called cowardice, and I'm sorry, but it's bullshit.
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