openbook

Anonymous

64 months ago

Hashtags were invented to help us better categorize information. They are also used to rally around a certain topic, or issue, and in the best case scenario have the potential to inspire people toward thoughtful, constructive mass action.

For more on how hashtags can inspire mass action, search these two hashtags together:
@Anonymous_💬 @hashtags101_💬

#openbook101_💬 #hashtags101_💬

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Anonymous

44 months ago
anoniminity isn't the answer to anything as big as claimed here, such as "a better facebook".

in fact a huge reason why any big corp goes bad is due to anonymous big people inside the groups doing things truly anonymously.

anoniminity isn't the answer to anything as big as claimed here, such as "a better facebook".

+ try reading the whole text without the "+" spoilers first. when you find a + just skip to the next paragraph (except on this paragraph, of course). 😘

in fact a huge reason why any big corp goes bad is due to anonymous big people inside the groups doing things truly anonymously + (actions without authors), such as with any group (even of 2 people: think of marriage and cheating). it just so happens that the smaller the group, the easier it is to find the author when it's clearly something done by a human. in reality, there's no action without an author, so anoniminity is just a social construct anyway.

it has its place, though.

perhaps the major merit is precisely the right to be forgiven and forgotten. if you can't forget, you can't forgive. + if your friend owes you a car for over 20 years, and you still remember it, have you really forgiven them for crashing it? what if it was a toddler putting your house on fire? why all of the sudden it's so much easier to forgive (and even forget)?

+ not everything deserves to be forgiven, but it's all up to our own selves and it can only be detrimental to our own health (as always, exceptions apart). do not forgive hitler just yet (for an easy instance) nor the allies to continue doing war for supporting consumptionism (for a considerably harder expansion instance).

be aware that forgetting without forgiving, however, is also possible and precisely one of the main reasons why anoniminity can't be a solution. + "i completely forgot you were still owning me a car. so, where is it?" is not forgiving. you probably just didn't need it and have been unforgiving to many other things, thus still "doing harm" to other kids in other ways. that's exactly what banks do, after all. (no big group is intrinsically evil, by the way. they all do more good than harm, in average).

(big side note
i'm not talking just about theory here, but it's very complex practice. i'm 39 years old today, and i explored the online and offline world truly unlike at least 99% of people. i know this because i have met over thousands of people as randomly and wide spread as possible and not a single one that went as deep as i did. and there's nothing like tamera.

tamera is a village which is nearly a country inside portugal which exists for about 40 years and had grown from 40 to 200 people in the last 10 years. that's a population number big enough to allow for some anoniminity. yet, there's none. and they turned 200 acres of dessert into lakes filled with plants living fully self sustainably.
)

we seek privacy in such a broken society probably only because we need to be forgiven and forgotten, but only when it's both at the same time, and only to some (most likely even most) of our actions, not to our humanity. + stealing food because you're living in hunger is easily forgivable. hopefully the person who does it gets help (be seen as a human) rather than going to prison or get punished in any way (be seen as a thing, a thief).

there's no way to be human without an identity. at least to oneself. and there's no way to have a humane society without each one seeing the next one as a human, rather than a completely forgotten and hidden thing. we just need the forgiveness for our mistakes up to the point in which they're forgotten, when it's reasonable. + if you truly can't remember your dumb friend owes you a car, you've done it. teach us all: how?

but let's also not forget the actions. this can be done in a completely anonymous way. and, although when i agree with this, it makes sense to have an online and fully anonymous center for sharing ideas such as this (ideas can be seen as actions without a single owner), the only way to make them fully anonymous is by educating everyone about all this. + hitler is always the best example in our occidental culture... except to the point we give his actions his face, we must not forget what happened. we must further, however, the mustache (for instance). it was from chaplin originally, after all. not that it matters the origin anyway.

brain dump finished.

wished i could redo it all with nothing but concrete words and images, rather than so many subjective ideas. + done. after each "+" sign and each paragraph. 😆

-- cregox

-- cregox

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Anonymous

41 months ago
I don't think it would be easy to forget a toddler burning down your house, although it would be easy to forgive. I'm not sure there's such a direct relationship between forgiveness and forgetfulness.

Perhaps you're trying to relate anonymity with the Anonymous slogan "We Do Not Forgive, We Do Not Forget" but that's not agreed upon by everyone using the Anonymous banner. Often the slogan is changed to "We may forgive, but we do not forget". But neither slogan resonated quite with the intentions of this website. Which is why at the top of this website there's a quote about how anonymity can allow people to speak more truthfully, instead of either of those slogans.

Personally, I agree forgiveness is important, but I think that the "We Do Not Forgive" slogan was probably meant to evoke "We will not let you off the hook for your crimes" to people in power. And it's ultimately less directed at those in power, and more as a battle cry of inspiration and empowerment to all the little guys out there fighting against the corruption. It's perhaps a bit oversimplified, but it's just a quick slogan after all.

You said:
"there's no way to be human without an identity. at least to oneself. and there's no way to have a humane society without each one seeing the next one as a human, rather than a completely forgotten and hidden thing."

This I strongly agree with! Yes, and I would never dream of a fully anonymous society, it's probably impossible to achieve like you say. But anonymity has it's place on the free exchange of ideas. To be ridiculed or even hunted down for speaking the truth is something that happens to humans. It's fairly common. Well, it's at least as common as it is to speak those difficult truths, which itself isn't so common BECAUSE of the consequences. Just look at the backlash Galileo had when he said the Earth wasn't the center of the solar system (let alone the universe). The church threatened to kill him unless he publicly recounted his statements, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

There's many obvious contemporary examples of anonymity helping the free exchange of ideas, too. For instance, WikiLeaks has many leaked documents from unknown sources. If someone is bold enough to do something in their name, it can have dire consequences. It makes sense that they would want to remain anonymous. As a counter example, look at Julian Assange being put through the ringer right now in England. He's essentially been persecuted, he was trapped in the Ecuadorian embassy for a while until Equador caved to pressure to give him back, and now he's basically been psychologically tortured and then put in a position to try to defend himself in court, ill-prepared, and with the cards stacked against him. All this, and the USA even wants to get in on the action and extradite him to the US, possibly for execution.

So, you see, it's hard telling the truth without a mask on. I don't resent those people who leaked documents anonymously, who may escape capture, who may live to release more documents, and who won't have to live the rest of their lives in Russia like Edward Snowden whose essentially lost his family life due to coming out publicly. (There were strategic reasons he chose to do this which i understand, just as i understand the strategic reasons for NOT revealing your identity in certain situations. )

But I think it's wonderful living in a commune where everyone knows each other. :) I would love to do it again in my life. I think you may have seen a false dichotomy. Anonymity and "being seen" as part of a community are not separate. They are not "mutually exclusive". You can still have your community, and then anonymously leak documents on the side, or make Anonymous videos, or post on Openbook to get a little anonymity in a world where privacy seems to be so hard to come by.

Humans are funny. When our minds runs wild with things you'd be embarrassed to share or talk about in your community, we often seek out the community that we CAN talk about it with. We talk about how holy we are at church, talk about how fucked up we are at Alcoholics Anonymous, talk about how loving and accepting we are when we're at Burning Man, talk about how we never keep track of time when we're traveling around talking to other travelers, talk about how punctual we are with our coworkers. And all these different sides of us never converse with each other. It's like all the different faces we wear, the different masks we wear, they are categorized and organized by agreement. So even though we all wear all these different masks, we only share one side of us in any given context. Then we also shape oversimplified cartoon versions of each other in our heads. So we only ever met one side of a person - the side they're willing to show us. Because of this psychological structure it's as if all the groups we attend can never fully agree with us, and we can never fully embody the agreements of any of the spaces we inhabit. We experience ourselves as infinitely complex, confused, and unstable, and we all suffer from Impostors Syndrome, feeling fake and out of place everywhere we go. Meanwhile, everyone else appears to have it together, they appear more stable, more certain, but only because they have only a certain side of themselves that they're willing to show us.

So what does this all mean? It's like modern society has sliced us up into many different little versions of ourselves. We take turns in different contexts, to get a break from other contexts. We go places to become different people, and when we return we reluctantly find we change back into who we are while we're here.

Portals of anonymity such as Openbook are just a way of recognizing this schizophrenic state humanity is in. Openbook is an outlet where all the different facets of our personality comes together into one. Where that impossible conversation can finally happen between ALL sides of our collective psyche. Where you can even argue against anonymity without consequences (well, not exactly in your case, since you signed your name, and said where you live! So you're not exactly shielded by anonymity! hehe. But you kinda still are, since anyone can sign any name on here there's no way to know it was really "cregox" ;) )

Anyways, I hope this helps explain the value of anonymity.

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