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Notes -
Voicing support for party X whilst your boss hates party X, in practice, will get you fired. Even if there are laws against it, your boss will assign you annoying tasks, over-scrutinize your mistakes, etc. to evict you for a different official reason. And there's no way to detect this without false positives.
The loss of online anonymity would also damage relationships, and not just ones with irreconcilable political beliefs. People "code-switch" all the time; imagine no code-switching because everything you write online is visible under your ID. Men talking about women around other men, women talking about men around other women, kids talking about their teachers to other kids, teachers talking about kids and parents to other teachers, etc. Austists would love to know everyone's views about them and may easily adjust, but I suspect most people would be turned off by others' behavior in other groups. Importantly, 1) even when they logically know such back-talk was always happening, they would struggle to emotionally handle concrete examples; and 2) some back-talk is criticism aimed at helping the target or those around them.
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Thinking more about it:
Direct P2P would also avoid these problems. While maybe mitigating the social harms of today’s internet, which were less common when in-person and telephone communication were dominant, like social isolation and a certain type of (embarrassing) meannness and brainrot.
If online anonymity were eliminated for everyone, while providing a way for everyone to communicate (with ID) only to who they choose - that may be better than today. People could even make public political statements without repercussion, by privately communicating them to a trusted speaker for their party…so this doesn’t actually eliminate anonymity, just makes it harder…but doesn’t anything?
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