The subtle pleasures of anonymity on the internet…

An interesting thread on Politics.ie sees a whole host of contributors revealing their ‘true’ identities. It’s great, no doubt, to do so and I can understand the dynamic. There is something very compelling about the ability to conceal and reveal when writing behind a pseudonym or user name. The natural inclination is to emphasise one aspect of personality over another – generally the more attractive aspects at that. Yet, oddly enough, most of those I’ve met in person who I’ve first encountered on the net aren’t that radically different in terms of personality. But if one indulges in that emphasis the danger is that when those meetings occur there is the sense that at least some degree of deceit has been exercised.

On the other hand there are good valid reasons why people want to remain anonymous. If there is an actual connection with political activity the chances are that the overly forthright expression of honesty (or truth as it’s sometimes termed) is going to be problematic. A party member may take the seeming opportunity of anonymity to laud or critique those who in other circumstances couldn’t be touched. The Respect/SWP conflict is fascinating because it is played out on the net as much, if not more, than on the ground in committee rooms. It assumes a ‘meta’ level of existence which is probably enormously satisfying to all involved if only because it exaggerates the actual size and importance of the formations involved. And note that the interest of the older media is minimal in this issue.

My own reason for remaining concealed is in part political, in part professional. In the real world it might be very slightly tricky for me to to hold a public political opinion or to express too forcibly an opinion on a political individual. Probably not much, but one never knows. Back in the late 1990s I conducted research into Irish political parties and found it quite handy to have moved from the party political. Everybody, or so many suppose, is an ex-member of a party.

I’m still not party political although I have my sympathies as you’ll have noticed, have good relations with people in a broad range of parties and like to think that I stand over my beliefs as best I can when asked about them. You’ll notice that I almost never attack political figures directly. That’s partially courtesy, partially because I can’t see the point and also, being pragmatic, because that sort of approach might be highly counterproductive. So, as regards anonymity, I err on the side of caution. But there is a paradox here, a good bunch of you know precisely who I am, or at least you think you do or at least I suspect you do. In the last week two people have told me they know who I am. And that’s odd as well, because it’s sometimes a bit disappointing to discover someone knows who one is. I’m not sure why that is. It’s a curious dynamic. One feels as if something has been given away. Yet if the other person knows then nothing has been given away. Quite the opposite really.

Perhaps it is also an aspect of the distance between the writer, the written word and the reader. There is an imagined audience out there. To start to put names and faces to it brings it closer. I think that is a good thing. We here at the CLR have always had at least the hope that this could be a platform for many voices. That may or may not occur. But it seems odd – to me at least – to believe in collective efforts and then lock straight into the individual.

Recently, particularly since being on Newstalk, I’ve been toying the with the notion of a slightly more transparent user name. But I kind of like worldbystorm. I took it, as some of you may know, from the lyrics of a Three Johns song, The World By Storm [incidentally listen to Death of the European on their Myspace site for a taste of their aesthetic – “Whom I working for?”… indeed]. The Three Johns, as good Marxists, knew what was what, and while sometimes their enthusiasms missed the target at least they tried:

The World By Storm

I’ll shake my hands across the seven seas

I’ll summon up some strange things to see

And in the airport lounge

Guerilla war is getting down

In the hearts of the passing crowd

Fruits of death are passed around

And in the canyons of N.Y.

F ire power in the jungle

Mine is the gold, Park Avenue!

No one is innocent

In the world by storm

A storm is raging in every placid pool

And the words of poetry they break up every line

And the singer’s voice

Is the grunt of an animal?

In the hearts of the passing crowd

Fruits of death are passed a around

I’d I like to teach the world to sing

But it taught me instead

I wrote this wing one day

On a Jumbo Jet

Screaming electricity

Sing it into my Black Box

In the hearts of the passing crowd

Fruits of death are passed around

I don’t know. “No one is innocent in the world by storm”… sure, they copped it from the Pistols. But they reconfigured it in an explicitly political context. I still believe it. And the other lyrics, overheated as they are perhaps, seem now to me to be prescient about the contemporary world.

Perhaps I’ll keep the user name.