Anons At the Gates.
Peterson's Demons and A New Online Solar Onto-Ethics.
Anonymity is a touchy topic for many, it spans across the most pressing issue of our time, that being the nature of identity and the self. Over the centuries, the Western world has seen a process of effacement from the subject. One that the traditionalists like to speculate over in terms of “origins” or original points that started the sheer drop brain buster that is the slippery slope into the modern world. Was it the French Revolution or the Reformation? Or was it the Christian overcoming of Paganism?
These questions are immaterial to this analysis, or perhaps in general, misses the point. Because history is filled with way points and watershed moments, contingencies that could have opened up another virtuality in time: a new series of possibilities that was previously not thought possible. Or perhaps we can see the contingencies of all events because of the digital age we are living under. Where things change, events take place, but “nothing happens” on a more fundamental level. So we export our current perceptions of events into the past. And maybe this is more clarifying.
The reason I bring this up is because there has slowly been this stripping away from the subject these unifying constellations of meaning and rootedness. This much is clear. We no longer live in the metaphysical age, the age of more or less unified Christendom. Worldly affairs were conjugal to the heavenly order above. The modern, post-enlightenment age was fully realized in a lot of ways in the 20th century. The self was besieged by the concerns not of the Divine, but of the grand Other. The Other was the outside to which the self can be reflected in, the Other can taketh away our sense of subjectivity as quickly as it giveth. 20th century existential ontology was concerned with this relation to self and the Other, the Other is omnipresent in the absence of God.
But now we are left in the 21st century with the self to the self, as the Other quickly slips away. This is a key insight of Byung-Chul Han in Infocracy (2022). we can curate our experiences and even our most deeply held relations to others on the borders of our own interests, desires, fandoms, and beliefs. The other is lowered into a curation act of the self by the self, for we all become mere conduits of information. We are a self of “singularity”, where information and data gathers and swirls around a singular black hole point. We are but an amalgamation or this constellation point of interactions, content, preferences and ideas that are broken down and expressed through data. Meme culture is the direct manifestation of Infocracy. Packets of cultural information contorted, remixed, co-arising with other memes, and ceasing or dropping out of being as the meme becomes played out. Self and other is expressed in this relationship, as identity becomes tangential or at the least, not wholly within a position of stability. The self is stretched across many digital avenues and profiles, inhabiting many different spaces. This is what is meant by the self as a constellation or “singularity” in digital being.
This analysis inevitably leads to the question of anonymity and it's role within a greater social context. Recently there have been a number of attacks on anonymity and anons as a whole by the professional punditry and “think-fluencer” class. And most of these arguments stray the typical political line that comes from an older form of liberalism that existed in a more functional society. I shall quickly tackle these arguments before moving on to the most interesting, albeit polemical and even outright histrionic arguments of the one and only, Jordan B. Peterson. Keep in mind however, this analysis is merely an attempt to understand and push back on what I think is Peterson's true position. I am not mounting a more traditional defence of anonymity as such. There have been other, more direct defences of anons from various places elsewhere.
Before proceeding any further, it is prudent to state my own personal experiences with anonymity, and what it means from someone in my position. I am one of the few in the online or “Eright” as I like to term it, that uses my real name, and shows my face. I have done this consciously, and hence have come to terms with the consequences of such a path. My reasons are personal to me, but perhaps it was originally out of a sense that any sort of hiddeness is futile in the end. My artwork and writing is a bit too distinct, it would be impossible to separate such things. But let me state clearly that anonymity is not a form of bad faith or perjurious in nature. In fact anonymity was the norm of the online world for quite some time. I have over the years, at least partially, built up a rapport with the Anon sphere. Some of the most significant friendships and communications I have had are from people who are anonymous. Fading in and out of avatars and accounts. But carrying with them a conglomeration of an online identity, even a body of work, that is just as meaningful as if it it was attached to their birth name.
This is the crux of the issue for many professional punditry and public academic class personalities that have chosen to go to war with the anons (I say public personality instead of the older term “public intellectual” because such a calibre of those types simply no longer exists). Take for example Richard Hanania1, who states outright that anons are cowards, or at worst, feed into a vicious cycle of anti-social behaviour. People who are not anonymous still state “edgy opinions”, and over all “ the people drawn to anonymous commenting are overwhelmingly freaks rather then thoughtful intellectuals providing value in the marketplace of ideas”. Or Eric Weinstein2, who states that anons are at the heart of a more nefarious online campaign to either fuel targets of bot farms, or sow FUD (Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt) in online discourse.
These criticisms tread the usual grounds of discourse, and are met with the same critiques by anons. Necessary and needed critiques, but never the less, people are not thinking of anonymity as a social function. A meta-praxis, instead of merely a tool of escaping political and social persecution; examine what Hanania and Weinstein are stating here, the implicit assumptions that lay behind their criticism of anonymous trolls and shitposters. Of course it is true, a lot of them are not daring and transgressive intellectuals. Only a few of them are. But the assumption is that there is still this free and open “marketplace of ideas” from which any idea can slip into it's public square; Agora, and slip out of just as quickly. This is presumptive of a form of communicative rationality that is predicated on a zone of indeterminacy when it comes to public discourse. One that can be filled with a free exchange of ideas, and ideas sink and fall on their own merit, which would make anonymity a needless “rigging” of the marketplace. A sort of black market economy of ideas where anons can slip the normal rules of decorum and sell the hottest and most illegal of memes and ideas.
We know now that in the digital age, ideas do not disseminate this way. They are rather memetic contagious or viral vectors that carry with them a gain of function, a situ or latency period, and eventually a half life before partial or full adoption. The “marketplace of ideas” is rather a command economy of discourse, hence the necessity of anons. For the tens of thousands, even millions of anons who lurk, or shitpost, post repetitive coal, or do use anonymity for nefarious purposes, there are the few who actually do move discourse along. This is nothing new throughout history of course, as anonymous or pseudonymous writers used hidden personas to develop various communiques, this is not different now. Anons are in fact integral now more than ever to “the discourse” because of the very nature of how discourse is shaped and spread in the digital age. Namely the age of data, of information. The anon proliferates in the digital seas because by necessity there is a detachment, at least partially, from the “self” as the flesh and blood manifestation of you. The self that is attached to your own history and facticity. And the self as a constellation of information and data within the digital.
The two are often intertwined, and this is where critics of anonymity get it wrong – it is not the case that the digital avatar, brand, persona, anonymous name is something outside of your “self”. And thus it is an insincere engagement with the real, with the other. Quite the opposite in fact. In some ways anonymity reveals more of a true inner self than what is present on the surface of one's everyday persona. The anon escapes Das Man, the “They”, to embrace a sense of truth-speaking, or “Parrhesia”. But this sense of “truth telling” to “power structures” is too simplistic, or at least the ways in which anonymity speaking a more overt and unfiltered truth is too simplistic or one dimensional. It is not exactly that anonymity provides a grounds to “speak one's truth” in the digital oceans. But that the digital reveals that which is within. It “brings forth” or clears, or creates a space of “room making” for inner truths present in the anon poster. This is not in an instant, and it is not even a conscious act most of the time. But a mediated process of knowing which is dragged out over time. The digital world reveals one's inner disposition in hidden ways, it brings it forth and makes present that which the poster could not consciously mediate in-Toto. It is a disposition, a habituation towards inner truth that is revealed slowly, rather than a conscious act of “speaking one's truth” free of persecution and consequences.
Even this nature of Parrhesia or “truth-telling” in an honest manner, rather than debate and persuasion, is build on contingencies and moods. Rather than hard and fast rationalities. All discourse political and cultural operates this way. Truths of this world are constructed, they are muddled and blurred with other perspectival truths because (as Byung-Chul Han notes) dataism and information exchange cannot distinguish that which is more productive, or truthful, or sacred to a civilization. It is only the massification of data itself which counts. This goes beyond the mere gather, buying and selling of data to government entities and corporations. It effects the ways in which we value things. Data is the only value, it is inert and a-historical, apathetic and amoral. So truth is lowered into the realm of conjecture and social context. It is in so many words, build upon a plane of ambiguity because the ways in which truths and ideas are formed in the digital age demand it be so.
This is the critical mistake that these “classical liberals” and “rationalists” of the commentariat class such as Hanania, Weinstein and Peterson get so wrong time and again. They still presuppose that there is a pure fount of rationality and truth which must be preserved from “postmodern” outside influences. One that can be easily accessed, a property that can charge up any complicated and sticky political or cultural issue with Mana. It is the jewelled net of Indra that blankets all online discourse with surety of reason and objectivity. furthermore, to them this fount or jewelled net of proper public communicative rationality that is never exhausted, can only be accessed by initiates who are “purified” in the presence of it by assigning their ideas and reasons to public visibility. It is the price one pays for their access to rationality and proper insight.
This analysis is flawed because we no longer live in a world of open transparency or reason which is accessible to all without consequence. This much is clear, but on a deeper level, the very structures of discourse is more favourable to the anon because we have entered into a new model of communicative engagement and reason. That being digital reason, digital time. An endless flow of information exchanges and personas floating in and out of engagement and discourse. The anonymous poster wrestles with these forces and slips away, diving in and out. The anon reveals a form of “truth” that serves the purposes of discreet slices of time. The anon speaks a form of truth that is often revealed over time than simply dug out of present conditions. The digital world has this funny way of revealing truths over time, or memeing them into reality. So apart from the basic necessities of anonymity in a choking and paranoid social order, the anon is more suited to engaging with the ways in which truth has become mediated within the digital.
Back in the mid 1990s, in a much earlier iteration of the online world, DiGiovanna addressed these questions of anonymity, authorship and the digital age even back then. The anon poster is not an author as such, who carries with their work a distinct title, a name, a media conduit such as a book or article. Rather the infrastructure of the internet as a whole becomes a form of authorship and media. The digital poster anon is not “embedded and embodied” the way in which the traditional author is. Their work is splayed out over multiple message boards, text sites, comment sections and now social media platforms. You are a floating, bodiless presence, or constellation of communications and posts. There is an inherent ambiguity to who you actually “are”, as identities can be subject to forgery. Bots can be created and disseminate scripted texts and posts that mimic what is “really there” as a human behind the screen. There is a sense of loss to our own selves in the digital, but ultimately DiGiovanna comes to the conclusion that the name itself is but a sign regime. A placeholder of meanings attributed to a singular source, and that name alone is just as legitimate as any author with a binding legal name, even if it means a whole team of different posters take claim to a singular persona or name3.
Identity in the internet age carries with it a polymorphic nature, but more importantly, the lines between that real flesh and blood identity and what constitutes an anonymous poster are blurred. It is the very nature of the online itself DiGiovanna alludes to, which makes this blurriness a common facet of what it is like to experience the online. A face poster and an anon are lowered into an equal state of worth, both write the same posts and share the same communiques. It is true that having a face and using a real name still affords you a form of legitimacy. But not as much as the critiques of anons like to think. Anons take on the role of a unified persona that operates functionally in the internet world not that dissimilar to a face. The merit of ones ideas, posts, videos, communiques and images stand and fall on the same basis, and are subject to the same overarching online structures. In terms of attaching legitimacy to a real face and name, even the anon poster isn't totally free of social consequences online. An anon stands or falls just as much as if a real person with a real face has a falling out with any community or group, let alone an online community. There are legions of anons who have had falls from grace with their own micro-tribes, fandoms, and E-communities.
At first glance this might seem like an out there assertion. Of course real people with their faces and real government names carry with them an air of legitimacy compared to the anon poster. But think of this broader spectrum of experience in the digital, the “Wired” (to borrow a parlance from the Anime “Serial Experiments Lain”). In existential Phenomenology, there is presence and appearances, the life world of a thing is built up from this. There is an embodiment we experience in relation to objects. I cannot, as a mutual of mine explains4, see a whole tree from the inside out. I cannot see its roots, but I can dig the roots up, I can use my observations and empirical science to intuit the “horizon” of the life-world of that tree. In the Wired, in the digital sea there is only appearances. There are affects and murmurings of the real, but the real is locked behind the black screen and it's simulacrum of vision, sound, word, and even touch. In the embodied world, in “meatspace”, there is affects and embodied objects tied to a thing. In the wired there is only appearances, contingent manifestations of the real hiding itself within an endless stream of data and information.
What we must realize about the debates circulating around anonymity in the digital age are not “wrong” per say. These debates are necessary in a sense because we live in a world of politics that has enveloped the life-world of the subject. The “personal is the political” is just the order of things, and as such, it is prudent to point out that anonymity is a response to the current conditions. One that does not guarantee open discourse totally, but a must for a lot of people who have their own reasons; what the debate misses is this greater view of things. The “intellectual dark web” pundits and those critics of anons, as well as a lot of anons themselves miss a better view of things which can produce more pertinent analysis of the Wired. We are treating anonymity as if it is some temporary aberration that will eventually be overcome. Or as some kind of Prima Facia admission of nefariousness or moral decay of honesty and forthrightness in society. Rather instead, we should we viewing anonymity as a feature of the online, not a bug. Because it is merely the facticity of things. It is a response to the conditions of life that the online itself presents to the world of the real. Even a face and a name can still manifest as an endless chain of appearances spread out across various platforms and online mediums.
The critics of anonymity instead should be focused on creating an online ethics that comes to terms with this reality. It is much more productive to think of the issues around anons from this view of reconciliation. It is the matter of things at hand, truth is revealed over time, and one's idenity is in part created by this world of hyper-connectivity. I say “created” not just in a social constructivist sense, but in a phenomenological sense. An internet phenomenology would have to state that we are in part responsible for this creation of an online anonymous or semi-anonymous “self”. But we are co-mingled with the online, it shapes us as we feed data into it. This is what the political left gets wrong by the way, about identities in the internet age. In spite of there being a level of agency and self-creation, there is something else which manifests in this endless chain of appearances. Something which is not as easily controllable. Just as in the same way memes cannot be “forced” to take off and go viral, so too can this anon poster “online self” not be entirely envisioned and guided every step of the way by the flesh and blood meatspace person behind the black screen. And this is what leads us finally to Jordan Peterson's actual worriment about the online...
Peterson's Demons.
I shall make it clear from the top that I in no way endorse the panicked, shrill, paranoid tweets and denouncements of anonymity from JBP. And his critics are infallibly vindicated in pointing out that he is an outcast from this Northern “five feet of snow” post-nation from which both He and I reside. He was stripped of his psychology board licence, academic position and public face for merely questioning enforced pronouns. Being a face did not protect him, nor did any supposed “conservative party” politician. So he is forced to do what every pretend or actual dissident in Canada does, cater to an American market. And so Peterson packed up, and sailed for less torrid waters under the paymaster-ship of the Daily Wire.
But this is not a personal attack on the man, instead what I wish to do here is actually understand his true position. What JBP's critics are overlooking is why he has such a gut-level and frantic reaction to the anons and their online posting. To Peterson, the very struggle for an integrated self in a fallen world, and the wrestling of darker, shadow forces within the collective unconscious is at stake in the online world. It seems so obvious to anyone with a familiarity with the works of Carl Jung, but is somehow overlooked in this recent spark up of the debate over anonymity with Peterson. This is not to say it is a justification for bashing on anon posters, rather, I believe to understand what Peterson may be getting at (and of course, this may be conjecture, I cannot know his mind totally) is more beneficial in terms of reconciling the reality of online anonymity with a more integrated picture of the self.
Jung from his writings on the direction and future of civilization, such as his more overtly political essay “The Undiscovered Self” (1957), from which this opening paragraph can In my opinion, summarize JBP's terror at the anons perfectly:
“We have no reason to take this threat lightly. Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelli-gent, mentally stable stratum of the population. One should not, however, overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public edu-cation and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing
factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could on an optimistic estimate put its upper limit at about 40 per cent of the electorate. A rather more pessimistic view would not be unjustified either, since the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man’s
outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to be wavering and inconstant, the more so, as a rule, the bigger the political groups are. The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness”5.
For Jung's time, you can interpret this passage any which way, from hordes of migrants in our current context in Continental Europe. To a more likely interpretation that was closer to Jung's concerns, that being revolutionary ideologies on the left and right. The Undiscovered self is all about the individual being besieged by the mass, “Das Man”, the “They” that totalizes a sense of imposed identity. The individual sinks into the mass and cannot escape. It is only self-knowledge in it's truest sense, individuation process, which can free the individual in a time besieged by disenchantment which leads to totalitarian ideologies for Jung. Peterson takes this to heart, because in the work, Jung talks of the faceless, unconscious mass that pulls the individual into the abyss. Critical reflection and rationality is thus replaced by ideological rationality. A rationality that functions in it's integral purpose to blind this inner reason of the individual and replace it with a series of signifers that imbues the subject with extreme, unbalanced identification with the other, with the mass. For Peterson, the fears of a long march plebiscite of faceless shadows swirling in a void of chaos is now online, in the Wired reality. The anon does not have a face, but wears a mask, and has embraced the “horror”. Or the dark Tetrad personality type of sadism/psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellian according to Peterson6.
From the begging of Maps of Meaning, JBP's magnum opus, we are greeted by his own personal confrontation with the Shadow self. JBP makes it clear throughout that man is untethered from tribe, community, social conditioning, etc. Is at the will and mercy of various chaotic unconscious forces; here JPB balances the needs and psychic shielding mechanisms of the collective upon the individual with the totally free individual that embraces the unknown, the chaotic forces outside of the gates with a “Luciferian pride”. There is a delicate balance between creative exploration of the unknown, whilst obeying the paternal order of the social and of tradition, and this other unboundedness which leads to a sort of arrogance of reason7.
The nature of the shadow is equated with the unknown, and with chaos itself. A chaos that is always on the brink of returning once more. Only now we live in an even more precarious position, because as Peterson correctly asserts, in the age of disenchantment, after the “Death of God”, or the functions of meaning the metaphysical served us, we are left still without ground. We exist in a fragile social strata who's tranquility can be disrupted by chaotic forces at any time. Only now there is no clear delineation of exteriority or interiority. Friend or enemy. The chaos from without in terms of hordes at the gates “resembles heretics from within” the social strata8. Interiority is just as precarious as the chaos of the unknown, for all of the archetypal sources of meaning and authority have been thrown into a chaotic mix.
Now we have, to Peterson, the archetype of the stranger, one that has grown ever more powerful in a disenchanted and globalized world. We are all strangers, there is no longer a natural immune system to society, just as Jung foresaw in the 50s. The contagion of social and inner chaos alike is ready to consume the individual subject at a moment's notice. To Jung, and to Peterson, the great threat is that of a one-sidedness to our unconscious. “slavery and rebellion go hand in hand”. To Jung, this is the source of political strife, and the growing omnipotence of the state, our inability to regulate ourselves in the absence of other social powers and traditions. So these Shadow constructs of the collective unconscious, often expressed in totalitarian ideologies, take over completely9. The stranger in this environment is not far behind.
The stranger is indistinguishable from the chaos of the outside, and the chaos present within the collective Unconscious Shadow. Chaos is inherently feminine-coded as the “consuming terrible mother” wishing to return from the chthonic earth. What one must understand is that in the unpredictable nature of the stranger, there is a level of imperceptibility. The stranger in a way, becomes imperceptible to the social defence mechanisms and shields against the forces of the outside10. As an aside, Peterson lands a mild critique of multiculturalism as forcing nations of outsiders together into one place without full integration of the other. This can produce to Peterson, the horrors of nihilism and Right Wing backlash, as well as the conditions of racial war which can produce the optimal strife-environment for Nietzsche's “superman”. Who wrestles the forces of chaos not by full individuation of disparate elements to Peterson, but by overcoming the weak. Here according to Peterson, both the stranger-shadow within and without, and the blonde beasts of Over-men will overcome the delicate social circumstances and rituals that took Aeons to perfect11.
I bring these things up in part, to give a sense of the overarching structure that informs Peterson's worldview and why it relates to his vicious hatred of online anonymity. It is why he is incapable of embracing the politics of the contemporary online Right, why he has coasted on a sort of liberal conservative amelioratory politics of “quality of opportunity” and “defending the west” insofar as it means the classical liberal tradition. Because of course a politics that grates with classical individualism will inevitably lead to fascism or totalitarianism, especially those that strive towards a Nietzschean irreverence of the existing social order and petty moralisms of the day. Anonymity also possesses this quality of unintegrated psychic contents, the shadow self, the barbarians at the gates that cease to have a clear distinction between where the gates, the inside and out begin and end. Peterson is in a word, afraid of anonymity swallowing the individual whole by enveloping people within chains of memetic contagions that violate the proper norms of social engagement and communicative action. But this struggle almost becomes spiritualized in a way (in spite of Peterson having a complicated relationship to the spiritual). The Anon poster is the stranger, the trickster that violates all that is sacred to proper sociopolitical discourse. The anon evades the systems of meaning-construction and social-psychic defence shielding that has been put in place to keep out those harmful chaotic forces. And also more importantly, in the age of the unintegrated, psychically lopsided self, as the greater decay of civilization reflects, anons pose a dangerous risk for Peterson. They have the ability to tip people over into an abysmal chasm.
Contra Peterson.
I have discussed a bit of those practical critiques of Peterson and others who chastise Anons and who do not see the necessity of such things. But I shall meet Peterson on his own terms. There is of course a danger to these things in the digital age. I say “danger” in the Continental philosophy sense, of implying a sort of line of flight that can end in a hindrance of one's life-project. Danger instead of “morally bad” or dubious. Peterson of course uses this moral language when it comes to anonymity because he only sees the dark, shadow elements of the unconscious it enable. But furthermore, what him and other liberal critics of Anon posters presuppose is this world of transparency. A solar world of light that shines through all things. A Rawlsean veil of ignorance or innocence we can return to where all issues can be freely and passionately debated without consequences. Because to Him, this communicative reason is sacred, and it a bulwark against the chaos from within that is represented and makes itself seen in various “collectivist” ideologies.
These are deeply flawed assumptions for numerous reasons, especially because we do live in a form of hyper-transparency. A transparency society that has gone awry. The problem Peterson and others of his temperament have is not the “lack of” transparency, but the all too ubiquitous transparency of the Wired, the “Digital Swarm”. What they mean is a form of communicative rationality, the “marketplace of ideas” hat can legitimize the “best ones”. And Anon posters disrupt this flow of continual dialectical litigation of ideas by creating meme clusters and swarms of ideas and info-hazards. But the marketplace of ideas is not a clearing house, it always was a wretched sausage making factory that never wanted the process revealed. But back to this question of transparency.
Forgive me for this analogy, because the film itself is a prime example of “normie idea of what a smart film is”, but it is an apt analogy never the less. Think of the ambience of the film “Midsommar”(2019) by Ari Aster. Many a left-leaning millennial YouTube video essayist have made hay out of the fact that the uneasy foreboding feeling comes not from the typical horror genre trope of darkness and blurry vision. Rather, everything is depicted in a sunny radiance, a blasting white light under a blue sky. The horror is seen in the clear day light, that hot transparent summer heat; the Wired operates from this principle, at least in terms of the open and public channels of discourse and information. Filled with labyrinths of secret and private corners, group chats, discords and the like. But the net is an open and sun-lit skyline horizon of transparency. You are exposed to the radiant light of everyone, not the solar light of communicative reason Peterson envisions. One that is predicated on a legitimacy to your name and information. But rather a transparent light of a different sort. By which people operate under a Panopticon gaze that is in part participatory. The transparency society of the connective function has influenced the way we post, what we put out there, the need and desire for engagement.
Peterson wants transparency and to dispel the shadow like personality traits anonymity enables, but perhaps we live under an entirely different, but equally maladjusted or even tyrannical society of openness rather than darkness. Where any piece of information can be resurrected, and people operate with a sort of detached irony that guards from criticism. The self is constantly under the scrutiny of the hot burning sun of the gaze of a million eyeballs, terror in the light rather than the dark; what Peterson considers the lack of reason and the excesses of “wokeness” has nothing to do with anonymity or hiddeness as such. In fact it is this function of the online world to make everything transparent and offered up to public discourse which has aided the “cancel culture campaigns” Peterson tweets about on a daily basis. The transparency society loves these witch hunts. There are consequences for Anons caught up in such campaigns because everything is laid bare of the digital self, across platforms, comment sections and profiles. Anons create samizdat and memetic contagions, but are caught up equally in them. So all in all, the real horror is not that of those who hide from the light via anonymity, but is the reality that there is never an escape from the light. The digital world is like this, built upon the Nuclear program by DARPA to guide missile silo coordinates. Now the internet provides a never-ending nuclear sun of transparency and dataism which covers all areas of life. Nothing and nowhere can escape its light.
Finally, let us examine this assertion that Anons are the expression and voice of the Shadow self within our greater Collective Unconscious. This can be true in a sense, but the reality is that the structures we are living under will not go away soon. There can simply be no Luddite Butlarian Jihad or mass doxxing event. There will be (hopefully, although we wouldn't want to give the regime any idea) a sort of rapture-like event Peterson might wish for. Where the barrier and price of entry into the public Agora is your own information and real name, because one's name denotes a supposed special place of significance as opposed to your persona. Remember, even Jung taught this, a persona is a “mask that eats the face”.
Coming into such a “light” will not happen, instead we have the artificial light of the Weird, of the digital swarm, and we have to come up with an ethics, even a spirituality that reconciles these things. Anon posters influence discourse in all sorts of ways. In fact, more deeply than one might assume, as others have observed (such as Raw Egg Nationalist in his recent piece12, or Mark Granza in his13). The Anon Poster can traverse striated space and operate on a smooth plane of immanence, seeing contradictions in hierarchical structures and mouse-holing through them. In the digital swarm they pose no greater or lesser a threat than professionalized and “official” discourses and figure heads whom spread certain narratives and regimes of truth. The Anon is, in the swarm, an agent of both chaos and clarity. In the battle ground of ideas, they are the white phosphorous that burns through everything, and sometimes these cleansing chemical fires are not as lurid and dangerous as any other discursive weapon wielded by faces with names.
A final challenge to Peterson and others would be a way to formulate a new way of being, a new understanding in the age of online anonymity. Think of this charge that one's real name and identity carries with it a gravity and a legitimacy. This is an older social construct. They often thrown around a piety around this, that you are “putting yourself on the line for your ideas”. This may have some truth, and certainly as a face and a name, I should agree. But this misses the point. There are a number of potentialities that come from the structures from which we live under. The Anon poster proposes instead a new form of social legitimacy in the Weird. One that is reliant not on being, but on becoming. On a sense of creation, a multitude or singularity of being which strand together the construct or amalgamation of a self rather than what is given by one's name, location, position and identity. One now stands or falls on what one creates in the digital swarm, the chains of connections, posts, comments and content they generate, rather than what they are.
This new onto-ethics of the online is already a reality, even those with real names and faces must enter the swarm and operate with this understanding of being-as-multitude. There were those pioneers of early social media and posting that thought they could mimic the models of mainstream content distribution, celebritydom and legitimacy, whether it was for serious intellectual work or trivial culture industry entertainment. Take for instance the early Youtubers we never hear about, who thought they could replace Hollywood and have the exact same model of content. Or early YouTube news outlets that wanted to grift their way to “mainstream”, “legitimate” legacy media platforms. Even certain bloggers escaped to grad school or thought they could ascend from the ghettos of the online to legacy institutions.
These models and early adopters almost universally failed because they did not anticipate the changes to the very foundations of content in the internet age, or did not see the universal rot to all of these institutions which demands your own position attached to real names and identities. Those who thrive now are the opposite, they see the digital swarm, the Weird for what it is. They are consciously aware of its light of a million eyes. It in a way, erodes sincerity, but makes way for a new form of sincerity that lacks a care for social conventions that have been distorted and blasted into parodies and simulations of themselves. Taking real world “civility” and “debate” into the online, or forcing these things into an online context by shunning the Anon poster misses the point entirely. It is Anons who have in fact created conditions of dissent that Peterson and others who have been through the ringer of becoming apocryphals to the order of things benefit from.
The shadow side of discourse, the shadow of the online that Anons lurk in cannot be fully shunned or wrestled into mass doxxing and life-ruination as a result. The excesses of such evasion are always dealt with eventually, for the mass psyche eventually craves equilibrium. Instead the shadow forces must be integrated differently. There must be a newer sense of online sincerity and maturity that deals with the conditions of Anonymity and the potentialities of discourse Anons create. Peterson makes the mistake I truly believe Jung would not make if he had lived to see the age of mass internet adoption. A new onto-ethics of the internet shall and will be created, the conditions of Anonymity will not go away. We could live in “based world” and Anons will still proliferate. The battle ground of ideas will always possesses shadow forces and mercenaries of discourse, and in fact it always was this way, as the history of anonymity and pseudonymous writing is older than we think. The way forward in our current conditions as always, is not to deny or destroy these conditions, for that would be impossible, but to go through.
https://twitter.com/RichardHanania/status/1678244749655015425
https://twitter.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1678127496565514240
3DiGiovanna, James. “Losing Your Voice on The Internet”. High Noon On The Electronic Frontier. Conceptual Issues in Cyberspace. Ed. Ludlow, Peter. (London, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1996): Pg. 452-456.
https://twitter.com/Wired73813850/status/1669410978620948498
5Jung, Carl Gustav. The Undiscovered Self. (London, New York: Routledge classics, 1957, 2002): Pg. 1.
https://twitter.com/jordanbpeterson/status/1678257429560131584
7Peterson, Jordan B. Maps of Meaning, the Architecture of Belief. (New York, London: Routledge, 1999): Pg. Xxi.
8Ibid, Pg. 90-91.
9Jung, Undiscovered self, Pg. 9-10.
10Peterson, Maps, Pg. 249.
11Ibid, Pg. 250-251.
12https://mansworldmag.online/an-actual-defence-of-anonymity/