Awesome piece, Jesse.

I’ve been thinking more and more about “perceived anonymity” recently; in fact, I feel like you’ve written an essay that’s been sitting dormant in my head for some time. I wonder if there’s something to the idea that people on the internet exist in the same way that species exist on islands — exposed to a limited spectrum of stimuli such that the ecosystems that they evolve in a way that would seem almost unrecognizable to a species that evolved in a more dynamic environment.

There is simultaneously danger and beauty in cloaking people with perceived anonymity: danger because the ideas they have are never checked by the approval of the market, and beauty for the same reason. I would hypothesize that none of the great art of this era could’ve possibly come about without the cloak of perceived anonymity. The question we’re left to answer is whether we’re willing to tolerate the ills that emerge from the perceived anonymity that characterizes life on the internet in exchange for the networked benefits it gives us.

I’m not sure what the answer is, but this essay has me wondering, and that’s a start.