Flame wars and jihadist rants and generally worthless behavior in the comments: that’s the problem I’m trying to solve here.

And I’m trying to do it while preserving anonymity. Internet conversation can get nasty when the participants are anonymous, which has led to proposals of tying all online identities to “real” identities. This is the wrong solution to the troll problem, because it destroys privacy in a serious way. I want to build discussion systems that allow anonymous comments, yet remain orderly, civil, and enlightening. I think this can be done with filtering systems based on reputation.

Reputation is a thing that sticks to an identity. Historically most people had only one identity, closely tied to their physical presence. But now, online, every one of us has multiple identities: think of how many user names and logins you have. There’s some consolidation going on, in the increasing acceptance of Google, Twitter, and Facebook logins across the web, and this is mostly a good thing.  But I don’t think we want to aim for a world where each person has only one online identity. Multiple identities are good and useful.

Multiple identities are closely related to anonymity. Anonymity doesn’t mean having no identity, it means not being able to tie one of my identities to the others. I want to be very careful about who gets to tie the different parts of me together. I’m going to give two arguments for this, which I’ll call the “does your mother know” and “totalitarian state” arguments. They’re both really important. I’d be really if sad if we lost anonymity in either case. And after I’ve convinced you that we need anonymity, I’ll talk about how we get people to behave even if they don’t leave a name.

Keeping the different facets of ourselves apart is the essence of privacy. We’ve always been different people in different contexts, but this was only possible because we could expect that word of what we did with our friends last night would not get back to our mother. This expectation depends upon the ability to separate our actions in different contexts;  your mom or your boss knows that someone in the community is going on a bender/having kinky sex/voting Republican, but she doesn’t know it’s you. The ability to have different identities in different contexts is intricately tied to privacy, and in my mind no different than setting a post to “friends only” or denying Amazon.com the details of your personal life. Although the boundaries around what is “personal” are surely changing, if you really think we’re heading toward a world where everybody knows everything about everyone, you’re mad. For one thing, secrets are immensely valuable to the business world.

And then there’s China. I live right next door to the most invasive regime in the world. The Chinese government, and certain others such as Korea, are trying very hard to tie online and corporeal identities together by instituting real name policies. This makes enforcement of legal and social norms easier. Which is great until you disagree. Every damn blog comment everywhere is traceable to you. Every Wikipedia edit. Everything. China is trying as hard as it can to make opposing speech literally impossible. This is not theoretical. As of last week, you can’t send dirty words through SMS.

When the digital panopticon is a real possibility, I think that the ability to speak without censure is vital to the balance of power in all sectors. Anonymity is important to a very wide range of interests, as the diversity of the Tor project shows us. Tor is a tool and a network for anonymity online, and it is sponsored by everyone from rights activist groups to the US Department of Defense to journalists and spies. Anonymity is very, very useful, and is deeply tied to the human right of privacy.

Right, but… how do we get sociopaths to play nice in the comments section if they can say anything they want without repercussions?

The general answer is that we encourage social behavior online in exactly the way we encourage it offline: social norms and peer pressure. We can build social tools into our online systems, just like we already do. A simple example is the “flag this” link on many commenting systems. Let’s teach people to click it when they mean “this is a useless post by troll.” Collaborative moderation systems — such as “rate this post” features of all kinds — work similarly.

Collaborative moderation is a really big, important topic, and I’ll write more about it later. There are voting systems of all kinds, and the details matter. Compare Slashdot versus Digg versus Reddit. But all of these systems rate comments, not users, and I think this makes them weaker than they could be at suppressing trolls and spam. Identities matter, because identities have reputations.

Reputation is an expectation about how an identity will behave. It is built up over time. Crucially, a throw-away “anonymous” identity doesn’t have it. That’s why systems based on reputation in various forms work to produce social behavior. There are “currency” systems like StackOverflow‘s karma where one user can give another credit for answering a question. There are voting systems such as the Huffington Post‘s “I’m a fan of (comment poster)” which are designed to identity trustworthy users. Even Twitter Lists are a form of reputation system, where one user can choose to continuously rebroadcast someone else’s tweets.

And in the context of online discussion, you use reputation to direct attention.

That’s what filtering is: directing attention. And this is how you deal with trolls without restricting freedom of speech: you build collaborative filters based on reputation. Reputation is powerful precisely because it predicts behavior. New or “anonymous” identities would have no reputation and thus command little attention (at least until they said a few interesting things) while repeat offenders would sink to the bottom. Trolls would still exist, but they simply wouldn’t be heard.

NB, none of this requires tying online identities to corporeal people. Rather than being frightened of anonymity and multiple identities, I think we need to embrace them. We need to trust that we can evolve the right mixes of software and norms so that collaboration overwhelms vandalism, just as Wikipedia did. This field is mostly unexplored. We need to learn how identity relates to trust and reputation and action. And we need to think of social software as architecture, a space that shapes and channels the behavior of the people in it.

Simply trying to make it impossible to do anything bad will destroy much that is great about the internet. And it lacks imagination.

There are four official languages in Singapore: English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil. This reflects the four major peoples who came to populate the city-state: Chinese, Malay, Indian, and colonial British. Every citizen of Singapore is issued a piece of government ID (the National Registration Identity Card) which has one of these races printed on it.

Does this discourage people from having mixed-race children?

Singapore twists the Asian brain.  Just about every other Asian country is uni-cultural, at least according to the mainstream narrative. The Japanese people live in Japan and speak Japanese. The Vietnamese live in Vietnam and speak Vietanamese. The Thai people live in Thailand and speak Thai. Etc. This makes identity really easy — except if you live in Singapore, and there’s no Singaporean race, no Singaporean language, no ancient and venerable Singaporean hertitage. Blood and place and language and culture used to be inextricable, but we can no longer use any of these things to define one another. Fortunately, it says what you are right there on the card. I don’t think this is a particularly good idea.

On the surface of it, in a black and white world, it’s always this easy. (Oh, for simpler, purer times!) It’s especially helpful to have someone whom you’re not. I’m a Hindu, you’re a Muslim. I’m Kurd, you’re Turk. Indian vs. Pakistani, which is ridiculous because, as one Indian put it to me, “we are the same stock!” But they’re different! They’re Pakistani!

And yes, race. The thing about skin color, nose size, eye slant is that it makes this all obvious. But we don’t need obvious. In fact we make obvious when it’s lacking. The key to us versus them is that you have to be able to tell at a glance whose side they’re on. Hence different color uniforms for each team, but also scarification, clothing, jewelry… we laugh at the primitive Africans for their tribal scars, but the Latino in the sharp suit pulls out his iPhone and casts suspicious glances at the Latino in the cap and baggy pants. Something makes us clump together, gravitate towards standard behaviors. No one really wants to run as an independent.

Granted, the Hutus and the Tutsis do look different, at least sterotypically. But after centuries of intermixing, there can’t be such a thing as a pure race. That young boy, naked in the abstract, could be either. He doesn’t definitively have Hutu or Tutsi features. How then did the Hutus know who to kill, in Rawnda in 1994? In practice it wasn’t a problem. So powerful was identity that everyone simply knew who was who. There were Hutu families and Tutsi families, and not much in between. Small villages share common knowledge, and every day the message is reinforced. He lived in the Tutsi part of town. He sat with the other Tutsis at school. It’s not something you can disown.

Sometimes I think the best thing about big cities is the obfuscation they offer. In the big city, my Mongolian friend does not have to be Mongolian when she doesn’t want to. Of course, this horrifies her mother.

Because it’s also about tradition. You are a ___ because your father was a ___. You come from an ancient and proud line. Sure, other castes might look the same, but are they really? Blood matters. You can see it in horses. Never trust a Capulet. Predestination: who you are was written before you were born. It’s good to have clearly labeled places, categories that amputate differences. You can spell it out with letters, said the Brahmin to the Dalit.

I am of the strong opinion that printing race or religion on identity cards holds humanity back. And if you think that’s radical, technology is going to make it worse. Just wait until changing skin color, eye color, height and countenace is as easy as lipstick.

What makes Obama black? Is it nothing more than the color of his skin? How light do you have to be before you’re white? (If anyone brings up “just one drop” I’m going to slap them for exhuming idiocy.) Does the fact that he married an African-American woman make him blacker? If he had married a white girl would he have been whiter? Or maybe it’s the work he did in the black communities of Chicago, but what about the service he’s given to the white people of Illonois as their Senator? Perhaps it’s the fact that he shoots hoops — with white guys.

According to Rolling Stone, he listens to Jay-Z, but also Bruce Springstein.

Tell me what “black” means, because I honestly don’t know.