4Chan and Anonymity Effects
Anonymity can have a profound effect on the way individuals make decisions. If you know every decision or product you produce within an organization will bear your name, you are going to act differently than if anonymity were the default.
Anonymity changes the psychological reward structure associated with group interaction. This can be seen best within networks like 4chan. When you remove someone’s ability to get “credit” for their ideas, there can be no dominance hierarchy. Some individuals take this as an opportunity to pointlessly and repeatedly posture, like a chimpanzee confused by a mirror. Others take the opportunity to solely engage with the ideas of others. The most interesting participants, however, take anonymity as an opportunity to gauge their ability to “dominate” the community by seeing how well their ideas spread organically, through their own merit (this is why so many memes that end up inundating other online communities like an invasive species come out of the memetic reactor represented by relatively small, anonymous online communities).
In an environment like 4chan in which the concept of the individual is rendered moot (pun intended) as every post is atomized and not connected to a larger identity, the group itself takes on a “personality” as if it was a single person. Utopians envision flat, non-hierarchical societies, in which people of slightly-above-average intelligence communicate through ideas, as havens of peace and acceptance. 4chan demonstrates that is not the case. (At least … sort of. Some regard 4chan as an extremely and radically accepting place. Some would claim that it uses vulgar insults as a form of social shorthand and equalization, and that it launches various attacks on groups as a means of shedding light on unequal and unenlightened ideologies. Most nevertheless view 4chan as the complete opposite of an enlightened utopia, perhaps to their detriment.)
While anonymous communities may produce novel ideas and moments of genuine brilliance that outcompete those of their doxxed counterparts, they’re too chaotic for the average, thin-skinned human. Instead of Superman or Lex Luthor, anonymous governments produce collective identities more like Freakazoid[[30]](#_ftn30)—with dopamine receptors so fried by rapid innovation and gratification that all they can do is try to drive the most mentally engaging and otherwise unexpected world events possible in a desperate bid to feel anything.