The early Internet was anonymous.

The early Internet was anonymous.

Yes, yes – I can already hear someone warming up their keyboard to type, “aKtUaLlY it was never fully anonymous because you could always be doxed!” Thank you, Professor Pedantry. This is what happens when people confuse theoretical vulnerability with actual historical practice — the intellectual equivalent of saying the Federalist Papers weren’t anonymous because, in principle, the printer could have snitched.

By this logic, no one in the 19th century was ever anonymous, because someone could have compared handwriting, or bribed a typesetter, or simply guessed correctly after reading enough pamphlets. Madison was unmasked as Helvidius Priscus by people who could recognize his prose rhythms. Volgin was identified by the Okhrana. The Unabomber – God help us – was profile-matched by the FBI with the help of his family. Despite all that, we somehow still manage to refer to them as “anonymous authors,” because that’s how anonymity has been understood for literally thousands of years: you don’t attach your name, and the public doesn’t know who you are.

No one demands cryptographic perfection from Junius.
No one insists samizdat wasn’t anonymous because the KGB owned typewriter forensics.
No historian opens a book and says, “Actually, Voltaire’s pamphlets don’t count.”

But for the early Internet? Suddenly the bar is raised to NSA-proofness. Suddenly “anonymous” only counts if you had Onion Routing from 1991, a Faraday cage, and a tinfoil hat woven by Richard Stallman himself.

It’s absurd.

Functionally, culturally, socially, and technologically, the early Internet was anonymous. You picked a username, and that was who you were. Your ISP wasn’t going to show up at your door because you shitposted too hard on Usenet. Google didn’t exist. Everything wasn’t archived forever. Cross-platform identity correlation was science fiction. And 99.9% of the time, nobody had the means or the motive to care who you “really” were.

So yes.
In the same sense that Publius was anonymous, and Volgin was anonymous, and every pseudonymous pamphleteer in history was anonymous:

the early Internet was anonymous.

And if that upsets someone’s modern, surveillance-soaked worldview – well, that’s their problem, not history’s.

In practice, in 1998, when you logged into an Internet forum, you had no idea who anyone was — and no one expected you to. You judged people the old-fashioned way: by what they wrote. Revolutionary, I know. On a hacker Usenet group, respect came from how well you debugged someone’s Perl horror. On a Tolkien forum, prestige depended on your ability to recite genealogies of obscure dwarf clans without checking a book. It was a simple ecosystem: you were what you posted.

And crucially: doxxing someone was considered a cardinal sin, the sort of thing that could get you banished from the forum-tribe like a hyena with mange. Many communities treated revealing someone’s real name as borderline criminal. Even today, in the last surviving pockets of Old Internet culture, you can receive an instant, irreversible IP ban — no appeal, no explanation — simply for referring to a user by their passport name. In the old ethos, your handle was sacred. The line between “username” and “identity” was a hard firewall, not a suggestion.

Then Facebook arrived, dragging the Normie Panopticon behind it like an invasive species. Suddenly the default online identity became your government name, your workplace, your city, your vacation photos, and your list of people you dated in high school. For a while they even enforced a real-name policy with a kind of bureaucratic zeal that would’ve impressed the Prussian civil service. (It only cracked when enough transgender users pointed out the obvious.)

And so we entered the Great Stupid Age — the era in which anonymous or pseudonymous posters are treated not as normal participants in a centuries-long tradition, but as shady, morally suspect figures whose refusal to post under their passport name is taken as evidence of crime, duplicity, or general subhumanity.

Which brings us to the current Idiot Juncture: Elon Musk — whom I generally admire, but who occasionally behaves like a man who fell asleep on the “ship’s wheel” of his own platform — decided, without warning, to start revealing everyone’s location. Surprise! It turns out a lot of people are not posting from the countries they claim to be from.

Cue the hysterics:
“Oh no, these people are Russian stooges!”
“They’re scammers!”
“They’re waging information war!”
“Putin personally told them to make a meme!”

It’s incredible: the entire Internet spent decades treating pseudonymity as normal, civil, and even virtuous — and now we’ve arrived at a future where the default assumption is that every nickname is a psyop and every avatar is a spook.

To be absolutely clear before someone jumps out of the bushes with a NATO-issue buzzword glossary: I think the very term “information war” is idiotic. It’s the kind of phrase that makes consultants and midwit pundits feel like they’re in a Tom Clancy novel instead of arguing with a guy named AnimeSword420 on the Internet. People’s posts should be judged by the quality of their arguments — not by “oh no, you’re posting from Hanoi, therefore you are geopolitically disqualified from having a brain.”

And yes, Musk’s new location-reveal stunt is, at best, morally questionable, and at worst, a soft form of mass doxxing. Spare me the “it’s in the Terms of Service” defense. Modern ToS agreements are basically magical grimoires written by lawyers so you can accidentally sign away your soul while trying to make an account. I am quite certain that somewhere in X’s EULA there’s a sentence like: “Elon may disclose your geographic coordinates at any time, for any reason, including boredom.”

I’m not claiming this is illegal.
I’m not claiming it should be illegal.
I’m claiming it’s a colossal dick move.

The real absurdity is the reaction. People aren’t outraged that their personal metadata was suddenly exposed without warning — no, the scandal is that someone posting from Hanoi had an opinion on U.S. politics. That’s what gets everyone frothing. Not the privacy breach. Not the precedent. Not the platform owner suddenly peeling back the curtain on hundreds of millions of users. Instead: “A man in Vietnam posted a meme. Sound the alarm.”

This, right here, is the problem.

P.S. Still better than Old Twitter — but at this point that’s like saying “still better than getting hit by a bus.”