I think it's important to separate the Internet existing, and the Internet existing sans anonymity. Doing away with it entirely could arguably be a good, but it's another topic. I do not think doing away with anonymity would be good. I think it would directly connect to a lot of suffering, and I don't mean depressed teens in Canada for example (though a good number of them too), I mean the sorts of oppressed people that organizations like Human Rights Watch are so keen to protect when they campaign for increased online privacy for citizens.

I'm continuing to talk about this because you have a fairly large platform and I think this notion is deeply authoritarian and terrible, quite at odds with the kinds of articles I have seen from you before. :( You won't find a free society or human-concerned nonprofit that agrees with you, but you will find controlling authorities that do. Your motivation is a desire to stop people from being toxic to one another, but the idea is more in line with North Korea than Denmark. Yes, something(s) should be done--but not *this.*

I read once about a solution that was found for elephants trampling farmers' crops in Africa. The farmers shot the elephants in response. The solution found was, rather than punishing the farmers or accepting the animals' death, to place beehives around the perimeter. The bees scared away the elephants, and the farmers added honey sales to their profits. Almost never is it true in this insane universe that there is only one solution. I'm not trying to say, "Stop trying to solve the problem!" but rather, "Please consider alternatives." And like with the elephants and bees, there are probably far superior alternatives.

It's easy to say, "Look at all these bad things. It's nothing but bad things! And all because these bad people can hide." But I don't think it is a holistic perspective. Victims of stalking and harassment benefit from it just as much as mean people do. (And, to get personal, this is me. Should I be unable to participate online where everyone else can because I knew a POS once? I'm in a single category of people who benefit from anonymity--there are many. I would consider forced exposure to participate anywhere in the Internet a lot worse than people being dicks to me when I do. A lot of the victims of online nastiness you're thinking of might feel the same way.)

Also, when weighing the good and bad of anonymity, the huge positive cleansing impact imagined for non-anonymity is 100% unguaranteed. If you look at how people talk to others on Facebook, I think it's clear that forcing name exposure would likely not have a very strong cleansing effect. I think someone commented on your article stating that studies have found that it does little because there is still a perceived divisor, so you could very well cause all of these negative effects and still not solve the problem.

But the negative impact of exposure on people across the globe IS guaranteed. Online groups are not unimportant--these very sorts of communal places are what helped the aforementioned Arab Spring. To say nobody needs this is like saying, "Nobody needs to escape tyranny." It's not hyperbole but very real. A friend of mine is a political activist who regularly speaks with people in less free countries via Signal and met them in the first place through similar services--without that anonymity, and before the Internet, these tools were not available to dissidents. It can't be chalked up to, "Oh, well, boo hoo if you decide not to comment then." There are lives at stake. Please, look at any group that advocates for human rights and discusses privacy online--you will see the same thing, and this is why. It matters, actually. It really does matter. (Even in a country like the US, there are people, especially in small rural towns, who risk being shunned by their entire community or treated violently if their unharmful but weird personal lives get exposed. And again, government oppression's not a problem in x country? Don't count on it forever.)

ACLU: "The right to remain anonymous is a fundamental component of our right to free speech, and it applies every bit as much in the digital world as it does in the physical one. In the words of the U.S. Supreme Court in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, “Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority.”" There are reasons why such organizations are all in support of this. I think it bears very serious contemplation.

On a smaller scale, there are many, many things that perfectly decent people want to hide. Their sexuality, their creativity, their just plain weirdness. To paraphrase the vid I linked before, feeling unwatched has an incredible growth effect on human expression and escape from conformity. You are an open and outspoken person, so it's of little concern to you personally; but we don't all have to be the same personality type, and we aren't. Anonymity has not only enabled mean people, it has enabled all sorts of misfits and outcasts to be themselves and exchange ideas. There is a LOT going on on the Internet--including a lot of good and positivity, and a tremendous amount of innovation and idea exchanges.

Another friend of mine is a cop...he thinks the worst of most people by default. If that's what you spend time with daily, that's how you see the world. But the nastiness is not the Internet's defining quality from my perspective. It completely depends where you go. The Internet is not a "sewer," it's a mixed bag. We have an entire encyclopedia written by the citizens of the world at our fingertips via Wikipedia -- that's INCREDIBLE. Today a Reddit community helped me ID a plant I found and gave me useful resources. There's a meditation group I talk with who are always completely positive. You could probably get a long list of such experiences from most people.

I have actually noticed that online discussions seem to be a good deal less toxic than a decade ago, even on Youtube. If groups have nasty people pop up, moderators can simply ban them. It's not so hard to manage. (As to what happens to kids, imo that's parents' job. Nobody forces a parent to give their kid a smartphone or let them use it all day, especially since they cause damage even if all a kid does is play games and not go on Tiktok or whatever.) But now I'm starting to get into alternate solutions, which is a huge, HUGE whiteboard.

So umm, hm, in conclusion, I know once one posts a whole article about a thing and sticks to their guns through iterations, changing their mind is very hard and unpleasant, but for the reason alone of government oppression and corporate control, very real dangers to millions and millions of people right now, and a potential danger at any given moment to nearly all of us, it's my fervent hope you might consider changing your mind about this particular solution.