Our New Faceless Monsters : With the Wiring of America, It’s Become Easier to Practice Terror and Nastiness Cloaked in a Sinister Anonymity. Where’s This New Anonymous America Headed?

TO: Cindy.

SUBJECT: Pen Pal

“Hi, Cindy. You sound sexy. How long is your hair?”

--Anonymous Internet message sent to the author’s 13-year-old daughter.

*

In another time, a 13-year-old girl who ran away from her home in small Kentucky town might have been sought at a friend’s house or with a cousin in the next town. The police would have knocked on a few doors. Her picture might have been posted around town. But Tara Noble left home in the age of the Internet. She was lured by an anonymous entity from cyberspace, a citizen of a computer network who identified himself only as George from California.

Tara turned up safe in Los Angeles, but not until she had terrified her parents, baffled authorities and made headlines across the country. Her case brought national attention to the dangers of a technology that brings people together in a faceless new realm where identity is obscured and secrecy is guaranteed. Other children have been raped and molested by anonymous adult computer contacts who lured them into real world encounters.

Such cases are forcing society to deal with some of the more troubling aspects of technology and human nature. In June, the state of Connecticut made harrassment-by-computer a crime. At the same time, the U.S. Senate moved to restrict sexually explicit message on the Internet. These actions have ignited a classical debate about free speech and censorship. But in the national discussion of censorship and rights, little has been said about the dark force--a condition, really--that lies behind Tara Noble’s disappearance and the attacks on other children. All of these troubles, along with new forms of extortion and hatemongering, have been made possible because technology shelters predators in the shadows of a new and powerful form of anonymity.

Something in anonymity brings out the worst in humanity. Just ask any 13-year-old girl who has tried to find an Internet pen pal. She may as well navigate a red-light district after dark. Faceless come-ons, cons and solicitations are everywhere. All this is made possible by technologies that have expanded the power and the reach of anonymity. For the first time in human history, almost anyone can instantly shed his identity and take on a new one, becoming a woman or a man, a sinner or a saint. Anything and everything is possible in the ether.

“Unfortunately, what comes out of a lot of people is their absolute worst,” says Clifford Stoll, author of “Silicon Snake Oil,” a critique of the computer age. An astronomer and computer-security expert, Stoll began using the Internet in the 1970s, long before the world in general knew that it existed. He has watched, with dismay, as anonymity has ruined the cyberneighborhood. “The more anonymous the communication, the nastier it is,” Stoll says. “With technology and the way we live today--in insulated suburbs and cities--we don’t know each other by our faces any more. We can evade responsibility for each other and for our own actions. We can even escape our own humanity.”

Of course, anonymity has a brighter side. It is vital to political dissent, especially when repression shackles free speech. But truly meaningful anonymous speech is rare in America today because there is virtually no legal barrier to open expression. Instead, anonymous speech is associated with the crank and the exhibitionist. Anonymous e-mail threats are sent to the White House. An unnamed hacker uses the Internet to distribute a purported transcript of the horrifying last moments of the crew of the space shuttle Challenger. Others spread damning rumors about technology companies and their products. Every day, anonymous hate flows on the Information Superhighway. Every day, anonymous sexual predators harass both children and adults.

Computer-based anonymity is just one corner of an expanding quarter of society where identities are blurred and the potential for mischief abounds. This place--call it Anonymous America--is a media landscape that includes phone-sex lines, fax machines, unregulated broadcast stations and even talk radio. The technology that guarantees entry to this faceless world also provides unprecedented access to others. There are no gatekeepers, no police, no editors or publishers in Anonymous America. Here, every citizen can distribute her views--confessions, lies, truth and fiction--to a single person or a community of millions. In ways that were never possible before, we are, almost casually, giving up our names, histories and identifying features to embrace anonymity. And that choice may be changing the very nature of political speech, human identity and our notion of the self.

*

Anonymity is context, a state of being, a setting. Sometimes--self-help groups are an example--anonymity sets rules for behavior that create safety. Under the Twelve-Step code of confidentiality, anyone who attends Alcoholics Anonymous, for example, is protected from gossip outside the confines of the group. But this kind of anonymity is not complete. Each participant must still face other members of the group. And in their ongoing relationships, the members of any self-help organization can hold each other accountable. They can also read the inflection in a fellow-sufferer’s voice. They can see the expression on her face. Though often transmitted and translated at a subconscious level, these cues are so much a part of social interactions that they can convey the true meaning of a person’s words. When they are missing, the rules dissolve and meaning splinters.

“Without those cues, or rules, some people respond in a more exaggerated way than they would face to face,” says psychologist Michelle Weil, one of a handful of clinicians whose practices focus on technology and psychology. Today’s anonymity is creating arenas in which people relate with fewer rules, she says. “It’s like the old Wild West. People are more impulsive, more ruthless, more crude. The Wild West was a more dramatic place. Over time, rules and mores were established. This is pretty much the same as what is happening on the technological frontier today.”

Life is more dramatic in the darkness of anonymity. Consider the experiment conducted in the 1970s by psychologist Kenneth Gergen at Swarthmore College. Gergen searched the Pennsylvania countryside for about 50 young adults who were absolute strangers. One by one they were placed in a black room devoid of light. They were given no instructions, just absolute anonymity. (Unable to predict what might happen, Gergen and his colleagues made sure that nothing that could be used as a weapon--shoes, belts, etc.--entered the room.) The experiment was run several times with different subjects. In the smothering blackness, each group behaved the same way.

“It always turned into a sort of group grope,” reports Gergen. “People would do things that they normally wouldn’t. There was a lot of touching, more than we would have expected. Some people wouldn’t leave when their time was up. One person offered to pay us to let them go back in.” Others were disturbed by their own behavior in the dark. “One woman, a young Catholic who was engaged to be married, was shocked by her own responses,” Gergen adds. “In the darkness, she had not felt the same control.”

Gergen described his experiment in a paper titled “Deviance in the Dark,” but he prefers to emphasize the liberation and joy made possible by anonymity. Anyone who has lived a long time in a very small town understands the constrictions of a fixed identity. It’s no wonder that farm boys and girls have always escaped to the city. “There are certain real benefits that come with being a stranger,” Gergen says. “It’s an invitation to play. You don’t have that anchor that holds you to one way of being, that tells you ‘This is wrong’ or ‘That’s a lie.’ Instead, you can experiment with many different selves.”

In Gergen’s experiment, anonymity liberated the participants from social and moral constraint. The same process occurs every day in modern life, and it doesn’t require a darkened room. Easy long-distance travel and technology have destroyed the physical boundaries that once forced most people to relate to a small and finite community. Not long ago, such absolute anonymity was rare and difficult to achieve. Nearly all people lived and died in relatively small communities where their words and deeds were bound to their faces. Personality and morality were fixed, or at least people believed so.

“People today don’t live in the same community all the time,” Gergen notes. “They don’t have to present a consistent self. In fact, they can have many different selves.” For example, with the help of air travel, a man can lead one kind of existence at home in Pasadena, and have a completely different personality and code of behavior on weekly business trips to San Francisco. “We all have the opportunity to separate what we do and say in one realm from our identity in another.”

As an example, Gergen describes a colleague in New York who recently attended a serious scientific conference in the morning and then drove cross-town to watch a friend in an underground performance of sexual domination. Of course he kept his dominatrix friend a secret from his academic peers. This secrecy, and the anonymity of the crowded club where he viewed the performance, made it possible for Gergen’s friend to straddle two worlds. “The incongruity of this is mind-blowing,” Gergen says. “It means you have different identities based on where you are and who you are with at the time.”

In such a polymorphous life, is it possible, or even necessary, to identify a central, core self? “No,” Gergen says, “there’s no core to know about now. A person is simply a unit in a relationship.”

This view of the self--as a chameleon--suggests that the safety and intimacy once associated with a distinct, consistent personality are being lost. Gergen believes that these losses can be offset. “In an anonymous state, you can develop some very real connections, intimacy,” he says. He cites the case of a young man who regularly meets a friend on the Internet and joins him in a computer fantasy land of castles and dragons. “They travel around together as buddies having adventures. They both got a lot out of it. This may be because with anonymity, people can really say what they feel. This can be very beneficial.”

It can also be very complicated. Life in the era of the polymorphous personality requires a flexible mind. Not everyone is able to pull it off. In some cases, the people who populate the many realms of Anonymous America can seem like they are balanced on the edge of multiple personality disorder. “I have talked to one guy who had four personas--windows--on the Internet,” notes Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “In two, he’s a woman. He has a very interesting perspective on his experiences. He says that RL [real life] is just one more window for him, and it’s not necessarily the most interesting one.”

The anonymous relationships of cyber-reality can be nearly as powerful as RL, Turkle argues. She knows one very meek man who has used two assertive female personas to discover that he can be aggressive without becoming abusive. He has transferred what he learned in anonymity to his real life, having become more forthright and honest in his relationships.

Such productive uses of anonymity are made possible because the technology creates a kind of consequence-free environment for experimentation, according to Turkle. Behind anonymous personas, we can try out noble and ignoble behavior. We can please or offend as we choose and learn how others will react. This world-without-consequences serves the same function that adolescence once provided in the development of personality, Turkle says. Today, in the age of AIDS and guns and lethal drugs, we no longer enjoy this sheltered period for testing experiences. Anonymous America may be filling the gap, she says. “It allows you to experiment and create yourself without getting hurt.”

*

But for every positive aspect of Anonymous America there is also a negative. Electronic romances can yield true love, but much of what we love in an unseen suitor is an illusion of our own making. When all we have are words on a screen, our minds tend to fill in the missing pieces, notes Dr. Avodah Offit, a New York psychiatrist who has written a novel called “Virtual Love.” Offit says it is all too easy to project fantasies onto an electronic paramour. On the Internet, to paraphrase Garrison Keillor, everyone can be above average, everyone can be good-looking. “Because of this transference, you expect them to satisfy your dream of a complete relationship,” adds Offit. “Unfortunately, your desire may be met with their wish to have a one-night stand. There is nothing virtual about the pain this causes. It’s quite real.”

Or worse. Anonymity can lead to harassment, abuse, even electronic stalking. In Anonymous America, men masquerade as women. Predators disguise themselves as friends. Stalkers abound. Karl Kleinpaste discovered these dangers when he created an anonymous server, a relay station on the Internet that cloaked the identity of every user who sent a message through it. Only a sophisticated hacker could trace a message back to its true source. The security of his invention was virtually unbreakable.

“I did it for the ‘Wouldn’t it be neat?’ experience,” recalls Kleinpaste, who is a computer specialist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “I also thought it was a great thing for people who wanted to talk about very private things, like sexual-abuse recovery, and get support. But then someone tried to commit extortion through my server. All of sudden I realized there was a lot more to anonymity than I had thought.”

The plot involved a young man, a young woman and some embarrassing photographs. The woman was certain about the identity of her tormentor, and he was caught when he made a mistake sending another message. “He’s not a very bright boy,” sneers Kleinpaste. “The district attorney determined there was not enough evidence to prosecute. But the woman felt that she had been victimized, and so did I.”

Anonymous crimes often carry a leering sexual component. Some computer assailants try to shock their audience with intimate information and pathetic suggestions of sexual activity. Others try out different genders. “So many men masquerade as females that I think most of the conversations in the lesbian chat rooms are between men,” says Lee Dodd with a laugh. A Los Angeles County woman, Dodd is a regular on the Internet, where she has made many friends, male and female. “There was also a picture of a guy who was naked--he called himself Shower Man--floating all over the Internet recently. No one seems to know where it came from. It’s pretty strange that someone would do that. But it happens.”

Although Shower Man may shock some, a deeper pain can be inflicted by the ongoing relationships that grow in computer environments. Affairs of the heart, if not the body, are common in Anonymous America. The effects of cyberinfidelity are documented by Sherry Turkle in her upcoming book, “Life on the Screen.” As Turkle describes it, many people who would not otherwise risk an affair pair with someone on a computer network and concoct elaborate relationships. Gay, straight or bisexual, these “couples” engage in highly revealing conversations and build romantic fantasies. These relationships are referred to as TinySex, or Tinyromance.

Some participants consider these without-a-body experiences harmless explorations. “I’m really not interested in something outside my marriage, one man explained in Turkle’s book. “But being able to have, you know, a Tinyromance is kind of cool.” The same man said that the computer relationships allowed him to fill in the gaps left by a sexually timid youth while his marriage was preserved.

The trouble is, cyberinfidelity does threaten real-life relationships. Though there is no bodily contact involved, keyboard encounters, like phone-sex relationships, can be emotionally powerful. The partner who is left out can easily feel betrayed, even threatened by the emotional connection that is created in a Tinyromance. At the same time, participants in these relationships can become quite attached to the fantasy scenarios they create. At the dark extreme in the vivid emotional landscape that flowers in anonymity is virtual rape. In such attacks, an assailant “hacks” or assumes the persona of the victim. The assailant then conducts a very public session of cybersex, including an impersonation of his victim.

“For example, I can type out something that makes it look like D’Antonio is swooning with delight at Turkle’s advances,” Turkle says. “You can imagine it is very upsetting when a person sees herself on the screening saying and doing indecent things in front of anyone who wants to watch.

“Often the victims of virtual rape will kill or delete the code-named persona that was attacked. But this means losing relationships with others on the network and starting again to rebuild contacts. It can be devastating.”

*

Virtual rapes are perhaps the ultimate example of the aggressive, highly sexualized nature of anonymous relationships. Gershen Kaufman is not surprised by the sexual nature of communication in Anonymous America. A professor in the counseling center at Michigan State University, Kaufman sees the human emotion of shame as one major source of the exhibitionism and aggression. The author of several books on the power of shame, Kaufman argues that much of what boils beneath the veneer of personality, and thus erupts at the first opportunity, is shame.

“Sex, hostility, hatred are what is bottled up in a lot of people,” Kaufman says. The fear of being shamed by society can repress many aggressive expressions of sexuality or hatred. This fear dissolves in the safe company of strangers. “When you eliminate face-to-face contact, the inhibitions are gone,” Kaufman says. “Anonymously, people can express hatred or aggression even for entire groups. Anonymity is a breeding ground for this kind of behavior.”

Faceless encounters can bring out the worst in us because they defy censure. The unseen talk show caller or fax-sending intruder cannot be shamed. “There is no look of disapproval from another person, no show of hurt or anger to stop abusive speech,” Kaufman notes. “The technology and anonymity increase the distance between people. They don’t see or feel each other’s reactions.” Much like the bombardier in a high-flying aircraft who never sees the people killed by his bombs, the anonymous hatemonger is separated from his victim by technology, which makes it easier for him to ignore the pain he inflicts.

Kaufman surmises that the shadows of Anonymous America attract people who are already burdened by a great deal of shame about their own behavior, attitudes or feelings. “They may have had such deep encounters with shame that it becomes a breeding ground for hatred and a desire for revenge,” Kaufman adds. Some may use anonymous forums to vent their feelings. This can be seen in the confessions that fill various self-help computer bulletin boards. But without a real, compassionate listener, confessions are not truly cathartic.

“I was on one of the computer networks for a long time, but I came to think that the communication was emotionally bleached,” Kaufman observes. “It’s not real self-revelation because you are not opening up to another real person. It’s like a product, not a real human conversation.’

*

Conversation is the main product sold in the corner of Anonymous America that is occupied by talk radio. Talk radio reaches more people than any other form of anonymous communication. “Talk radio is probably the broadest example, the one that gives the anonymous person the greatest power,” explains Peter Laufer. “When they are manipulative, or lucky enough, anonymous callers can thoroughly influence other listeners and even entire political debates. They can change the public’s assumptions about a person or an issue. It’s scary.”

A veteran of talk radio in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Washington, Laufer grew wary of the chat format as it spread from 405 stations in 1990 to 1,163 today. Like major league baseball, he says, the quality of the genre has been diluted by expansion. At one time, most such programs were dedicated to informed opinion; personal attacks were barred. Now it is common to hear ignorance and slander. Entertainment value has replaced information in the talk show universe. But it is entertainment with a political edge. “Groundless innuendo gets the same respect as investigative journalism,” Laufer says. “Hate is heralded as a valid response to problems.”

Anonymous callers play a critical role in what Laufer calls talk radio’s “skillful charade” of disinformation. This became most clear to him, he says, during an incident in Washington during the early days of the Clinton Administration. “I was driving to work, listening to my own station, when this woman came on and said that all military personnel had been asked to leave their uniforms behind when they visited the White House,” he recalls. “The idea was that Clinton was anti-defense.” Laufer telephoned his station’s news department, which quickly discerned the lie. But even after he was informed of the facts, the talk show host continued to spread the misinformation. “He was having too much fun with it. He viewed the talk as a product, and he didn’t really care if it was true, so long as it attracted an audience. As a result, that anonymous caller created hours of shrill rhetoric, which a lot of people believed.”

Defenders of talk radio insist that it is part of a long tradition of protected anonymous speech. The anonymous ballot is essential to democracy. Early American politics thrived on anonymous pamphlets. And as recently as last April, the Supreme Court affirmed a citizen’s right to distribute unsigned political tracts. Talk radio’s boosters cite this tradition in defense of the medium. They also describe the forum as the equivalent of a kaffeeklatsch or town meeting.

Of course, anonymity creates a distinct difference that destroys the town meeting analogy. At a town meeting, a speaker who criticizes his neighbor is likely to be confronted before he leaves the hall. He cannot escape his statement. It is attached to his face, his voice, his very identity. On talk radio, callers have no identity. And there is something about that state of secrecy that can bring out the worst: the profane, the paranoid and the preposterous.

“Anonymity, being in the shadows, decreases people’s inhibitions,” Laufer notes. “For good or for bad, the anonymity frees them to talk about subjects they wouldn’t discuss face to face and in terms they would never use in a different context. The context is everything.”

*

Context provides the meaning in human relationships. In the context of a family, a neighborhood, or a classroom, our words and actions can have different meanings. In the faceless context of Anonymous America, the best that anyone can hope to find is a facsimile of real-life relationships. Like the recorded heartbeats that parents play to soothe their sleeping infants, this kind of communication provides an imitation of humanity but little warmth.

Given its limitations, one would imagine that Anonymous America would be abandoned by visitors who find it lacking. That is not happening. If the popularity of computer networks and talk radio are any measure, Anonymous America is growing like a fast-food chain. Perhaps Americans are so lonely, so alienated, that even the imitation of human a relationship is considered valuable and sustaining. Most likely, these anonymous relationships provide just enough comfort to make the pain of isolation bearable. We may feel impotent when it comes to national politics, but we can be heartened when we hear our passions and prejudices broadcast by the anonymous talkers on the radio.

The broad reach of anonymity has already affected the public arena. Anonymous sources, once a staple only of supermarket tabloids, are now cited by the mainstream press. And political debate, once governed by certain civilities, is now widely viewed as a free-for-all where character is routinely assassinated and fact is sacrificed. It’s difficult to imagine that crude anonymous speech, now heard and read all over, hasn’t contributed substantially to the decline of political manners and goodwill.

Those who despair of the effect Anonymous America has had on public speech may be encouraged by experts who say that society will gradually impose a code of behavior on these forums. Just as the frontier towns of history ultimately were civilized, Anonymous America will be tamed. Sociologist Amitai Etzioni, an expert on developing communities, has already seen these standards imposed by members of computer groups who ostracize those who are offensive or manipulative. One court has already imposed some legal order, as well. In May, a federal judge ruled that Prodigy Services Co. acted as a publisher when it edited messages sent by its subscribers, therefore making the company bear some responsibility for the content of communications.

Etzioni believes that, in the long run, Anonymous America will be tamed, and the technology will produce many more social benefits than problems. “In the best of all worlds, we would all meet face to face,” Etzioni says, “but I think this is something that society will learn to use for the common good.”

But as important as the broad social and political implications may be, the most tragic aspect of modern anonymity may be what it says about the state of human intimacy in a technological age. Every night, countless Internet cruisers hack away at their keyboards while their relationships with their children or their lovers wither. Likewise, an unhappily married couple I know--they are surely not unique--have developed the habit of falling asleep to the sound of talk radio. The anonymous voices are soothing, but they are also numbing, undemanding and one-dimensional. The couple’s imitation relationship with the radio talkers distracts them from the quiet that has grown in the years since they stopped listening to each other. In Anonymous America, they find cheap relief from the pain that might have motivated them to fight for true understanding and happiness in RL.