You guys are the best. Really, now fuck off, Tulpa.

This is my review of Pipeworks Brewing Hey, Careful Man, There’s a Beverage Here!:

It has been argued by people that want to exterminate multiple oil and gas producing nations by direct and indirect military action, that internet anonymity is the devil.  While Nimrata the Destroyer did walk back her desire for a state-backed doxing of the entire internet, it turns out the science is not on her side (TW:  The Conversation):

Nimrata the Destroyer, artist unknown

Many people focus on the dangers of online anonymity. Back in 2011, Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Mark and (then) marketing director of Facebook, said that for safety’s sake, “anonymity on the internet has to go away”. Such calls appear again and again. Behind them is a common intuition: that debate would be more civil and constructive if people used their real names.

But my research with colleagues suggests that anonymity – under certain conditions – can actually make for more civil and productive online discussion. This surprising result came out of a study looking at the deliberative quality of comments on online news articles under a range of different identity rules.

We built a data set of 45 million comments on news articles on the Huffington Post website between January 2013 and February 2015. During this period, the site moved from a regime of easy anonymity to registered pseudonyms and finally to outsourcing their comments to Facebook. This created three distinct phases.

The first phase is what you might call the wild west phase.  You got to log in to the comment section without any verification necessary.  If you got banned, no problem just create a new profile and/or a new username then continue being an asshole behind a keyboard.  Everyone here that arrived from H&R is well aware of this form of discourse.

The second phase was a verified user with a pseudonym.  All of you are familiar with this, as this is the level of discourse employed at this …um, fine site.

The third phase, however, took it to another level.  You had to have a Book of Faces account which implies a level of verification to the point where Mark Zuckerberg not only knows your first and last name, he knows your date of birth, and is even aware of where you are located within a few yards (that’s like a meter, Rufus).  This is before you begin informing him of your preferences for women’s legging ads by, well…watching the entire ad of multiple women showing you their bum while wearing that particular brand of leggings.  They are always pretty nice, to be honest.  Anyways, this FB account is then linked to the commenter and even will post your comment to FB if you were absent minded enough to not review your FB settings before releasing bile in the comments.  Which means your mother knows you’re an asshole in the comment section.

As I’m reading this study, linked here because why get things secondhand from someone as illiterate as a journo, thinking the entire time, “those poor grad students.”  Certainly, there had to be an easier way to get research credits than reviewing millions of comments on HuffPo?  Surely, professors still accept sexual favors?

Anyways, the results were actually a bit surprising:

The expectation that poor discursive behaviour in anonymous environments would be improved if users had their ‘real names down’ seems not to be clearly or straightforwardly borne out by this case. The most striking finding from our data set is that the CC of comments shows a marked improvement in the shift from non-durable to durable pseudonymity. But CC reduces again in the ‘real-name’ phase, when comments are made under the users’ Facebook names. We find this pattern repeated when we restrict the analysis to those present through all three phases under study. […]
The idea that people behave better with their real names down is primarily underpinned by assumptions about communicative accountability. One potential explanation for the difference between the latter two phases can still draw on the mechanism of communicative accountability. However, following Moore (2018), we can distinguish two sorts of communicative accountability: accountability to the audience within the forum itself, on one hand, and a broader accountability for one’s speech and actions that is not limited to a particular discursive context, on the other.
Moore’s discussion of the deliberative potentials of pseudonymity suggests that continuity of identity within a particular discursive context is a necessary condition for a minimal form of communicative accountability, which involves the possibility of making and meeting demands for justification within the forum.

So you see, using a pseudonym while still being a verifiable human being is a superior form of communication.  You know I’m real, I assume you are all real, and this is about all we need to agree Nikki Hayley is a vile parasite.  Civility for me is a finite vessel from which I must draw from and emptied over the course of the day almost entirely upon people I work with.  Let’s be real, I work with people that believe in Medicare, that’s the real work. Here I am free to be Andy Rooney, except I am not an illiterate journo.

They tell me to watch Big Lebowski, but my problem with movies and shows is every time I decide to finally see something everyone likes I am disappointed in something.  By something I mean everyone.  Sort of like this beer. They call it a “White Russian Imperial Stout.”  While I can get on board with rhetoric that results in a trip to the gulag, I don’t know what to make of this.  Does it taste like a Russian Stout?  Sort of.  It just doesn’t look the part, and it doesn’t do what I actually want it to do:  leave my breath smelling like I drank a pot of coffee.  Instead, I smell like I drank beer, which makes for a dicey day drinking proposition.   Still, I’m glad I tried it. Pipeworks Brewing Hey, Careful Man, There’s a Beverage Here!: 2.9/5  10.5% ABV