On "Doxxing" Influence
Identifying swarm nodes with memetic gravitational pull is a journalistic skill.
In Who Is BasedBeffJezos, The Leader Of The Tech Elite’s ‘E/Acc’ Movement?, Forbes writer Emily Baker-White identified and named one of the key meme hubs of the accelerationist movement.
Forbes has learned that the Jezos persona is run by a former Google quantum computing engineer named Guillaume Verdon who founded a stealth AI hardware startup Extropic in 2022. Forbes first identified Verdon as Jezos by matching details that Jezos revealed about himself to publicly available facts about Verdon. A voice analysis conducted by Catalin Grigoras, Director of the National Center for Media Forensics, compared audio recordings of Jezos and talks given by Verdon and found that it was 2,954,870 times more likely that the speaker in one recording of Jezos was Verdon than that it was any other person. Forbes is revealing his identity because we believe it to be in the public interest as Jezos’s influence grows.
Many libertarians and accs are up in arms about this supposed "doxxing". Here's Mike Solana who thinks that writing about thought leaders of influential movements is akin to "thought police", conflating 50k Twitter-followers with non-influence, which is just dumb and especially dumb for someone supposedly fluent in memetics. Ofcourse he also just dodges the question of Bezos publicly endorsing neoreactionary rightwing asshat Nick Land. It’s just edgy memelording, we are all Beff Jezoses. Spare me the bullshit and while it's fun to see accelerationists doing mental acrobatics around journalists doing their job, it’s all so annoyingly backwards and anachronistic.
I said it before and i say it again: i don't buy early digital ideological takes anymore, not from my internet-activist peers and not from the current edgelords, since i've seen the internet go up in flames over bullshit and protofascists like Trump became president because of that. There are no more holy cows in the digital and since 2016, everything is on the table, including the dogma of anonymity. And believe it or not: you have no absolute right to be anonymous. You have somewhat rights to anonymity in some contexts, but all of them can be done away with in certain circumstances. One of these circumstances is being a powerful, influential voice of a movement.
You are, by all accounts, a member of society and therefore you are adressable by the very nature of being a citizen. I know i know, libertarian e/accs have a hard time coming to grasp that they are citizens of nation states, those monolithic institutions of yore that should be done away with (just to make place for new ones on dystopian techno-islands on which they are king). But they are, and these e/acc anarchistic galaxy brains are, too, bound by the social contract, trading some freedoms for security to gain freedom in a democracy. One of the traded freedoms is absolute anonymity.
Internet ideology famously sells absolute anonymity as one of the cornerstones of online existence. On the internet no one knows you're a dog, yada yada. But this, like so many other paradigms of early internet utopianism, is bullshit. You are a citizen and you are adressable, period. This includes Beff Jezos, who traded his absolute anonymity for the freedom to write bullshit on Twitter in this society. And now that he gained remarkable influence on a powerful movement that is prevailing in Silicon Valley, one of the globally most influential and richest places on earth with over 80 billionaires jerking each other off on accelerationist libertarian antisocial takes, a movement so prominent with the rich and the powerful it just got namedropped by US-secretary of commerce, that the fourth estate has done its job, identified him and "doxxed" his real name, connecting the central meme hub to his name, his startup and his professional goings. Boo-fucking-hoo.
You know what i want as a person interested in tech? I want reliable information about what's going on in tech. The identity of the central meme hub of the e/acc movement and its background is good, reliable information to gain new insights about, for instance, what's going on in the head of clowns like billionaire Mark Andreessen, who called Jezos the "patron saint of techno-optimism" and are memed by him into writing techno extremist manifestos and use their money to make them real, influencing the society in which i, too, live in. I didn't get the hubbub around the NYTimes profile of ultrainfluential blogger Scott Alexander back then, and i don't get the hubbub around the Forbes profile of influential tweeter Beff Jezos now. The keyword here is Influence.
It's the job of a journalist to inform the public about stuff that forms and influences the society that public lives in. Arguably, in our times, people like Scott Alexander and Beff Jezoz have a remarkable influence on decision makers and rich folks, and being anonymous on the web makes them unadressable, merely nodes in a swarm with a very high memetic gravitational pull in the network.
In the 21st century, one of the roles of journalists is to identify these nodes in the swarm with high memetic gravitational pull and write about them, about their influence, where that influence comes from, what it does, and its background. Identifying the sociological adress of that node, in these cases the real name of the citizen, is just part of that job. This has zero to do with "doxxing", which actually is the practice of trolls posting private information on the internet.
It would be very cool if internet ideologists, early web activists and so so edgy e/accs, instead of inventing ever cruder cool cool language memes, rather develop some actually working sociotheoretical frameworks other than BUT MAH ANONYMITY IS ABSOLUTE AND A BASIC HUMAN RIGHT which not only is not true but also outdated.
I know that asking e/accs to use their brain for some basic sociology is asking too much (“humanities bad”, you know), but contrary to what your holy Ayn Rands and Thatchers memed into your head:
You do live in a society. You do have influence now and the web did empower you, by your own choice. Now deal with the consequences.