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Anonymity is like a rare earth metal. These rare elements are an absolutely necessary ingredient in keeping a cell alive, but the amount needed is a mere hard-to-measure trace. In larger does these heavy metals are some of the most toxic substances known to a life. They kill. Take cadmium. Essential for life in very minute amounts; toxic in any significant amount. Anonymity is the same. As a trace element in vanishing small doses, it's good for the system by enabling the occasional whistleblower, confessional, or persecuted dissent in a tyrannical regime. But if anonymity is present in any significant quantity, it will poison the system, even a half-rotten system. I believe anonymity is essential. It is vital to a healthy society and market. Without the option of anonymity I believe a society would be less than optimal. Indeed I would fight vigorously to keep the option of being anonymous as an essential part of any society. It is both humane and wise. At the same time I think there can be too much anonymity at work. When it becomes a default option it poisons the community -- like a rare-earth metal. My argument is not against anonymity but against too much of it.

What do I mean by anonymity? An untraceable, unaccountable, undistinguishable agent. Someone who engages in an activity cloaked in the identity of the tag "anonymous." I do not mean a vegetable vendor in a market whose name you do not know, because that person is both distinguishable and potentially traceable.  I mean people who post using anonymous as a habit.

In the case of the One Machine we should look for evidence of self-governance at the level of the greater cloud rather than at the component chip level. A very common cloud-level phenomenon is a DDoS attack. In a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack a vast hidden network of computers under the control of a master computer are awakened from their ordinary tasks and secretly assigned to "ping" (call) a particular target computer in mass in order to overwhelm it and take it offline. Some of these networks (called bot nets) may reach a million unsuspecting computers, so the effect of this distributed attack is quite substantial. From the individual level it is hard to detect the net, to pin down its command, and to stop it. DDoS attacks are so massive that they can disrupt traffic flows outside of the targeted routers - a consequence we might expect from an superorganism level event.

Unsurprisingly the vast flows of bits in the global internet exhibit periodic rhythms. Most of these are diurnal, and resemble a heartbeat. But perturbations of internet bit flows caused by massive traffic congestion can also be seen. Analysis of these "abnormal" events show great similarity to abnormal heart beats. They deviate from an "at rest" rhythms the same way that fluctuations of a diseased heart deviated from a healthy heart beat. Prediction: The One Machine has a low order of autonomy at present. If the superorganism hypothesis is correct in the next decade we should detect increased scale-invariant phenomenon, more cases of stabilizing feedback loops, and a more autonomous traffic management system.

3) Perhaps 4chan is its face? Perhaps Anonymous speaks for the ii? Memes drift up out of the morass of /b/tards into the world, seemingly without a concrete source. “I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER” may be the global intelligence saying “hi”… or perhaps more poetically, babbling like a baby. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121564928060441097.html?mod=rss_E-Commerce/Media