“There is a powerful tension in our relationship to technology. We are excited by egalitarianism and anonymity, but we constantly fight for our identity.” ~ David Owens

This is a rambling train-of-thought post. Proofreading it was a nightmare; I can’t imagine why you’d want to read it, but if you do, know that persons attempting to find a plot within it will be shot.

It’s strange to me that the Blizzard / Battle.net controversy only hit stride yesterday. I got my first “Real ID” email on the 13th of last month and knew there was darkness on the horizon. True, it didn’t contain the official forums tidbit, and was worded in such a way to highlight how everything is (at this point) optional. So maybe that explains why the enormity of the consequences didn’t set in until now. Or maybe privacy is already so on the ropes that it takes a fortnight for people to connect dots these days.

From a purely cynical point of view, it’s brilliantly timed. Those users who might be pissed and cancel in protest are likely to be lured back soon after by Cataclysm (…or StarCraft, or Diablo III…).

The official line and a lot of the conversation seems to believe the Battle.net requirement is merely a smirking corporate tactic they’re hoping will silence a lot of negativity on the public forums (which, in theory, will reduce the energy that is expended on moderation). Blizzard’s own babble backs this.

The official forums have always been a great place to discuss the latest info on our games, offer ideas and suggestions, and share experiences with other players — however, the forums have also earned a reputation as a place where flame wars, trolling, and other unpleasantness run wild. Removing the veil of anonymity typical to online dialogue will contribute to a more positive forum environment, promote constructive conversations, and connect the Blizzard community in ways they haven’t been connected before. With this change, you’ll see blue posters (i.e. Blizzard employees) posting by their real first and last names on our forums as well.

Most of these assumptions are demonstrably untrue, and ignore the troubling implications.

* Forum administrators will be vulnerable and serve at a disadvantage while their real-life information becomes fodder all over the internet.
* Vile people will be just as vile under their own names as they will under a handle. Talk shows, Reality TV and Girls Gone Wild videos are the majority rule and those people don’t wear Guy Fawkes masks to act like morons or say disgusting things. Social and criminal deterrents only work when there are consequences that deter people from their own natures.
* It’s easier to impose stricter rules and employ technology solutions than it is to police a user base. Trying to impose a false sense of positive by bulling away negative criticism is ultimately self-defeating.
* Devaluing your own forums and driving people to third party formats in search of free speech makes you a second-class delivery system in your own market. When people stop visiting the official forums, Blizzard will have to work harder to monitor third-party forum sites to find out what their customers are saying/thinking and will have to spend more on promotion efforts to get their messages out. This is bad juju.
* Blizzard actively recruits and markets to children; the first time a kid’s real name gets used for something sinister, it’s crying moms and abused children vs. Big Bad Blizzard’s greedy corporate policy. Throw in an ambitious lawyer and you’ll end up with a class-action lawsuit just for putting kids at risk.
* God help them if they try and make this retroactive, or there’s a tech glitch and information from past posts are revealed without user consent.

Blizzard is usually nothing if not self-serving and hyper-protective of their legal liabilities. So why the dumb move? What’s the advantage? Do they think being able to provide users with the ability to network inside their own system is more important than focusing on gameplay/immersion, developing the relationships between users and their avatars, or updating content faster? It looks like it. They’re misreading their role as that of a communication provider, instead of being an entertainment provider with outlets to communication-based venues.

With the launch of the new Battle.net, it’s important to us to create a new and different kind of online gaming environment — one that’s highly social, and which provides an ideal place for gamers to form long-lasting, meaningful relationships. All of our design decisions surrounding Real ID — including these forum changes — have been made with this goal in mind.

You can almost see some out of touch suit sitting around spouting things like “we gotta be more like that Facebooky stuff — why aren’t we doing Facebook things? Farmville is killing us!” while his R&D department head tries not to commit seppuku in the middle of the boardroom.

It looks like they’re trying for the Disney World model, where once you show up, you never have to leave for anything. Except that sort of thing only works at Disney World because WDW provides for every guest need. Food, clothing, transportation, emergency services, entertainment, etc, are all catered to. It’s stupid to attempt this sort of this thing when you only offer one product (entertainment/activity) and that product is, let’s face it, waning. Improving the flow of communication between users and their social networking is certainly crucial. Trying to establish themselves as a closed-circuit hub (and doing so while imposing constraints) is unfathomably dumb.

I could support (and would defend) Battle.net trying to hook up their users with outside social networking as a means to keep people inside the format, and requiring authentication for such. That’s basic, but it doesn’t require the public brandishing of user information. If I’m Jane Smith on Facebook and Jane Strangelove on Twitter and KillzYouHard on WOW, my voluntary desire to link those accounts doesn’t require my IDs being splashed all over the forums just because I hate the fact that Blizzard techs can’t ever meet their announced deadlines, or because my fishing hat lure doesn’t work after the latest patch.

Being able to monitor and interact with my social networking should be a positive thing, not a sacrificial endeavor. Blizzard could easily allow authentication and interaction without stomping all over user privacy. So why don’t they value user privacy, or believe that users value it enough to make it worth the trouble?

Well, that’s a longer post and requires a bit of personal disclosure to understand where my beliefs on the subject come from. I’ll bump it behind a jump so you can leave it here if you’d like.

I’m an introvert, so I value my anonymity far more than the average. My SL profile suggests you should read Jonathan Rauch’s wonderful article Caring for Your Introvert before even IMing me. In a world where 3/4 of the human population skews extrovert, I am often baffled and discouraged by the way other people devalue privacy and the antics they employ to dismantle it. I am also well aware of how people like me are regarded with mistrust and often considered to be hiding for some sinister end.

Being an introvert was once easy on the internet; it was our realm. There weren’t a lot of extroverts willing to wait ten minutes to connect to a BBS and type back and forth about geek topics. But, as the internet got easier, the extroverts came. I still have friends who will grumble and mutter about how AOL ruined everything in voices very like Montgomery Burns lambasting those long-haired hippie Homers and their noisy “rock and roll.” History was against us. The nature of communication and technology was against us. When I think on this, I have to wonder if it is ultimately human nature itself that is against us.

The way I see it, this current “crisis” is based on the unbalanced relationship that currently exists between internet technology, communication, and attention-seeking behavior.

Communication is the foundation of human society; whatever evolution our species can still claim, it is based on communication. It is how we learn and pass on knowledge, how we express art and investigate its meaning, how we develop survival habits to protect and maintain our safety, the safety of those we love, and assure the longevity of the cultural elements we deem valuable. I am the most extreme isolationist I know, and even I would not want to exist in a vacuum devoid of communication. To do so would be to live in a world without books, without music, without knowledge. Unlike an extrovert, I could survive in that void, I just don’t want to.

Enter: attention. For most people, communication is the cornerstone of how they generate attention. Most of us require some attention as a basic survival need. Extroverts require a lot more, and extroverts drive social networking. What keeps communication technology in business isn’t people like me. The people that drive social networking are the ones who live and die by how many friends they have on Facebook — the type of person who pays attention to what makes them gain or lose twitter followers and adjusts their behavior accordingly. The fact that there are armies of those people and a minority of people like me is just really dawning on web-based business. The scales have shifted and they’re realizing they don’t have to cater to introverts anymore. Moreover, because generating attention is also fundamental for things like business marketing, personal branding, etc, they have an even larger motivation to abandon introvert culture norms.

Attention has become a commodity in personal and business evolution; it is its own currency. We have entered the dawn of Wuffie.

When three-fourths of a target market values something above all else, the odds shift in favor of the house. This is how the need for attention which drives most people simultaneously undermines their consumer rights — the casual consumer will surrender liberties without a second thought, and will even continue to surrender them while complaining, if the product serves a basic need.

Privacy features, customer service, quality control, and maintenance departments cost companies big bucks without any “on paper” return, unless they can charge for them. The phone companies learned this when they figured out how to charge people for unlisted numbers. Dell learned this when they started offering customer support plans. Credit card companies figured it out when they began to establish levels of service based on your spending habits and annual fees. Because of the nature of these intangible values, most companies won’t even recognize they’re losing business over them until it’s too late

Now, to be fair, anonymity and afforded privacy do contribute problems that cause expense, but so do any number of consumer privileges — most of that is simply the cost of doing business. Moreover, I’m a believer that consumer privileges establish a social debt relationship between customers and providers that is valuable. Given the tools and procedures that can be easily employed to defend against concerns, there is little justification to strip consumers of rights, other than “because we can.” This is bad in the long run because if a consumer doesn’t feel any social debt toward a company/product then the product will falter as soon as it meets any meaningful competition in the marketplace.

The irony, of course, is that by legal definition, a corporation has a lot in common with 4chan’s hive-minded anonymous. It’s a sociopathic entity that exists only in theory, conceived to protect individuals from the consequence of a larger group’s actions. Companies, like trolls, do not have to be invested in what’s best for their user base, or for society in general, only in what profits them, and all too often, those profits are short-sighted. Like football coaches, CEOs only get a short time to prove themselves winners. Short-term agendas can cause long-term damage to a brand.

I suspect this wave of thinking will eventually backfire for Blizzard. It will disengage gamers from the relationships they develop with their avatars; it will undermine immersion; it will damage industry reputation and user-appreciation toward the product; it will create a pressure point that a start-up competitor will be able to capitalize on. When you’re the bigger company with the larger budget, holding your users in contempt and demonstrating disrespect by stripping them of privileges is bad, even if you don’t think it’ll cost you in the short term — when you’re so out of touch that you don’t even recognize the damage you’re doing, that’s worse.

Attention-seekers are a bigger share of the market, but, in my experience they’re a fickle market prone to shifting with low consumer loyalty. I wish I had numbers to back this up, but all logic points to extroverts as short-term revenue. Say what you want about introverts, but we are generally patient and loyal to products and services. Maintaining policies that keeps us happy has benefits you might not see on paper.

Communication technology companies might not care about keeping introverts happy, because they’re delivering a fundamental service on the basis of mass appeal, but entertainment-based technology companies should care deeply. Extroverts play sports, stay out all night drinking, and fill up their calendars with activities. Introverts stay home and play MMOs. Ultimately, though I believe this is a bad move for Blizzard, I don’t know that I can say it will hurt them for a long time yet — not until they have a real competitor and the extroverts have other options for their “down time” entertainments.

There are valid reasons and important factors that motivate legitimate people to maintain their anonymity. Anonymity fosters truth, especially if that truth is unpleasant. Anonymity provides control over information and environment. Anonymity creates a buffer between vulnerable individuals and potential predators. Anonymity allows us to departmentalize our lives, so that we don’t have to run into that annoying guy from work trying to buddy up to us while we’re killing make-believe baddies. In Blizzard’s case, their response to fraud and identify theft is already dismal; putting their user base information at an even greater disadvantage is a gesture of reckless disregard they don’t need to make.

As corporations have begun to settle into the mindset that consumers will surrender a lot to communicate and gain attention, the harsh reality of current trends points to more undermining of anonymity to come. It’s all creeping toward consumer-based virtual worlds full of attention-accumulating humanity where privacy is just another casualty. I suspect that speeding toward this vision of the future will be negative for both providers and consumers. Corporations won’t like having to operate in that atmosphere any more than introverts, especially when middle men become less and less necessary.

Once the reality hits that anonymity is a red herring and people will behave badly under their own names, and once those names are tied to cross-platform social network identities, and once all that information is harvested into tidy corporate databases, any casino pit boss could tell you blacklists aren’t far behind. And once lists are established, getting on them will get easier and getting removed from them will get more difficult. Once the majority of individuals are on one list or another (as youthful indiscretions will dictate) there will be a ready-made black market and subculture of identity masking sophisticated beyond anything we can envision right now. Once real identity fails to have value, we’re right back where we sit now.

Except we’ll have criminalized the userbase. All because the social debt people feel toward fairness and privilege will evaporate. Refusing to let people departmentalize their lives might seem easier or encourage more polite behavior on the surface, but I can foresee very negative consequences.

We are complex individuals. We behave differently in front of our parents than we do at a friend’s party. We cultivate relationships that fulfill different needs. Trying to force a person to maintain a single front in all their social interactions is a really bad idea.

This might read like paranoia, but it’s just the logical progression as I see it because it’s the path of least resistance and the path of easy profit and the path of human nature.

So, are privacy advocates like me just outdated relics who need to shut up and let the carousel turn? Is there any chance the balance will shift along the way and privacy can regain value against attention-currency? Can we dig in at some level and maintain the social debts we employ to help society function?

I remain skeptical, if hopeful. Even in my most optimistic scenarios, however, I don’t see a reverse-trend happening within the market, but only taking place in the form of legislation which can’t happen without the revival of a meaningful consumer advocate movement and a bump in the ability of politicians to get a handle on technology. I don’t see that as a reality within my lifetime. As is often the case, it’s what I know I can’t foresee that I base my hope on.

In the meantime, the only victory for privacy advocates, I suspect, will be of the Hot Tin Roof variety. Just hanging on, as long as we can.