Universal Basic Doxxing

On the Proliferation of Naughty Lists

Doxxing is one tool in a suite of tactics for crushing dissent. Exposing an anonymous, pseudonymous, or unidentified persona’s true identity and personal information is always an attempt to take them off the chessboard. When executed successfully, a doxx accomplishes the following objectives:

• Tags an individual for reputational destruction for their past, present, and future.

• Delegitimizes their public work by sullying it with their private activities.

• Creates psychological, if not also physical, insecurity for the target.

• Puts their livelihood, education, property, business, or life under threat.

• Generates social pressure through guilt by association from friends, family, and colleagues.

• Warns others to stay down by making an example of them.

• Removes them from play.

These seven criteria are obviously not always, nor uniformly, achieved. But they qualify the intent of every doxx. Choosing to doxx someone is therefore a deeply personal, intentionally destructive act; whether you know the target or not. In the U.S. it represents any number of the above, up to and including, death by murder or suicide. In some cases it represents threat of imprisonment or execution as well. For the purposes of this article, we are using a broad definition of doxxing that includes exposing not just anonymous and pseudonymous internet actors, but also unidentified and underexposed persons to public scorn. Partly, this is because the dividing lines between these 4 categories of targets are not always clear-cut (some are varying degrees of all 4, as we’ll see later), but also because the line between internet and real-life is decreasingly meaningful.

Recent events in the Israel-Palestine conflict have drawn renewed public debate, particularly on the Right, over the propriety of compiling lists of radicalized supporters, and reporting protestors to their schools, employers, and even Homeland Security. Credible and imminent threats of violence are covered under U.S. free speech restrictions, and law enforcement have numerous tools and tactics at their disposal that even the most pernicious journalist couldn’t dream of, for unmasking and identifying threats. It is unreasonable to claim, then, that a primary, or even significant, justification for these activities is public safety or policing unlawful violations of speech. Clearly, these maneuvers are the actions of private or institutional actors aiming their doxx canons at partisans for the purpose of crushing dissent.

The Right’s Fight

A refrain echoed by those with still-liberal temperaments is that the Right ought not to revel too greedily in the schadenfreude of seeing, or partaking in, the professional, academic, and interpersonal down-going of their ideological enemies. Many in this camp are weary of the venomous spread of cancel culture through our formerly liberal institutions, and wish to broker an uneasy truce, hoping for a return to “normal”, tolerant relations. Some have themselves even been doxxed or brigaded to cancellation, and chosen to turn the other cheek. This Faction of Forgiveness wants unilateral disarmament.

A louder crowd is actively or vicariously participating in campaigns to tarnish and dispossess overstepping agitators, and loving every minute of it. “A chance,” they’ll say, “to finally give them a taste of their own medicine! Where there was no quarter given before, there shall be no quarter offered in turn.” They seek to capitalize on the outrage and the fervor, to break their bullies and disembowel their (dis)establishment. All this in hopes that their righteous fury may now be finally met with divine justice, and providence has smiled upon the downcast. Alas, the Star of Nemesis is returned. This Faction of Fair Play recognizes the rules of engagement on matters of public discourse have been rigged against them for some time, and wants heads to roll.

What the Faction of Forgiveness and the Faction of Fair Play share are reeling experiences of ideological persecution by institutions, themselves or by-proxy. What is unshared is their prescription for ameliorating these transgressions.

McCarthy Redux

Joseph McCarthy, 1954

Those with historical memory recall the last time the Right had significant cultural clout to blacklist and cancel career leftists as the era of McCarthyism. The second Red Scare had tepid bipartisan support because of the existential threat posed by Communist infiltrators at the onset of the Cold War. Democrats, seeking to distance themselves from suspicions of communist sympathies, begrudgingly pruned the ranks of their own party to fend off allegations. Notably, the first anti-Communist “loyalty review boards” were installed by Truman’s Executive Order 9835 in 1947; nearly 3 years before McCarthy’s famous Lincoln Day State Department speech. Addressed to the Republican Women’s Club of Wheeling, West Virginia, February 9th, 1950, McCarthy presented a list supposedly containing the names of 205 known communists working in the State Department; which had until-then been ignored by Secretary of State Dean Acheson. A flurry of media attention immediately followed and the Wisconsin Senator became a national figure overnight.

Momentum from this revelation quickly spread concerns of communist infiltration of the government more broadly. McCarthy initiated investigations into communist elements within the CIA the following month. In response, CIA Director Allan Dulles pressed President Eisenhower to demand McCarthy cease issuing subpoenas against CIA assets. It was not made public until 2004 that Dulles had directly ordered agents to break into McCarthy’s senate office and feed him disinformation to discredit and spoil the investigation.

Other agencies weren’t so unscrupulous. As head of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations from 1952-1953, he conducted investigations of Voice of America, the State Department, and the U.S. Army. He pilfered the State Department’s overseas library, recited a list of pro-communist authors before his subcommittee and the press, then had those forbidden books removed from shelves. In a publicly televised series of challenges to the U.S. Army he levied various charges of communist infiltration for 36 days before the hearings broke inconclusively. This gambit, though unsuccessful, led to a surge in the Senator’s popularity among the viewing public.

It wasn’t long before his moment in the spotlight came crashing down. On Dec. 2, 1954, the Senate voted 67-22 to censure McCarthy for “conduct that tends to bring the Senate into dishonor and disrepute." For the public spectacle, he was accused of abusing his committee chairmanship, and that committee in turn was accused of having “distorted, misrepresented, and omitted in its effort to manufacture a plausible rationalization in support of its recommendations to the Senate.”¹ A combination of botched, sabotaged, and overzealous investigations, along with institutional and partisan pushback marked the enterprise for derailment; and its figurehead for disgrace.

McCarthy is a tragic figure. A public servant put his legacy on the line to rid our government and public institutions of Communist subversion. Communists and communistic influences were found, as they had been well before him, and some rooted out. He briefly enjoyed the spotlight, with public and bipartisan support, before numerous forces (including, to whatever extent, his own incompetence) colluded to take him out. One can forgive collapsing before a legion of enemies, but it was his unforced errors that closed the door for similar action on the part of the right for decades. A door that, thanks to a new crisis of institutional legitimacy, is once again open, if only for a brief time.

Total Culture War

As the Faction of Forgiveness and the Faction of Fair Play go back and forth over what to do with the daily scalps, each are trying out for hearts and minds to be the changing face of the American Right. Fundamentally, these are a liberal and an increasingly illiberal (or post-liberal) camp, respectively. In tension are the rules of engagement with regard to political noncombatants in a hyperconnected world where every civilian is potentially a sleeper guerrilla fighter.

The theater of battle is also expanded because of the aforementioned merging of online and real life. Where the Red Scares were largely delimited to targets in government positions, the military, universities, and influential industries (Hollywood), new culture war contests envelope everyone, everywhere, at all times. This characteristic of standing ubiquity precipitates a specter of totalitarianism. The Faction of Forgiveness seeks peace and reprieve, while the Faction of Fair Play stands to dig two graves.

Balaji’s Pseudonymous Promise

Balaji Srinivasan’s 2019 talk “The Pseudonymous Economy” presented a vision of a future with a multiplicity of functional, tenuously tethered identities. In this future, which is already some’s present, one’s true self or government identity is partially or fully cordoned off from multiple other, looser, affiliative online identities that exist to perform certain social functions. A pseudonym may be used for business and employment dealings, while anonymous accounts may be used for purely entertainment, and government-issued I.D. only for the most official tax and medical necessities. The key insight in this scheme is that for many institutional affiliations (work, school, social media) exposing your entire identity practically constitutes oversharing. I will not belabor illustration of this point (the talk isn’t very long), but a brief analogy might suffice. The schema described is not unlike how a systems administrator would assign hierarchical identities and their privacy permissions inside a network. A root user has full control, including the ability to create, restrict and delete other users, admins have slightly less control, and run-of-the-mill users are very delimited. The corresponding value of each of these reflects their degrees of freedom and sanctity. A normal user getting hacked is an annoyance. An admin is a big problem. And root access is potentially devastating. Likewise, one’s anon getting banned is annoying, one’s psued being deplatformed might be a big setback, and one’s real identity taking sustained damage is life-altering.

Pseudonymity defends against social supply-chain disruptions - Balaji

The purpose behind the Pseudonymous Economy is to prevent character assassination through reputational partitions. Balaji goes on to describe how one can trade off degrees of anonymity for reputational currency, and various social network innovations, like zero-knowledge attestation, that may one day make it trivial for lets say, a 100k follower verified account to spin off a pseudonym that also borrows its verification. At the end of the talk, he’s immediately asked by an audience member about real-life identification. He doesn’t have a satisfactory answer, only that facial-recognition-masking technologies, might make it more difficult to automatically identify protestors, for example, in the future. Where he left off, Balaji’s pseudonymous promise provides some interesting considerations for protecting online identities, but lacks protection for real-life encounters. The latter, I propose, is a matter of extending his germ of an idea.

Growing a Deeper Face

"Every profound spirit needs a mask: even more, around every profound spirit a mask is growing continually, owing to the constantly false, namely shallow, interpretation of every word, every step, every sign of life he gives." - Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

If doxxing in all its forms remains an omnipresent threat, then one solution is to take what is explicated in the pseudonymous economy and turn it up to the nth degree. Instead of merely keeping your various online identities partitioned, reconfigure multiple facets of your life and institutional affiliations around minimum necessary information flows. What this means in practice is that your school, your employer, and your landlord don’t need to entirely know who you are, and shouldn’t. Instead, they would each contain varying degrees of proof-of-x with regard to whatever information is necessary for them to make decisions. This would take the form of various zero-knowledge proofs that would give a bit of information needed to fulfill some contractual obligation, and no more nor less. Proof of student. Proof of income. Proof of citizenship. Proof of human. Etc… . By growing a deeper face, even if your “real” government-issued persona were doxxed, it would hardly be relevant or searchable to your employer, your school, or whomever, because they would know you in a limited, particular way that would be difficult to tie back to this tax-relevant identity. Likewise, the people hunting you down wouldn’t be capable of doing much with said information, because the internet, and even internal organization records wouldn’t turn up the same identifying information. What I’m proposing is that not just some, all of us are routinely overexposed, and we now have the technology to dispense with this overexposure. The solution to the panopticon world we’ve built around us is to begin knocking out eyelets.

The Right’s Soul

For the right to have a viable future it cannot have its members lopsidedly destroyed at the flip of a switch by its political and ideological opponents. A repetitive game where you and your side are routinely deprived of jobs, resources, and prestige, while your opponents freely deride you and are rewarded for it is simply unsustainable. A tit-for-tat dynamic, such as the one that is emerging from the Israel-Palestine protests, is more sustainable, but not ideal to live in. It is also unclear whether this particular set of issues: support for Israel, condemnation of Hamas, accusations of antisemitism—actually lends itself to broadening cancelation power from the right. As some have pointed out, open attacks against whites on campuses have been normalized and unpunished for quite some time. Unilateral disarmament likewise seems unlikely, given the ubiquity of tools and low cost of deployment. Instead, I have proposed here that they become more cunning by embracing technological and institutional solutions to total culture war.

1. https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/censure-of-senator-joseph-mccarthy