The Lair

The coffin corner is one of those concepts that I remember reading ages ago but forgot until a recent memory joggle. In this case, the jab to the memory came from a slightly sensationalist analysis of how Air France flight 447 may have been downed.

So while you are napping, eating or watching a movie on that flight to LAX, you should know the plane you are flying is cruising along at the ratty edge of its capabilities. Why? Money. The higher an airliner flies, the better gas mileage it gets.

With the slight caveat that going a bit too high can cause the airplane to do all sorts of things it shouldn’t be doing – like stalling. Actually, that is sage advice for pretty much anyone, including that dude called Icarus. But I digress. The point is, those kinds of tradeoffs are everywhere.

Take anonymity on the internet. There is a delicate line between revealing just enough information to put another person at ease (ie:, establish that you are, in fact, not a crazy axe wielding murderous type) and too much information. The amount of information that straddles the line is (as far as I can determine, anyway) very specific to a particular culture.

Example: An extreme case in Japan.

For users, however, there seem to be three components of The Fear.
– A fear that criminals and con-men will use online information to scam or otherwise harm the user
– A fear that co-workers or bosses will find personal details which could be held against the individual within his/her organization
– A fear of bashing from anonymous mobs for social transgression (especially being judged as an individual “too aggressively trying to stand out”)

I don’t know, does this seem familiar? The coffin corner for venturing out with your real name is when you attract all the wrong sorts of attention. In places where online communities are large (and widely dispersed), this isn’t a problem. Small towns? Oh hell yes it is a problem.

So the inevitable entreaties begin – thou shalt use thy real name at all times – in a sort of mutually assured destruction pact with everyone else.

The worrying part is that the real-names-at-all-costs cries appear to be gaining traction. For any number of reasons, I’d like my internet to be anonymous and to remain anonymous for the foreseeable future.