A PDF copy of this essay can be found here.
This is something that's a little bit out of the ordinary for my blog - something more philosophical than technical - but it's something that's been weighing on my mind for some time now. I've discussed the ideas I present here with many of my friends, and they understood (though not all necessarily agreed!), so maybe the internet at large would be interested as well. I think that the growing homogenization of the internet at large through sites like Facebook and YouTube, as well as the growing use of SSO (Single Sign-On) solutions to use a single account to login to a variety of smaller sites, has led to a chilling effect on the honesty of internet-based discourse; but more importantly, threatens to prevent our complete selves from being expressed to the world, which could prove extraordinarily harmful in the long run.
