The value of Tor and anonymous contributions to Wikipedia

[Moderator: the first part of this submission may appear tangential to the issue raised in antonela's post, but if you keep reading you will find the second part is "on-topic"!]

Wikipedia is an (unconventional) encyclopedia, but the Wikipedia user community is a (virtually) Utopian society. Conventional wisdom says that Utopian societies always fracture and die out after a few years, but Wikipedia has defied convention by surviving and even, to some extent, thriving. Even more astonishing, Wikipedia has come to be generally regarded as a resource so essential to anyone seeking information that it seems unthinkable that it might someday simply vanish.

(But it might. All earthly things, including all websites, are vulnerable to extinction during the current mass extinction event.)

One aspect common to many Utopian societies--- including Wikipedia--- is that horrified authoritarian onlookers stridently denounce their "anarchic" nature. Or, not very consistently, to denounce them as a "cult". Wikipedia has been called both those things, but in truth, Wikipedia is neither chaotic nor a cult.

In fact it is only to be expected that any novel society will initially lack a clearly defined form, but will quickly begin to organize itself, with "cliques" and "social rules" developing, possibly in the absence of any conventional type of "leadership". In the early stages, some charismatic personality may play the role of "benign dictator", a term which has been applied to Jimmy Wales (but only in jest, at least on the part of informed commentators).

Ignorant onlookers are prone to regard this decentralized, unplanned, and often messy process of self-organization as a sign that "this cannot last", but the process is better seen as a kind of natural selection in action: some cliques persist while others die out, some rules persist while others are discarded, some leaders enjoy the respect of the community over a long period, while others come to be generally reviled. And it is true that in human society as in nature, most "experiments" lead to extinction. But Wikipedia is one of the few which seems not only to have proven viable, but which is even becoming, dare we say it, dominant.

Could it be that the corporations by which we have been too long plundered and the governments by which we have been too long oppressed, are doomed to die out, that our heirs will live a society which looks much less like Main Street or Wall Street or Silicon Valley, and much more like Wikipedia?

Just in the past five years, we who have the misfortune--- or opportunity?--- of living in turbulent times have experienced the early stages of what will likely prove to be the most rapid and profound social, economic, political, and environmental evolution in human history. The nearest approach in the past few millennia might be the first century AD and the years roughly 1775-1795. (For the latter, see the already classic book by Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval). But there seems to be a growing consensus that even the profoundly radical nature those times of change will not compare to our own.

Of these changes, the one which perhaps most personally affects everyone reading this blog is the fact that human societies (all over the globe) are rapidly transforming from societies in which the "default condition" is that adults are officially "employed" to societies in which very few people are employed in any sense which would be easily understood by a medieval serf or a twentieth century American. This change is so utterly confounding that even the best and brightest intellectuals, much less political leaders, have been unable to grapple with the implications, much less to make reliable predictions about what kind of society will replace the ones in which all previous generations of humans have existed.

From this perspective, one of the most striking aspects of Wikipedia is that "wikipedians" are not only willing but eager to contribute volunteer labor, in pursuance of the idealistic goal of preserving from harm and incrementally improving the encyclopedia, and moreover are not only willing but eager to work as hard or harder than they ever would if they were reaping the kind of inordinate financial rewards which are heaped upon the CEOs of multinational corporations. Which would seem to be consistent with the increasingly common view that capitalism is fundamentally inhuman. Actual people, it seems, do not want to work for "money" (whatever that might be) but for something equally intangible but (it seems) far more natural and far more "humane", something which we might hypothesize can be called something like "trying to make the world a better place". Optimists who reject the generally current trend towards degradation, dissolution, destruction and despair, may perhaps regard Wikipedia as an intriguing example of what kind of society might replace pre-twentyfirst-century societies (from hunter-gatherer economies to capitalistic economies).

For these and other reasons, the social evolution (to date) of Wikipedia holds extraordinary interest.

One aspect of the early evolution of Wikipedia which is most directly relevant to antonela's post is this: fairly early, one of the most pressing problems confronted by the Wikipedia community was that "wikivandals" often made hard-to-notice but unhelpful edits (such as mischievously inserting a word which changed a factually true sentence into a factually false one), or even easy-to-spot and easily-reversed but nonetheless annoying deletions of paragraphs or even entire articles. This led to a nonhuman ecosystem of "wikibots" which monitor the vast wikipedia.org website for such changes and automatically "revert" them.

A second aspect of the early evolution of Wikipedia which I think is relevant to understanding the interaction of the Wikipedia and Tor user communities was the appearance of fairly well defined subpopulations ("cliques" might be too strong a word), which could be roughly placed according to a multidimensional system of antipodalities such as these:

o serious <-> whimsical
o conventional <-> unconventional
o established <-> provocative
o scientific <-> anti-scientific
0 truthful <-> fictional
o inclusive <-> divisive
o complex <-> simple

For example, some users "specialized" in producing exhaustive lists (often but not always lists of "trivia items"), and a social norm emerged according to which such "articles" were given titles of the form "List of [noun phrase]". Some users specialized in producing articles explaining technical subjects too new or too specialized to have found a place in any conventionally printed encyclopedia. These topics often included major technical developments, often computer or science related, and the authors were often genuine subject matter experts. Because these articles offered up to date information on very new and newsworthy developments which were often quite important to many people, but concerning which accurate information was hard to find elsewhere, Wikipedia gradually became recognized as a critical resource, not only by journalists but even by jurists struggling to write a credible summary of some technical issue which had come before their court. And in jury trials, panelists are increasingly unlikely to heed stern warnings from the bench not to consult Wikipedia from the sacred confines of the jury room.

And so Wikipedia became impressively influential. Which is to say, Wikipedia became important. Suddenly, controversies involving Wikipedia became seen as consequential. Suddenly, well-informed citizens all over the world began to recognize that Wikipedia is one of a handful of websites which--- love it or loathe it--- quite simply *matter*.

On the dark side, Wikipedia's open format was quickly exploited by previously marginalized groups ranging from far right hate groups to earnest but self-deluded people desperately anxious to promote some "conspiracy theory" or pseudoscientific conception. But the majority of Wikipedians wanted to ensure that the encyclopedia was better described as "a good source of up to date and generally reliable information" than as "a cesspool of disinformation, misinformation, and hate speech", and they did not take kindly to "wikivandalism" or to more determined attempts to hijack the encyclopedia to serve some unpopular and unregarded special interest.

The earliest attempts to "keep Wikipedia clean" involved the formation of an extensive and increasingly convoluted ruleset, leading to the emergence of a new specialty: wikilawyering. Working within this system soon proved to be far too exhausting for most "content producers", but computer scientists saved the day by contributing increasingly sophisticated "bots" which took some of the pressure off those wikipedians who wanted the encyclopedia to remain mostly reliable and mostly free of hate speech.

Another early development was that articles on large and medium-sized companies and corporations appeared, and the executive suites began to take notice of the implications. This led to a new business: "consultants" who boasted (mostly without any real factual basis) of being "influencers" within the Wikipedia community and who sold their services as "wikishills" who would supposedly "ensure" that the public image of their corporate clients, as expressed in Wikipedia, would be favorable to shareholders.

Politicians were initially a bit slower to pay close attention to Wikipedia articles on the topic of themselves--- called "wikibiographies" in wikispeak--- and early attempts to suppress often "damaging but true" information about some often unpopular or controversial political figure led to such gaffes as "anonymous IP edits" of the wikibiography of some US Congressman which technically adept wikipedians were quick to expose as originating in the IP range assigned to US Congress. Since this type of "crying foul" quickly became too tedious for human oversight, it too was taken over by specialized wikibots.

At more or less the same time, there emerged a class of "academics" who quite shamelessly promoted themselves as "leading intellectuals" [sic], an often laughably excessive view held by essentially no one else. This kind of activity was easy for humans to spot but proved much harder for wikibots to combat, because the self-promoting small-potato academics (and later, more or less meritless "media personalities") often proved more ingenious at "gaming" the Wikipedia system than traditional political operatives.

In another notable development (which the Wikipedia "leadership" is understandably not eager to discuss), mysterious actors began to exploit the website in ways which seemingly had little if anything to do with the goal of providing information (true or false, misleading or not) for mass consumption. Mysterious edits in very obscure locations in wikipedia.org (seemingly "obscure by design") began to appear, resulting in a yet another new specialty: wikicryptanalyst. Some of these turned out to be arrangements for personal assignations in countries where unusual (or even "mainstream") sexual practices are strictly proscribed. (See the classic book by David Kahn, The Codebreakers, for historical precedents which attracted the attention of previous generations of amateur and professional cryptanalysts.) Other well hidden edits seemed to have some kind of criminal nexus, which led to some rather alarming requests for information from some truly scary sources.

Given this, it should not be surprising that well-funded intelligence agencies with global ambitions (not all of them American) were quick to try to exploit Wikipedia in various ways, such as by encouraging operatives to worm their way into the upper levels of the developing hierarchy of Wikipedia "influencers", with the immediate goal of tracking what was happening behind the scenes of this extraordinarily important virtual society, and in the longer term, with a view toward systematically "slanting" content in ways favored by certain governments. Hidden from the view of the public (and from almost all wikipedians), "out of band" discussions using increasingly more sophisticate cryptoprecautions began to occur with increasing frequency. One development which to some extent benefited from "spooky" advice was that Wikipedia hired cybersecurity professionals who greatly improved the cybersecurity of the website. Less happily, genuinely influential wikipedians began to find themselves subject to increasingly sophisticated state-sponsored "targeted" cyberattacks. But perhaps the most striking aspect of this generally unwanted, dangerous, and still growing spook infestation is that Wikipedia appears to have become the unique example of a utopian society which became so important to "the mainstream" that (seemingly) every intelligence agency in the world with even the most modest pretensions to global omniscience feels they need to have a "on-site presence". In contrast, the Pinkertons apparently never saw any need to infiltrate New Hope or the Amish community.

We can see here parallels with the history of the Tor community. We too have found that as we become more consequential in the world at large, we become subject to ever more determined targeted attacks by an ever more diverse set of corporate and state-sponsored adversaries. Which are the very same adversaries which are targeting the Wikipedia community. And one activity which all our adversaries energetically pursue is the systematic attempt to promote division, not only inside targeted societies, but between them. Thus, one of the things with which both Wikipedia editors and Tor developers must contend is the systematic attempt by sophisticated and well-funded adversaries to prevent us from recognizing and building upon common ground.

Two books which may aid in understanding how our most dangerous adversaries operate are:

o Mike German: Disrupt, Discredit and Divide. New Press, 2019.
o Tim Wiener: Legacy of Ashes. Anchor Books, 2008.

These books cover USG efforts to influence, disrupt, and corrupt everything everywhere, but of course the USG is not the only government which has us--- Wikipedia and Tor-- in their gunsights.

But if our communities can somehow survive these increasingly vigorous--- and increasingly desperate--- attempts at indiscriminate destruction, in the longer term everything which our adversaries believe is "vital" for "national security" (whatever a "nation" and its "security" might be) or "economic survival" (whatever that mean in an age when information is increasingly more "tangible" than traditional notions of "money") or "geopolitical power" (whatever that might mean in a world in which misinformation appears to be proving more powerful than missiles), all these things which our befuddled enemies think so essential, may vanish. That would surely be a truly happy and liberating development, of incalculable benefit to all peoples everywhere.

But that is the future, which is unknowable, until it happens. We live in the present. Which is always dangerous but which has perhaps never been more dangerous than in the polyterroristic times in which we live.

We are all now engaged in an epic struggle to shape the future. The world to come will be--- if our adversaries prevail--- unbearably awful. Unfit for civilization. Incompatible with even the most basic notions of freedom. Incompatible not only with the pursuit of happiness, but far worse, incompatible with any reasonable notion of a life worth living. The world to come may very well may not contain humans at all.

But there is a chance that if we continue to fight all those forces which oppose all things bright and beautiful, we might yet prevail. The world to come just might turn out to be more of a utopia than a dystopia.

Let us work for it, fight for it, even die for it. Because a better world would be well worth any sacrifice.

We need it, we deserve it, we can have it--- if we are willing to fight for it--- and we must do everything we can to ensure that our survivors actually get to live in it.