IRL nobody is running facial recognition tech and uniquely identifying you. And, despite what your teachers told you, no one is keeping a permanent record of the minutia of your life. So I know my neighbor is "George", but I don't know anything about his political opinions, where he shops, how he treats waiters, or what kind of porn he watches. Thus he's not anonymous, but his daily activities are generally private and ephemeral.
The internet flips this on its head because pseudonymous handles can be linked to reams of online activity that's retained effectively forever but can't be connected to a specific person. This is why "doxxing" is such a big deal online.
If online activity was like IRL activity and ephemeral, I might agree with you. But the internet never forgets.
Edit: By the way, this is not universally defined:
> say crazy shit
"Crazy shit" is very culturally and contextually dependent. If I condemn China's treatment of Uyghurs, that's fine in North America but considered "crazy shit" and can land you in jail in China. That's an extreme example, but there are plenty of other more banal differences in culture and what's acceptable globally.
> IRL nobody is running facial recognition tech and uniquely identifying you.
Maybe this is true in some places. In big cities in Europe and the Americas this is definitely the case. It's done by law enforcement, commercial retail, and private security. It's more or less trivial nowadays to buy a cheap IP camera and collect an database of faces across your camera network.
My guess is that there's more of this going on, but I'm only listing stuff I have personal knowledge of.
First, it's useful to separate things like watching porn and other explicitly private activity from actual speech and interaction, which are deliberate forms of engagement.
The anonymity we're talking about here is WRT the latter.
With that in mind, my point is that it's a social problem that people have to worry about death threats for expressing political opinions. It's not solved by people becoming anonymous at scale to offer up their opinions. In fact, this adds to the problem, in that anonymity tends to lead to increasingly offensive forms of expression (absent the social governor and accountability that are present IRL). Anonymity can change the motivation for engaging and remove constraints that have social utility.
It also makes it easy for bad actors to do their work.
Put simply, if people don't feel comfortable offering an opinion in person, then maybe it's not a good thing to give them an opportunity to offer it anonymously at-scale.
>Crazy shit is very culturally and contextually dependent
No. I'm speaking WRT the context of our discussion. That is, saying things anonymously online that one would not say in-person for understood social (or legal) reasons. e.g. threatening people, being overtly snarky, trolling, etc.
The internet flips this on its head because pseudonymous handles can be linked to reams of online activity that's retained effectively forever but can't be connected to a specific person. This is why "doxxing" is such a big deal online.
If online activity was like IRL activity and ephemeral, I might agree with you. But the internet never forgets.
Edit: By the way, this is not universally defined:
> say crazy shit
"Crazy shit" is very culturally and contextually dependent. If I condemn China's treatment of Uyghurs, that's fine in North America but considered "crazy shit" and can land you in jail in China. That's an extreme example, but there are plenty of other more banal differences in culture and what's acceptable globally.