***
There’s an incredible corner of the Net, hosted by someone who calls himself “Scott Alexander.” “Alexander” is a young Bay Area psychiatrist with a wide range of interests and enormous intellectual energy. He’s written a blog — Slate Star Codex (wbm)—that echoes some of the very best in the old web. Longer essays, sometimes book reviews, sometimes summaries of a collection of academic papers with his analysis, occasionally humor. One reader I’ve known (and trusted and respected) for 25 years tells me (I’ve not been a follower):the essays are always intelligent, often original. The typical essay gets a comment thread of five hundred to a thousand comments. Judging by the polls he occasionally does, there are probably twenty or thirty thousand readers.Recently, a New York Times reporter decided to do a story on the blog. He interviewed a bunch of readers and then interviewed “Alexander.” During that interview, he told “Alexander” that he had identified his true identity, and was going to reveal it in the story. “Alexander” strongly objected to being doxxed. He has announced that he will close the blog if the Times outs him.
***
This was a triumphI'm making a note here, huge success
I had, not to mince words about it, a really weird year.
513,000 people read my blog post complaining about the New York Times' attempt to dox me (for comparison, there are 366,000 people in Iceland). So many people cancelled their subscription that the Times' exasperated customer service agents started pre-empting callers with "Is this about that blog thing?" A friend of a friend reports her grandmother in Slovakia heard a story about me on Slovak-language radio. (...)
Before we go any further: your conspiracy theories are false. An SSC reader admitted to telling a New York Times reporter that SSC was interesting and he should write a story about it. The reporter pursued the story on his recommendation. It wasn't an attempt by the Times to crush a competitor, it wasn't retaliation for my having written some critical things about the news business, it wasn't even a political attempt to cancel me. Someone just told a reporter I would make a cool story, and the reporter went along with it.
Nor do I think it was going to be a hit piece, at least not at first. I heard from most of the people who the Times interviewed. They were mostly sympathetic sources, the interviewer asked mostly sympathetic questions, and someone who knows New York Times reporters says the guy on my case was their non-hit-piece guy; they have a different reporter for hatchet jobs. After I torched the blog in protest, they seem to have briefly flirted with turning it into a hit piece, and the following week they switched to interviewing everyone who hated me and asking a lot of leading questions about potentially bad things I did. My contacts in the news industry said even this wasn't necessarily sinister. They might have assumed I had something to hide, and wanted to figure out what it was just in case it was a better story than the original. Or they might have been deliberately interviewing friendly sources first, in order to make me feel safe so I would grant them an interview, and then moved on to the unfriendly ones after they knew that wouldn't happen. I'm not sure. But the pattern doesn't match "hit piece from the beginning".
As much crappy political stuff as there is in both the news industry and the blogsphere these days, I don't think this was a left-right political issue. I think the New York Times wanted to write a fairly boring article about me, but some guideline said they had to reveal subjects' real identities, if they knew them, unless the subject was in one of a few predefined sympathetic categories (eg sex workers). I did get to talk to a few sympathetic people from the Times, who were pretty confused about whether such a guideline existed, and certainly it's honored more in the breach than in the observance (eg Virgil Texas). But I still think the most likely explanation for what happened was that there was a rule sort of like that on the books, some departments and editors followed it more slavishly than others, and I had the bad luck to be assigned to a department and editor that followed it a lot. That's all. Anyway, they did the right thing and decided not to publish the article, so I have no remaining beef with them.
(aside from the sorts of minor complaints that Rob Rhinehart expresses so eloquently here)
I also owe the Times apologies for a few things I did while fighting them. In particular, when I told them I was going to delete the blog if they didn't promise not to dox me, I gave them so little warning that it probably felt like a bizarre ultimatum. At the time I was worried if I gave them more than a day's warning, they could just publish the story while I waited; later, people convinced me the Times is incapable of acting quickly and I could have let them think about it for longer.
Also, I asked you all to email an NYT tech editor with your complaints. I assumed NYT editors, like Presidents and Senators, had unlimited flunkies sorting through their mailbags, and would not be personally affected by any email deluge. I was wrong and I actually directed a three to four digit number of emails to the personal work inbox of some normal person with a finite number of flunkies. That was probably pretty harrowing and I'm sorry. (...)
Some of the savvy people giving me advice suggested I fight back against this. Release the exact death threats I'd received and explain why I thought they were scary. Play up exactly how many people lived with me and exactly why it would be traumatic for them to get SWATted. Explain exactly how seriously it would harm my patients if I lost my job. Say why it was necessary for my career to publish those papers under my real name.
Why didn't I do this? Partly because it wasn't true. I don't think I had particularly strong arguments on any of these points. The amount I dislike death threats is basically the average amount that the average person would dislike them. The amount I would dislike losing my job...and et cetera. Realistically, my anonymity let me feel safe and comfortable. But it probably wasn't literally necessary to keep me alive. I feel bad admitting this, like I conscripted you all into a crusade on false pretenses. Am I an entitled jerk for causing such a stir just so I can feel safe and comfortable? I'm sure the New York Times customer service representatives who had to deal with all your phone calls thought so.
But the other reason I didn't do it was...well, suppose Power comes up to you and says hey, I'm gonna kick you in the balls. And when you protest, they say they don't want to make anyone unsafe, so as long as you can prove that kicking you in the balls will cause long-term irrecoverable damage, they'll hold off. And you say, well, it'll hurt quite a lot. And they say that's subjective, they'll need a doctor's note proving you have a chronic pain condition like hyperalgesia or fibromyalgia. And you say fine, I guess I don't have those, but it might be dangerous. And they ask you if you're some sort of expert who can prove there's a high risk of organ rupture, and you have to admit the risk of organ rupture isn't exactly high. But also, they add, didn't you practice taekwondo in college? Isn't that the kind of sport where you can get kicked in the balls pretty easily? Sounds like you're not really that committed to this not-getting-kicked-in-the-balls thing.
No! There's no dignified way to answer any of these questions except "fuck you". Just don't kick me in the balls! It isn't rocket science! Don't kick me in the fucking balls!
In the New York Times' worldview, they start with the right to dox me, and I had to earn the right to remain anonymous by proving I'm the perfect sympathetic victim who satisfies all their criteria of victimhood. But in my worldview, I start with the right to anonymity, and they need to make an affirmative case for doxxing me. I admit I am not the perfect victim. The death threats against me are all by losers who probably don't know which side of a gun you shoot someone with. If anything happened at work, it would probably inconvenience me and my patients, but probably wouldn't literally kill either of us. Still! Don't kick me in the fucking balls!
I don't think anyone at the Times bore me ill will, at least not originally. But somehow that just made it even more infuriating. In Street Fighter, the hero confronts the Big Bad about the time he destroyed her village. The Big Bad has destroyed so much stuff he doesn't even remember: "For you, the day [I burned] your village was the most important day of your life. For me, it was Tuesday." That was the impression I got from the Times. They weren't hostile. I wasn't a target they were desperate to take out. The main emotion I was able to pick up from them was annoyance that I was making their lives harder by making a big deal out of this. For them, it was Tuesday. (...)
Getting all these emails made me realize that, whatever the merits of my own case, maybe by accident, I was fighting for something important here. Who am I? I'm nobody, I'm a science blogger with some bad opinions. But these people - the trans people, the union organizers, the police whistleblowers, the sexy cyborgs - the New York Times isn't worthy to wipe the dirt off their feet. How dare they assert the right to ruin these people's lives for a couple of extra bucks.
...but I was also grateful to get some emails from journalists trying to help me understand the perspective of their field. They point out that reporting is fundamentally about revealing information that wasn't previously public, and hard-hitting reporting necessarily involves disclosing things about subjects that they would rather you not know. Speculating on the identities of people like Deep Throat, or Satoshi Nakamoto, or QAnon, or that guy who wrote Primary Colors, is a long-standing journalistic tradition, one I had never before thought to question. Many of my correspondents brought up that some important people read my blog (Paul Graham was the most cited name). Isn't there a point past which you stop being that-guy-with-a-Tumblr-account who it's wrong to dox, and you become more like Satoshi Nakamoto where trying to dox you is a sort of national sport? Wouldn't it be fair to say I had passed that point? (...)
So I've taken the steps I need to in order to feel comfortable revealing my real name online. I talked to an aggressively unhelpful police officer about my personal security. I got advice from people who are more famous than I am, who have allayed some fears and offered some suggestions. Some of the steps they take seem extreme - the Internet is a scarier place than I thought - but I've taken some of what they said to heart, rejected the rest in a calculated way, and realized realistically I was never that protected anyhow. So here we are.
by Scott Alexander (Scott Siskind), Astral Codex Ten | Read more:
Image: ACT
[ed. See also: Slate Star Codex archives here.]
