Anonymity online (or the lack thereof)

There is a short, quirky, well-worth-reading article in the the New York Times Magazine called Not Being There, and it's about anonymity online, or rather the fact that you're not as anonymous as you think...

It first explains the promise of anonymity that the Internet afforded us at first:

The chance to try on fresh identities was the great boon that life online was supposed to afford us. Multiuser role-playing games and discussion groups would be venues for living out fantasies. Shielded by anonymity, everyone could now pass a “second life” online as Thor the Motorcycle Sex God or the Sage of Wherever. Some warned, though, that there were other possibilities. The Stanford Internet expert Lawrence Lessig likened online anonymity to the ring of invisibility that surrounds the shepherd Gyges in one of Plato’s dialogues. Under such circumstances, Plato feared, no one is “of such an iron nature that he would stand fast in justice.”

It goes on to point out this truth about the perceived benefits of anonymity:

Anonymity, it turns out, can serve two opposite interests: fantasy (an escape from the self) and manipulation (a reinforcement of the self).

In other words, you can either (1) pretend to be someone else that you really want to be, or you can (2) pretend to be someone else who really likes the "real" you, and go on to tell everyone how great you are.  The article then explains how anonymity doesn't really exist online - if you have an IP address, you can be identified!  But it also explains the dangers of thinking you're anonymous online...

Without a physically present audience that we can see or hear, we are left free to imagine our audience however we wish. When we do so, it’s easy to delude ourselves that what we’re talking about determines whom we’re talking to. People don’t think, “There could be a billion people reading this, so I’d better not discuss sex.” Their instincts tell them: “This is a place for talking about sex, so there can’t be many people listening.”

It closes with another explanation of why people seek out anonymity, and why people will probably continue to shoot themselves in the mouth...

Shakespeare’s Henry V, in perhaps the founding act of sock-puppetry, disguised himself in the cloak of a common soldier on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt to rally the restive English forces with a pep talk (“I myself heard the King say he would not be ransom’d”) that few would have believed had it been given in the King’s own name. Leadership is intellectually delegitimizing, and yet leaders require intellectual legitimacy. This is an old conundrum. It has often been beyond the powers of a single identity to solve.

What does this have to do with user experience?  I think sites that play up this false notion of anonymity as a benefit are doing their users a disservice.  It brings up a bigger question for me: Is the next evolution of user experience design not just to fulfil user needs, but also exposing what users don't need and why, even if they want it?