International Law

US critic Lee Siegel got into trouble for posting flattering replies to his own blog under a false name.  In The Guardian he explains why he has no regrets:

The web is only about 15 years old, but already the conversation about it runs along tired old lines. Elites vs the people, amateurs vs professionals, hierarchy vs democracy - and on and on. For a medium supposedly defined by its transparency and openness, the critical discourse is surprisingly restricted.

And never more so when we talk about the fate of the critic. To my mind, critics speaking on this subject usually recall the forced confessions of Stalin's Russia: "The internet is a brave new medium and only a fool would cavil and carp at the magnificent opportunities it affords hitherto repressed masses of people. Certain regressive elements might speak of lost aesthetic standards, of the critic's knowledge and authority, and also of the unpleasant tendency of some to abuse and malign others from behind the mask of anonymity. But such is the price of progress, comrades."

I had my own collision with the inexorable march of history at the New Republic magazine, where I had worked for nearly 10 years, first as a staff writer, then as TV critic, and finally as a senior editor. By the time the magazine gave me my own culture blog, in May 2006 - ominously titled Lee Siegel On Culture - I had had pretty extensive experience as an online critic.  I had published in Newsweek.com, worked as the art critic for Slate.com, and for three years written a weekly online TV column for the New Republic. I am not what you would call a nice critic, so I was no stranger to sometimes apoplectic online responses - mostly anonymous. (I had received plenty of furious printed responses, too, though these were published under the correspondent's own name.) But the situation on my blog at the New Republic was something new. Unlike any other magazine, newspaper, website or blog that I have ever heard of, the New Republic decided not to filter or edit the online comments.

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Tired of being labelled an elitist, weary of being bullied, but most of all angry at being insulted as a "douchebag", "asshole", "fraud" and, finally, "paedophile", I implored my editors to edit or delete the worst attacks. Delighted by the ruckus and all the online traffic, they refused. So, after attacking what I described as my readers' "thuggish anonymity" under my own name, on my blog and in print, and after enraging the entire blogosphere by coining the term "blogofascism" to describe the quality of the discourse I was experiencing, I decided to get silly. I decided to give thuggish anonymity a taste of thuggish anonymity.

I called myself "sprezzatura", a term invented during the Italian Renaissance that connotes a "deceptive simplicity". Whenever Lee Siegel was being libelled, I celebrated him. To those who objected in obscene terms to my views on Jon Stewart, I replied: "Siegel is brave, brilliant, and wittier than Stewart will ever be. Take that, you bunch of immature, abusive sheep." Whenever my attackers ganged up, I excoriated them. I was back in the schoolyard, so I did what I had done as a bullied, bookish boy. I fought back with artifice and words. I drove everyone nuts. Of course, I got a bloody nose.

Crossing over to the other side, to the anonymous world of the hitherto silenced and repressed, had a peculiar effect on me. I found that I could not bear to allow my alias's words to go unacknowledged as mine. My foolish pride, as the song goes, which gave birth to sprezzatura, also could not take a back seat to sprezzatura. So I did nothing to hide my style, even repeating phrases I had used when writing under my own name. It was through these reckless telltale tics that some enterprising commenters worked out who I really was.

Though I appeared as sprezzatura on a mere five occasions - and several times mocked myself, in one instance enthusing that "Lee Siegel was being burned in effigy in front of the Pakistani embassy" - I was made out to be a serial deceiver. I was called a hypocrite, naturally, once my cover was blown, though the way I see it, an advocate of gun control who shoots an armed assailant is hardly a hypocrite. To my mind, I had simply been practising the type of criticism the champions of the web claim to have unleashed. I was challenging smug, complacent, monolithic opinion, even if to other people it looked like the "wisdom of crowds". An understandably terrified New Republic suspended me for a few months before warily publishing me again. But my punishment hardly came as a surprise. As the truly dissenting bloggers out there might agree - and of course they exist - dissent is never in season. I hope those stubbornly contrary bloggers will persist, and use the internet to reform its worst aspects. I certainly intend to keep using the web, in the hope that it will develop into something less herdlike and banal. It will be quite a scrimmage. Technology may change, but humankind doesn't, and as a critic once said - before his hegemony was happily abolished - humankind cannot bear much reality.

Read more here.