Political tribes work by allowing people to emit costly signals of fealty to a tribe, where that signal of fealty ties your social status to the tribe's social status. So joining a political tribe is a status bet: you're hoping[1] that the tribe will gain in group status, relative to rival political tribes. If you called it well, you'll rise in social status with your tribe. Social status is a matter of relative position in a prestige order, so these group-status competitions are zero-sum.
Political tribes are horrifyingly successful in the social media age. Certainly, monotheistic faiths and the 20th-century political ideologies and nationalism were similarly effective phenomena. But living in the post-scarcity First World, people seem to want to spend a lot of their wealth on playing the zero-sum game about prestige ordering, online and otherwise.
People who have never really understood any other way to use words and arguments will sometimes say things like, "everything is political." I think this means something like: "there are no interesting, purely predictive uses of language that avoid signaling in some group-status relevant manner; anyone claiming so is actually making a status move by trying to arrogate the title of 'neutral.'"
This is just false. Beyond being motivated, though, it's epistemically evil! It's just plain wrong that we have to live in an adversarial communicative environment where we can't just take claims at face value without considering political-tribe-maneuvering implications. This is not a satisfactory equilibrium! In a mindkilled age, when egregores propagate freely in the medium of human psychology and bash in our ability to think, it's especially important to state directly: being "political" is unequivocally epistemically bad. And being epistemically weak is in turn bad for your goals, whatever they are. Raising the instrumental-rationality waterline is the common instrumental interest of many final causes.
There's no real contradiction in explicitly joining the anti-tribe tribe. It's just false that you can't get better at being a better-calibrated observer by trying hard at it. One of the most basic rationalist insights is that the best way to accomplish your goals, whatever those goals are, is to try directly. If you want to be less political, try directly first.
I bet that a core tenet of the Neo-Enlightenment project we're trying to carry out will be building a culture inimical to egregores. I bet a big part of that is simply avowing that, in my culture, I'm anti-political-tribe. I'm not secretly banking social status to later pledge to some political tribe's maneuvering; I just actually want to make apolitical predictions. I'd sign a commitment to that effect, if I could.
- ^
"Hoping" and "betting" here can be largely unconscious, strategically-hidden-from-yourself-and-then-retroactively-completely-memory-holed mental motions. Unusually elaborate mental motions like these are typical for social status games; we were fine tuned for those tasks in our ancestral environment, and so have a lot of relevant purpose-build psychological hardware.
Why are you using what I presume is your real name here?
I'm not actually interested in whether or not it is your real name, mind; mostly I'd like to direct your attention to the fact that the choice of username was in fact a choice. That choice imparts information. By choosing the username that you did, you are, deliberately or not, engaging in a kind of signaling.
In particular, from a particular frame of reference, you are engaging in a particular kind of costly signaling, which may serve to elevate your relative local status, by tying any reputational hits you may suffer as a result of mis-steps here to your real identity. You are saying "This is me, I am not hiding behind false identities." The overall effect of this is a costly signal which serves to elevate your status with the tribe here.
If it isn't your real name, why are you using a false identity that looks like a real identity?
Hang up, though. Let us say instead that you, instead, see false identities as a form of dishonesty; this isn't signaling, this is sticking to principles that are important to you.
Well, if that is the case, another question: Would you use this identity to say something that does have strong reputational costs associated to your real identity? Let us say that you would, you just don't have any such things to say.
Well, it is convenient for you, some might observe, that you are willing to stand up for principles that don't cost you anything. (Hence some part of why signaling tends to be costly; it avoids this problem.)
I will observe there is an important political dispute about anonymity on the internet, which has major communal aspects. The fewer users who insist on privacy, the more that commercial websites can exclude those who do. Oh, you don't want us tracking you? You don't get to use our website anymore. Observe the trend in websites, such as Twitter, of becoming increasingly user-unfriendly to those who are not logged in, or of excluding them altogether.
"Everything is political" is an observation that this phenomenon is, basically, universal.
Once we observe that there -is- a political implication in your choice of username, we must ask whether you -ought- to do anything about it; a lot of people like to skip this question, but it is an important question. Do you "owe" it to the people who prefer anonymity, to yourself remain anonymous? The pro-anonymity side would be really well served if everybody was forced to be anonymous; they are certainly better served if the choice is explicitly served (hence the EU rules on website cookies) instead of anonymity being opt-in instead of opt-out.
However, there are also people who don't want to be anonymous, or who don't want to interact with anonymous people; certainly there's the potential for some power imbalances there.
We've happened upon some kind of uneasy mostly-truce, where anonymity is contextual, and violating another person's anonymity is seen as a violation of the cultural norms of the internet. This truce is eroding; as fewer and fewer people choose to be anonymous, a higher and higher proportion of anonymous actions are those which would impose costs on the speaker if the speaker chose not to be anonymous, which makes anonymity an increasingly sinister-looking choice.
Imagine being a writer in a group of blogs with a common user system, moderating comments. To begin with, all the blogs allow anonymous comments. However, after one too many abusive comments, a blog bans anonymous commenters; some percentage of previously-anonymous commenters value commenting there enough to create accounts, reducing the number of "legitimate" anonymous comments in the ecosystem as a whole. This makes anonymous comments look worse, prompting the next blog to turn them off, then the next.
Look, the pro-anonymity people say, you're making a choice to oppose an anonymous internet; you're against us.
Well, there's definitely an "is" there. What's missing is the "ought", the idea that the political implications of an act create individual responsibility. There's a very deep topic here, relating to the way certain preferences are also natural attractor states, whose satisfaction rules out opposing preferences, but this comment is already long enough.