Doxed and reported. Friday night, Forbes reporter Emily Baker-White doxed the anonymous tech positivity account Beff Jezos (revealed the man’s legal name against his wishes), wildly implied his posts were in some manner adjacent to white supremacy, and proudly shared an interview he granted under extreme emotional duress. After reviewing emails of Emily’s obtained in my capacity as a Real Journalist, I can further report she carried out the dox following conversation with her editors in which it was determined this was in the “public interest.” Her editors’ involvement separately confirms the practice of doxing is an actual policy of the Forbes technology team, which notably includes the highly influential tech journalist Alex Konrad, who contributed to the piece, and has since defended it on X. I requested comment from both Emily and Alex. Naturally, our paragons of transparency have yet to respond.

The doxing of a man with so little influence or power as Beff Jezos — early-stage startup, 50k followers on an anonymous Twitter account, randomly from Canada (always a yikes for me) — poses many important questions. For example, why does the Forbes technology team consider the unofficial leader of a plucky, pro-technology meme community dangerous enough to dox? Then, is this a “dox”? There is considerable disagreement over the word, a sort of sub-controversy typically kicked up to insulate journalists and other warring shitposters from the moral question central to the act of revoking someone’s anonymity, which is where I’d rather focus: what role is played by anonymity in our discourse, both historically and today online? Are there pitfalls to anonymous discourse, have these pitfalls proliferated in our present age of social media to the point the institution of anonymity should be abolished, and, finally, with all of this considered, should anyone in tech ever speak with Forbes again?

In her piece, Emily characterizes Beff as a “provocative” account on Twitter “leading the ‘effective accelerationism’ movement sweeping Silicon Valley,” a joke name obviously chosen in mocking reference to Effective Altruism, the philosophical agent of OpenAI’s recent near death experience. Beff’s desire? Nothing less than “unfettered, technology-crazed capitalism,” whatever that means. His ideas are “extreme,” Emily argues. This is a man who believes growth, technology, and capitalism must come “at the expense of nearly anything else,” by which she means the fantasy list of “social problems” argued by a string of previously unknown “experts” throughout her hit job, but never actually defined. This story is important, Emily all but explicitly writes of her own work, as Beff is a powerful man, puppeteering such other powerful men as Garry Tan and Marc Andreessen — the real targets of this piece.