From an article in Time by Lev Grossman:
The Net has anarchy in its DNA; it’s always been about anonymity, playing with your own identity and messing with other people’s heads. The idea, such as it was, seems to have been that the Internet would free us of the burden of our public identities so we could be our true, authentic selves online. Except it turns out–who could’ve seen this coming?–that our true, authentic selves aren’t that fantastic. The great experiment proved that some of us are wonderful and interesting but that a lot of us are hackers and pranksters and hucksters.