#*real names

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The real problem with anonymity

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then San Francisco (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

According to "the greater internet fuckwad theory," the ills of the internet can be traced to anonymity:

Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theory

This isn't merely wrong, it's dangerously wrong. The idea that forcing people to identify themselves online will improve discourse is demonstrably untrue. Facebook famously adopted its "real names" policy because Mark Zuckerberg claimed to believe that "Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity":

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/14/facebook-and-radical-transparency-a-rant.html

In service to this claimed belief, Zuckerberg kicked off the "nym wars," turning himself into the sole arbiter of what each person's true name was, with predictably tragicomic consequences:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

Facebook is, famously, one of the internet's most polluted reservoirs of toxic interpersonal conduct. That's not despite the fact that people have to use their "real" names to participate there, but because of it. After all, the people who are most vulnerable to bullying and harassment are the ones who choose pseudonyms or anonymity so that they can speak freely. Forcing people to use their "real names" means that the most powerful bullies speak with impunity, and their victims are faced with the choice of retreat or being targeted offline.

This can be a matter of life and death. Cambodian dictator Hun Sen uses Facebook's real names policy to force dissidents to unmask themselves, which exposes them to arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killing. For members of the Cambodian diaspora, the choice is to unmask themselves or expose their family back home to retaliation:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/facebook-cambodia-democracy

Some of the biggest internet fuckwads I've ever met – and I've met some big ones! – were utterly unashamed about using their real names. Some of the nicest people I know online have never told me their offline names. Greater internet fuckwad theory is just plain wrong.

But that doesn't mean that anonymity is totally harmless. There is a category of person who reliably uses a certain, specific kind of anonymity to do vicious things that inflicts serious harm on whole swathes of people: corporate bullies.

Take Tinyletter. Tinyletter is a beloved newsletter app that was created to help people who just wanted to talk to others, without a thought to going viral or getting rich. It was sold to Mailchimp, which was sold to Intuit, who killed it:

https://www.theverge.com/24085737/tinyletter-mailchimp-shut-down-email-newsletters

Tinyletter was a perfect little gem of a service. It cost almost nothing to run, and made an enormous number of peoples' lives better every day. Shutting it down was an act of corporate depravity by some faceless Intuit manager who woke up one day and said "Fuck all those people. Just fuck them."

No one knows who that person was. That person will never have to look those people in the eyes – those people whose lives were made poorer for that Intuit executive's indifference. That person is the greater fuckwad, and that fuckwaddery depends on their anonymity.

Or take @Pixsy, a corporate shakedown outfit that helps copyleft trolls trick people into making tiny errors in Creative Commons attributions and then intimidates them into handing over thousands of dollars:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator/

Copyleft trolling is an absolutely depraved practice, a petty grift practiced by greedy fuckwads who are completely indifferent to the harm they cause – even if it means bankrupting volunteer-run nonprofits for a buck:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/02/commafuckers-versus-the-commons/

Pixsy claims that it is proud of its work "defending artists' rights," but when I named the personnel who signed their names to these profoundly unethical legal threats, Pixsy CEO Kain Jones threatened to sue me:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/13/an-open-letter-to-pixsy-ceo-kain-jones-who-keeps-sending-me-legal-threats/

The expectation of corporate anonymity runs deep and the press is surprisingly complicit. I once spent weeks working on an investigative story about a multinational corporation's practices. I spent hours on the phone with the company's VP of communications, over the course of many calls. When we were done, they said, "Now, of course, you can't name me in the article. All of that has to be attributed to 'a spokesperson.'"

I was baffled. Nothing this person said was a secret. They weren't blowing the whistle. They weren't leaking secrets. They were a corporate official, telling me the official corporate line. But they wouldn't sign their name to it.

I wrote an article about for the Guardian. It was the only Guardian column any of my editors there ever rejected, in more than a decade of writing for them:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/05/14/anodyne-anonymity/

Given the press's deference to this anodyne anonymity, it's no wonder that official spokespeople expect this kind of anonymity. I routinely receive emails from corporate spokespeople disputing my characterization of their employer's conduct, but insisting that I not attribute their dubious – and often blatantly false – statements to them by name.

These are the greater corporate fuckwads, who commit their sins from behind a veil of anonymity. That brand of bloodless viciousness, depravity and fraud absolutely depends on anonymity.

Mark Zuckerberg claimed that "multiple identities" enabled bad behavior – as though it was somehow healthy for people to relate to their bosses, lovers, parents, toddlers and barbers in exactly the same way. Zuckerberg's motivation was utterly transparent: having "multiple identities" doesn't mean you "lack integrity" – it just makes it harder to target you for ads.

But Zuckerberg couldn't enshittify Facebook on his own. For that, he relies on a legion of anonymous Facebook managers. Some of these people undoubtably speak up for Facebook users' interests when their colleagues propose putting them in harm's way for the sake of some arbitrary KPI. But the ones who are making those mean little decisions? They absolutely rely on anonymity to do their dirty work.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/04/greater-corporate-fuckward-theory/#counterintuit-ive

#pluralistic #tinyletter #enshittification #greater internet fuckwad theory #real names #nymwars #intuit #mailchimp

[mananabuffins]

People love to obsess about trans people's "real names" but my oldest and cissest brother has gone by a preferred name since he was a toddler and no one cared. (He and my dad have the same first name. He goes by his middle name to avoid confusion.)

So. Y'know. Just a reminder that that argument is bullshit and people only use it because they need ammunition, not because anyone cares about rEaL names.

#names #preferred names #given names #real names #i feel like i should tag this as something queer but it's about my cishet brother calling himself Ryan #so

[gennsoup]

One must name cats, people, whoever comes close, even though they carry their real names hidden inside them.

Keri Hulme, The Bone People

#Keri Hulme #The Bone People #names #naming #real names #cats #Maori literature #New Zealand literature #Indigenous literature #quotes #quotes blog #literary quotes #literature quotes #literature #book quotes #books #words #text

[tamarahtalkstv]

If I Make A Doujinshi Should I Use My Real Name Or A Pen Name?

#Mangaka #Manga #Doujinshi #Doujin #Doujins #Book #Books #Name #Names #Real Name #Real Names #Pen Name #Pen Names

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Okay, I want to try something here and give a "list of pros and cons" like I usually do. I want to look at my "real name" tag in the tumblr archive, find a post from a year ago, and just read it.

You can probably guess what will happen to me. I'm going to like the post, like I do for most of the tumblr posts I do like, and it's going to have the usual "i liked this because i am a big dumb nerd who doesn't know any better" explanation at the end, like I do when I like a lot of my other posts. The tumblr user "nostalgebraist" is going to be back on tumblr and he's going to like this one too, it's going to have the usual "i like this because i am a big dumb nerd who doesn't know better" explanation at the end. The "real name" is going to be my real name, as given in the "real names" field, as given in a tumblr form I've completed once before because I wanted to put "my real name" somewhere in the tumblr sidebar.

All this is probably boring to you, if you don't know me. This is not my real name, but it's not the pseudonym I started using when I came to tumblr, either. It's somewhere in the middle.

There is no reason you should know my real name, even if you do know a lot of my pseudonyms. If my pseudonyms didn't have meanings associated with them in some way, I wouldn't even tell you. (Although to be fair I do sometimes tell you, which is kind of a thing I think about a lot, and I feel weird about it but maybe that's just because I have a tumblr).

There is no reason you should not know my real name, if I want to tell you (and so far I haven't told you but I don't know if I'll ever tell you). You don't know whether I used it as an alias for a few months between the point where I actually started using it and the point where I started actually posting tumblr posts. (Maybe I have done this? I don't remember.)

To be clear, I never use my real name here. If you ever see the real name on my tumblr posts, you are either seeing it as it is printed in a "real names" field when I edit a post ("my real name is John A. [redacted] (they/them)", etc.) or you are seeing it as it is entered in the tumblr registration form (in which case if I was ever not going by "real name" I have no idea how anyone in my life would find me).

The real name is "nostalgebraist" which you know, because I tell you about it. (You're welcome for this)

Here is the "real name" field in the tumblr user "nostalgebraist" tag:

[ID: a reblog of a tumblr post, "nostalgebraist: Aa" "reblogged your post: n...". In the real name field, "nostalgebraist" is written over and over.]

If you see any tags I've written that don't have the "real name" field filled in, it's because it's my username, and you would type it in the tumblr registration/login form. (It's my username as it was given by one of my parents when I was 11 years old, and I don't think I ever changed it).

The point here is that even the information that "my real name" is "nostalgebraist" would be known to people who knew me for a while. You could know this, and you wouldn't know how, and you wouldn't know how much you don't know.

#real names #computer generated image #guidance scale 3

[astronomical-bagel]

#ok no but for real this is genuinely my friend group. #the only one that's a little iffy is the anime catgirl bc 98% of us are dudes. with the exception of me and one other #we even have a union guy 😭 #side note chilchuck's name would 100% be Chris if he was a real guy. he's such a Chris. (I mean it COULD be chuck but. Chris is better) #dungeon meshi #delicious in dungeon #senshi of izganda #izutsumi #marcille donato #laios touden #chilchuck tims #chilchuck #falin touden #astronomically random

[liquidstar]

Yes, Greece still exists, we didn't all die 2000 years ago. Yes, people speak Greek. You people are so fucking stupid for real. So many of you claim to love ancient shit but can't even acknowledge the actual living culture of the people whose mythology and classics you romanticize. You keep leaving annoying comments about how you just forget Greek people still exist, thinking you're being quirky because you love ancient stuff soooo much that you forgot about the people it came from. You think about it so little you don't even realize that an actual Greek person has to read this shit, making it clear how little you actually care about the culture beyond the romanticized (and westernized) mythology. Don't claim you love Greece, don't use our mythology anymore if you can't acknowledge that we're still around without making it about how little you think about us. It's mind boggling that you'd think a Greek person would read this and think you're anything but obnoxious. Explode.

#this post is edited because you're all annoying. maybe I'll turn it back someday #it sucks that people can't even be normal about a funny family story once the fact that we're greek comes into the fold #suddenly its all about blorbofied mythology shit and idiots saying ''GREECE IS REAL???? 🤯🤯🤯🤯'' yeah percy j*ckson didnt make it up #maybe it would be less annoying if they weren't all saying it like I'd think it's funny that they don't know we exist instead of like #disturbing on a personal level. like what the fuck #man if you can't acknowledge we exist in real life just name your oc Icarus something else idgaf #so yeah explode. Skase. Voulos'to. Valto mesa sto katamalakismeno mouni tis mana's sou. Psophise. etc.

[noknowshame]

why is religious Christmas imagery all so joyful and pleasant? where is the inherent horror of the birth of Christ? A mother is handed her newborn child, wailing and innocent. Her hands come away sticky. Red. Simply by giving her son life she has already killed him. He is doomed from the beginning. Her love will not save him from suffering. Because the thing cradled in her arms is not a baby, it is a sacrifice: born amongst the other bleating animals whose blood will one day be spilled in the name of what demands it. the night is silent with anticipation. Mary, did you know? That your womb was also a grave?

#instant conversation enders for my multiple youth pastor cousins #don’t say it (I’m gonna say it) #The Child is The Price #but i mean come on #as someone who isn't actually even christian the real-life historical version of this is still cursed as fuck #i mean we know that jesus was a person who existed. whatever circumstances he was born in #its terrifyingly ominous to imagine being so unaware of the affect your child will have on the future of humanity #time itself will one day be counted around your birth of him #and all because he will suffer an excruciatingly painful death that you will not be able to prevent #not only that. but regardless of his or your intentions #regardless of whether there is a god #for millenea unfathomable millions will have blood spilled and will spill blood in his name #atrocities will be committed that you cannot even conceive of #and all on his and your behalf #you love your child. its beautiful. but there's horror in what you've done. because everyone else will love him too #and what's more dangerous than that?

[mylittleredgirl]

that moment when you cross the point of no return with a character should be accompanied by a specific chime i think. like 🔔 congratulations! this one has been installed in the Permanent Collection and you will never stop thinking about them as long as you live

#that just happened to me in real time btw #they should maybe also consider a warning tone #unfollow that tag and log off right now or that's it for you. no going back. you're gonna name a pet after this one someday #i headcanon'd too close to the sun #containment breach

[pommegrantaire]

Au lit, le baiser by Henri de Toulous Lautrec but make it Aziracrow

#posting this late but i just finished it and i can rb it tomorrow #doing this digitally was wild and i probably could've done it traditionally with real live oil paints but maybe next time #i did have fun with this tough!! #i went to name the file 'smooch' but it ended up being 'smlooch' but thats still good #good omens #good omens fanart #good omens painting #aziracrow #air conditioning #ineffable husbands #ineffable partners #crowley #aziraphale #anthony j crowley #kissing #gomens #crowley x aziraphale #toulouse lautrec #pomegrantArt #im sure someone's done this already but i was Inspired

[bigboobyhalo]

the anger inside of me

#btw for anyone checking the original: q!badboyhalo is not a real person he is a fictional character with the same name as a real person #q!badboyhalo is an 11600+ y/o fallen angel and part-time grim reaper . which badboyhalo the minecraft youtuber is not #he is from roleplay . he is from minecraft roleplay #and he’s also canonically arospec !

[ninjasmudge]

thats a red flag narinder, get that crown back while you still can

+ top panel without text below the cut

#cult of the lamb #cotl #rspect my privacy at this time by not asking what came over me to make a fully colored comic #cotl narinder #cotl lamb #cotl aym #my art #actully im like really proud of this not sure why it happened but it did #anyway i have at least another 4 cotl jokes to get out right now #if you look real close you can see my hcs for lambs design before and after they got the red crown #and also i need everyone to notice aym and lambs eldrich shadow #and yes i know you can both name the cult anything AND you can have a cult in someones name with it being their cult but consider. funny #narinder

[milchreste]

In honor of this post and the numerous tags.

#dungeon meshi #dungeon meshi spoilers #laios touden #toshiro nakamoto #kabru #shuro #don't take this too seriously I just loved reading all the “wait that's not his real name???” tags

[inkskinned]

no, actually, where is the whimsy?

my ex had a best friend named larry who asked me once: what do you think comes after irony?

we were at the bar where larry worked. it was a quiet night, and he'd hopped over to sit with us on the patron side. i swirled the lemon around my limoncello martini.

earnest positivity, i said, while my ex said, art self-destructs.

i stared at my ex. he stared at me.

his argument was the cinemasins argument: look how bad media is becoming! look at the loopholes and the dumb shit!

it was roughly 2011. galaxy print was still in. at the time, i had a favorite shirt that was a wolf howling at the moon. it got ripped in half in the wash and i honestly still mourn it. i dressed like effie stonem, because everyone did. and irony was the name of the thing. men liked MLP "ironically." the internet liked the kind of crass, "anti-mainstream" vibes of things like fuck romance, touch my butt and buy me pizza. we put cats in sunglasses everywhere, which was because we only liked things in irony.

and media had the same vibe in it: anti-hero white men would be "hard to love" and then storm off the scene. nobody was just earnestly trying to save the world: they were jaded, angry, unoriginal. mad you even asked them to try to help.

my ex ends up not being wrong. cinemasins becomes super popular. a lot of people start viewing media with this lens that is the cruelest, most jaded depiction. it's wrong for your character to have unexplained powers, even if the entire movie is about how strange it is she has unexplained powers - that is still considered a "loophole." characters make thoughtless, panicked choices? loophole. characters are actually kind people, despite hardship? loophole. features a woman doing literally anything without assistance? loophole. movies become hyper-aware of scrutiny, and now irony rules the media.

which means you go to a movie, and the character has to turn to the screen and say "beats me!!" or one of the side characters has to have some kind of quip like "are you seriously telling me that you think this is normal?" because nothing can happen in earnest. like a sitcom laugh track, we now anticipate the fourth-wall break: the moment that the media acknowledges it is telling a story. the media has to apologize for itself, or else someone like my ex rolls their eyes.

but here's the thing: i wasn't wrong either.

the difference might be that i am (and always have been) so soft-hearted that any crack in the light of this world will spear me into the ground. and i was the poet in the relationship. (he thought that was the same thing as being naïve and stupid). i was making things daily. i knew how all of us artists are driven by some strange desire to evolve. he notably liked to critique art, not to create it.

so yes, i've made things that are bitter and angry and even ironic. i've made long, sharp poems with all capital letters, and i've made poems about how the silence stretches out like a song. someone wrote once that we will spend our whole lives just circling the place we grew up. i think it's more that we spend our whole lives trying to remake a home. i think it's that as we age, it becomes less exciting to build the castle on the beach - we become aware of erosion, of windforce. we realize what we really want is to come home to our dog, castle or not.

and while art in the foreground is mired in white male violence and irony, and aggression, and not taking anything seriously - i don't think that's true of all art. i think more and more artists are leaning in to the things we love. the world has changed so much. they have taken so many things from us. the only thing we have left is love. at the bottom of the moving box - all we get is the faint sense that we have to appreciate what little we've got. i can't enjoy this stuff ironically anymore: what room do i have for irony? if it makes me happy, that is an amazing thing. there are so few happy places left for me. i want to be happy because of how leaves shiver beside each other like nestling birds. i want to be happy because of the color pink, and how magenta doesn't exist. i have spent so much of this life suffering, i have earned my right to a gentle ending. if nothing matters, i get to assign meaning to the nothing. i get to create meaning. i am an artist first and foremost, which means creation is my thing.

where is the whimsy? wherever i fucking put it. because if this is my last fucking chance to do any good in this world - i want to do it earnestly. i want to write things that make you happy. that make people feel heard and seen. what comes after irony has to be positivity.

it was close to my 21st birthday. in 7 years, i would end up writing a book about this relationship, which is hopefully coming out somewhere around May 2024. i come back to this bar scene in my memories a lot. i keep thinking of how pale my ex was. the look that crossed his face. how i looked back at him. how for a moment, both of us couldn't recognize the other person. like the gulf between us was a suddenly wide and cavernous thing. like we were alien to each other. he never took my opinion seriously, and he always seemed surprised whenever his manic-pixie-dream-girl ever broke free of the plot. like in the whole time we were together, i wasn't human enough.

this knowledge: where he said nothing comes after, my only instinct was what comes after is love.

#spilled ink #writeblr #this is a real story lol #looking back i liked larry as a person SO much more than my ex hollyyyyy shitttt #compulsory heterosexuality will do you DIRTY #edit to correct effies name my apologies to effie and effies family

[xsimbaaa]

This scene makes me feral…

The watch, the jaw, the wrist flick, the VEST….🤤

#spencer reid x you #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid #spencer reid smut #my god #the man is gorgeous #like whyyy #the hyperfixation is hyperfixating #real bad #till his mom remembers my name #alright let me stop 😂

[notherpuppet]

Chaggie moments in rule 63 AU

#chaggie is so cute #I love them in every universe #hazbin hotel #chaggie #charlie morningstar #Vaggie #vaggie’s name stays the same because when does v*gina stop being the best thing ever #if that lore is even real lol #I still don’t know if Adam was being serious or not #anyway #my doods #hazbin hotel fanart