Anonymity, Pseudonymity and Real Identities

On the internet, there are essentially three distinct forms of identity that one can take on. You can use your real name; this is popular on many social media platforms, but is also used for email addresses, etc. You can utilize a pseudonym - for example, I'm currently writing under the moniker "Five of Cups", but I've used different names on different parts of the internet. A pseudonymous identity in this sense is a consistent name that you use, that has things substantially attached to it, but that is not your real name. It's common on various forums, chatrooms, and on some social media like YouTube. Lastly, there is full anonymity - each comment is fully unique; a hundred anonymous comments can come from one person or a hundred distinct people. It's common on websites like 4chan.

When I made this website, I needed to decide, essentially, how I wanted to represent myself on it. Total anonymity doesn't make sense. I don't think it's frankly possible to obtain total anonymity on a static website; everything on this website was clearly put there by the person or people who made the website. That really just left the two options of pseudonymity or of attaching my real name to this project. Thus, I'll be spending the most time in this essay thinking about and contrasting these ideas.

Despite the fact that I presented pseydonymity as its own distinct idea initially, it is neither its own thing nor merely one thing. Pseudonymity lives on a spectrum; it encompasses the open interval (0,1), where the boundary points 0 and 1 represent total anonymity and using a totally real identity. Any new internet pseudonym is going to be within some epsilon of 0. However, the very first thing that I did when I made this site was kill a bit of that anonymity - my "about me" lists several identifying aspects of who I am. This pseudonym is already less anonymous than it may otherwise have been. As time goes on, pseudonyms have a tendency to become increasingly less anonymous (i.e., they are monotonically increasing), though perhaps a believable lie can serve to misdirect, to make a particular pseudonym more anonymous. It's not something that I've ever tried.

Pseudonymity can be used to become more anonymous through a process of "burning" pseudonyms. If you have too much information about yourself accumulated onto, say, your reddit account, you can burn it, i.e. delete, deactivate or just stop using the account. Then, create a new pseudonymous account with a new name, and you're more anonymous than you were beforehand. The discovery that two pseudonyms belong to one person is occasionally a source of drama. There are other reasons to burn accounts like this, or to use alts. If I use this identity enough times, I may want to eventually use the internet or say things without being recognized as "The Five of Cups", regardless of whether that identity has been doxxed.

The opposite of this process of burning accounts to preserve anonymity is doxxing. Doxxing is when real-world details of a person are attached to their online pseudonym. Revealing someoone's real name, age, location, etc. are all forms of doxxing. Though the term has a negative connotation, and may be used to enable a variety of unsavoury behaviours like stalking, it is not necessarily a negative. I've already doxxed some information about myself on this website. It's hard to do anything on the internet without a slight dox; the language that you speak and the times you're online reveal information. If you're, say, asking for help with homework, you're necessarily doxxing information about what grade-level you are. If you share about your interests and hobbies, you're partially doxxing yourself too. My rule of thumb is that doxxing is bad when it's involuntary or nonconsensual. There's nothing wrong with mentioning that Game Theory is Matthew Patrick, because he's willingly doxxed that information himself.

With that in mind, pseudonymous identities can complicate things. I've had in my life two major pseudonyms that I've used before, in various small communities. I've used those names for years, made friends using them, and thought of those names as being as intrinsically part of who I am as my "real name" is. Both pseudonyms have met opposite fates; with one pseudonym, the online community fizzled out, and I stopped using it and stopped identifying myself with it. In retrospect, I'm embarrassed by a lot of what I said and did under that name as a teenager, and seek to bury it. I've mostly burned it completely. I have another pseudonym that I've since doxxed myself with more or less completely; I've met a number of people from that community in real life, and even of those I haven't, the others know where I live, what my name is, what I look like, etc. It's completely untenable to continue using it as a pseudonym by this point.

With this in mind, there's two variants of doxxing that I don't think neatly fit the definition of doxxing. There's anti-doxxing; instead of revealing to the internet community that "Five of Cups is John Smith, who lives on 212B Baker Street", you reveal to John Smith's sister Jane, and to his coworkers, that "John Smith is Five of Cups, who does these things on these websites". Doxxing would be if someone told Green Lantern that Superman is Clark Kent; anti-doxxing would be if someone told Perry White that Clark Kent is Superman. There's also pseudo-doxxing, where two online identities that the user tries to keep seperate are revealed to be the same person - it's what happens when you tell people that Yellowjacket and Giant Man are the same person, regardless of whether you tell them that they're both also Hank Pym.

Not all name-changes allow for pseudo-doxxing, though. Under both of my previous pseudonymous identities, I've changed my name a couple times each. Going back to the superhero analogy, everyone knows that Nightwing and Robin are the same person; that Robin just changed his name. Likewise, some forums and chatrooms allow you to change the name on your account; even with the ones that don't, you can always make a new account and just tell people that you've made a new account with a new name.

For my part, I find unwilling pseudodoxxing to be the least bad of the three; you can just burn the new account and start again. Though people may disagree, I find anti-doxxing to be more uncomfortable than the regular kind. I'm fine with my dumb online childhood friends, who already know that I was stupid when I was 15, learning my real name. I'd be less comfortable with my real-life friends and family learning that I was an embarrassing idiot on the internet when I was 15.

It's also worth noting that even a real life identity is not just one thing. John Smith is a very different person when talking with his parents than when talking with his friends, even though both his parents and his friends know him by the same name and might even know eachother. I'm a different person to the students that I've taught than I am when I'm hanging out with my drinking buddies, even though both know me by the same name. Even within different friendgroups, I tend to take on different mannerisms. Maybe this is a result of spending too much time online with different pseudonyms, but I find myself uncomfortable when these worlds collide. I don't like that a few years after we broke up, my brother and my ex-girlfriend met and became friends. I like to keep these different aspects of myself neatly partitioned, for much the same reason that I don't like dooxxing nor anti-doxxing. That said, "real world" identities are more fluid; if I'm hanging out with my frends from undergrad and just run into my cousin out-and-about, I'm bound to be recognized in a way that I wouldn't online.

So, with all this in mind, bearing in mind all the different ways that these identities can be changed, can gain or lose importance, can be combined with eachother in various ways - this brings us back to the decision of what I did when I made this site. I chose to create a new pseudonymous identity in the form of "Five of Cups". My plan is for this to be unlinked from any previous identities that I've had, real or pseudonymous. There's a couple reasons for this - firstly, it's easier to lose anonymity than to gain it. If I tell people here tha names I've previously used and where I've used them, or tell someone I know in real life that I run this website, then I've cast the die and can't take that back. Conversely, I can always get rid of anonymity if I decide I don't want it, by willingly doxxing myself.

Secondly, I want a fresh start. I moved to a new city about a year ago, and found myself unshackled from the expectations I'd built up for myself. I tend to behave certain ways because I'm expected to, hold onto expectations that I have for myself and that others do, too. If I made friends through a shared interest in discussing politics, then I'm going to keep up with politics in part to maintain that friendship, and in part because it's expected of me. If I lost intererst in politics, then moving to a new city would have freed me of that paticular "obligation". A fresh start allows me to explore who I am now, rather than continue to be who I am to other people.

I like to think of it like a one-man play. When I'm with my family, I'm on stage performing as myself, or as the version of myself that my family knows. When I'm at work, I'm on stage performing as that version of myself. When I'm online using an old pseudonym, I'm on stage performing as that version of myself. But sometimes, if I spend a week in a totally new place surrounded by exclusively new people, it's like getting to take off my makeup and change costumes between scenes, and a more "me" version of me emerges. And there's nothing wrong with performing, with playing the role - those characters are indeed me, or at least significant aspects of me. But they're not the entirety of me, and being on stage and in-character for that long can become exhausting.

I also want to build up new connections through neocities. If I immediately attach my website to an older identity - my real name, or an online pseudonym I've used before - I feel I'll rely more heavily on my old communities, and hold myself back from meeting new people. If I cut myself off from them in this project, I may be more isolated here initially. I may be less motivated to continue due to that for a time. But if I push through it, I'll meet a bunch of new people, and participate far more fully in the personal internet - it'll motivate me to join more webrings, to look more closely at other people's websites, to read other people's blogs, etc.. I want to participate more fully with this online community, rather than just using this site as an extension of myself from some other community.

There's also just the fact that I don't really have another pseudonym I can really link this to. I have an old pseudonym from when I was a kid that wasn't active since I was 16, where a quick google search can reveal stories I've written that are best lost to the sands of time. I have a more recent pseudonym that's been fully doxxed, that I now use in a semi-professional capacity; but I also want "internet anonymity", for this website to be at least partially divorced from me in "real life". And I have a few throwaway usernames without anything particularly attached to them. There's just not a ton of options for me to work with.

There's one aspect of pseudonymous identities that I think is important to bring up - we get to pick our names. In real life, while you can change your name, most people don't. Most people use the name they were given at birth, and then change it only in very limited circumstances - marriage can change a surname; transitioning can change a given name to one more appropriate to the gender; people might change from their name to a dimunitive or vice versa, or start using their middle name. It's rare (though not totally unheard of) for someone to change their real-life, legal name just on a whim. Conversely, with total anonymity, the point is that you don't have a name; that you can't be referenced, that you can't be recognized. With pseydonyms, we get to pick our names, and we have full control over how we present ourselves to the world.

So, how do you pick an internet pseudonym? It's complicated. Some people pick arbitrarily; I know a guy who named himself after a candy bar that he was eating because it was just nearby. Some people name themselves things with no other meaning but that sound pleasing, similarly to how I would name a fantasy character in a story. Some people name themselves after their interests, or fictional characters they like, or a pun, or incorporate an aspect of their real-name, or... the list really goes on. And it's a process that I definitely overthink whenever I do it. Personally, I've done all of these and more at various points in time. Interestingly, the names that I've stuck with the longest have tended to just be semi-arbitrarily selected nearly on a whim, and the ones I've put the most thought into have wound up dying out quickly. (I'm hoping that this is an exception, though!)

I have no sources, and no further readings to suggest. This was largely just my own idle musings; not really part of a dialogue with anyone else.