Following up on the posts about Phil Agre's article, I must admit I haven't read it all the way through, but I have the feeling what he's talking about is actually not modern conservatism at all, but classical (Burkean) conservatism. As Patrick said, the word is often used to mean things that are a lot more benign, and I think there's some value to that usage -- i.e., some value to rescuing the term for an ethos which, if I don't necessarily subscribe to it entirely, could use some stronger voices in our political sphere. I.e. conservation as caution and thoughtfulness, resistance to change for its own sake (which often might mean resistance to certain of the effects of unfettered capitalism - i.e. hyperindividualism and consumerism), conservation of natural resources -- etc. There are plenty of people who identify as Republicans and hold some or all of these values, who it would be nice to see splintered off from what is now a truly radical party. At this point it might actually be conservative (small c) to have respect for democratic values...

Sorry for all the distracting "i.e."s in that post. Didn't proofread...

I've often thought that if all the conservatives who weren't religious nuts, and the liberals who weren't P.C. nuts, would speak up and get active, we might have sane politics in this country again.

...and then the sun hits my eyes and I wake up to the real world.

WRT the problem of Nader, these folk believe they have a solution. Condorcet voting.

Mind you, I think it's a nice system for small-scale elections (a friend is using it as the basis of an online voting system for student government). Imagine the chaos if we had to resolve a "cyclic ambiguity" on a national scale.

Let's leave aside the notion that Americans would never embrace a voting system named after a French mathematician...

It seems to play out pretty easily in practice, but the explanation is murder. The Hugo voting system is hard enough to explain to the uninitiated, and that's a lot simpler. And wouldn't the results be the same?

Jeff, they'd never realize it was named after a Frenchman. Most of them probably would think a condorcet is a baby condor.

This comment by "sturgeonslawyer" about "Calimac," over in an earlier thread, brings to mind something that's been increasingly bothering me, which is that some people in these conversations are using the names under which they're generally and publically known, and others are using nonce pseudonyms. I know which acquaintance of many years "Calimac" is because I clicked through to the LiveJournal linked from his comments here and deduced it. His real name isn't evident on his LJ, but his initials, his friends list, and his subject matter made it possible to deduce. And yes, I grant that at least "Calimac" does use this pseudonym in part of his life, the LiveJournal part. By contrast, I have no idea whatsoever who "sturgeonslawyer" is. Similar clouds of ambiguity surround many people who post here under made-up names.

This isn't a huge issue and I'd really like to avoid having a giant pissing match over it, but I do find myself bemused and sometimes uncomfortable about being a public figure in conversations with people who wholly or partly withhold their identity, particularly when I have reason to suspect (as in the case of "Calimac," and who knows, maybe "sturgeonslawyer") that I actually do know them.

(And before anyone starts, no, this has nothing to do with with what it says on your passport or driver's license.)

Well, you know who I am, but maybe others don't. It's in my bio in my LiveJournal, but I don't appear to have put that in my information on Electrolite; I'm fixing that with this post.

Not that my name means much to anyone; I'm known in certain bits of the Pagan community, but that's about it. But if I want anonymity, I'll use a pseudonym, as opposed to Xopher, which is a nickname. I've not done that here, or only with humorous intent (posting as Sokrates, or Ghu, or something, I don't remember what).

For me, using my real name is a matter of honor in a weird way. It indicates that I stand by what I say, and that I'm not afraid to have people know what Christopher Hatton thinks, or that I'm willing to talk about it. I refuse to be ashamed of my opinions or statements; if they're bullshit, and I realize it, I change them.

I realize that getting me to explicitly identify myself wasn't the intent of your comment; it just made me notice.

I liked Phil Agre's essay very much.

But I have very large bones to pick with his reification of conservatism as the animating ideology of whatever "nascent aristocracy" exists in this country, because he does not say who the conservatives are.

He defines conservatism using a dictionary and grammar that I share. His language is clear there - we know what conservatism is and what its end goals are. We know that it seeks to destroy rationality and substitute for it the authority of engrained, customary hierarchy. We know they like to destroy language by using words to mean things in contradiction of consensus dictionary definitions. We know that they lie, they appeal to false images, they try to obscure and make irrelevant the consequences of ideologically pure brainwaves, because they are serving no greater truth than their own evanescent exaltation above us forelock-tuggers.

Sure.

But who are the conservatives? WHO ARE THEY, according to Phil Agre?

From the pharaohs of ancient Egypt to the self-regarding thugs of ancient Rome to the glorified warlords of medieval and absolutist Europe, in nearly every urbanized society throughout human history, there have been people who have tried to constitute themselves as an aristocracy. These people and their allies are the conservatives.
...
Conservative rhetors, for example in the Wall Street Journal
...
rhetors such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter
...
Newt Gingrich's (then) organization GOPAC
...
The Wall Street Journal's opinion page
...
the Wall Street Journal's editors
...
[Wall Street Journal] late editor Robert Bartley
...
[Present Wall Street Journal editor]Daniel Henninger
...
conservative think tanks
...
conservative public relations
...
George Bush.

This is my problem. Figureheads. Symbols. Irrelevancies. Who are the nascent aristocrats? Are they members of an economic class? Are they members of a particular religious affiliation? Are they professionals? Are they the sad benighted Skinner-trained-to-pull-the-lever-for-a-Republican-peanut dupes?

Is it the class of people who believe in conservatism? Well, it might be nice to have some kind of systematic zoology by which one can identify the people who believe in conservatism? Is it their circles of professional or civic affiliation? Is it their geneaology? Is it their magazine subscription list or their home libraries or the fact that they can pay to send their kid to Andover?

That is a crucial and critical flaw in Phil Agre's essay, because while I receive very well his wonderfully cogent exegesis of conservatism and its threat to our culture; we end up struggling against an idea, and not struggling and confronting the people who hold that idea.

They have unifying characteristics beyond their desire to institute unthinking heirarchy? I'm sick and tired to shadowboxing the umbrous nascent aristocrats and their lackey toady conservative rhetors

Name them - do it - name them!

Say that people who believe in a militant evangelical faith that respects no bounds between public and private, between the parochial and the secular - that people who behave as though human law is subject to Divine Law are anti-democrat.

Felt good, right? Rationalist bonafides are secure!

Next!

Darn, well, since Phil said that the conservatives are the people who are trying to turn themselves into aristocrats, and they are also the people who are trying to extinguish rational thought, and they are also the people who achieve these things by lying about true things and making words mean the opposite of what they were originally supposed to mean... I guess every single group or class of people that engages in rhetorical dishonesty to advance its own condition, and every single group that unilaterally renegotiates the boundaries of "legitimate" debate to shape that debate toward selfish ends, well, darn it, they are all conservatives.

Oh, wait. There's that caveat about attempting to cement aristocracy - so clearly, the nascent aristocracy must have some congruence with the class of folks that have more (of something: wealth, influence, power, land, beneficiaries of non-reciprocated social obligations) than anybody else but are scared that they won't be able to hold onto the more without rigging the game.

Who are these people?

My point is This is hard. You can single out the conservative politicians, and you can put yellow hats on the loony conservative rhetors (pesky silly rhetors, kicks are for trids), and you can go target shooting in religious wackoland, and you are no closer to identifying the reasons why a particular individual might be attracted to the banner of a regressive and selfish cause. Iffn you is for democracy, you gots ta look to the individual who does pull the lever, and that person's pulling that lever up or down based on what that person believes.

Phil Agre's prescription list: pssh....

Rebut conservative arguments
Benchmark the Wall Street Journal
Build a better pundit
Say something new
Teach logic
Conservatism is the problem
Critically analyze leftover conservative theories
Ditch Marx
Talk American
Stop surrendering powerful words
Tipper Gore is right
Assess the sixties
Teach nonviolence
Tell the taxpayers what they are getting for their money
Make government work better for small business
Clone George Soros
Build the Democratic Party

Dear god almighty! Let's divide these prescriptions into categories:

1) Rhetorical toolkit general improvements:

Rebut conservative arguments
Build a better pundit
Talk American
Tipper Gore is right
Stop surrendering powerful words
Benchmark the Wall Street Journal
Tell the taxpayers what they are getting for their money

Basically, fight back by engaging enemy statements in detail while being more persuasive, fluent, unassumingly confident, concisively firm and combative, and not using rhetoric that implicitly or explicitly accepts the legitimacy of particular taboo subjects -- ie avoid things that are obscene or can be construed to be obscene by grandma-hard-of-hearing. So, basically, learn how to present your case better while simultaneously negotiating the irrational minefield of the shifting consensus view of obscenity?

2) Be better thinkers. Spread better thinking.

Assess the sixties
Ditch Marx
Say something new
Teach logic
Critically analyze leftover conservative theories
Conservatism is the problem

Oh, golly gee, think about what you believe, and think about it in a way so you believe it more and persuade more people to the truth in the way that democracy asserts can be the only way things are virtuous and true. Warms the cockles of me heart.

OF COURSE WE SHOULD HAVE A COHERENT SYSTEM OF BELIEF RESPONSIVE TO EXTERNAL CHALLENGE AND SUSCEPTIBLE TO SKEPTICAL IMPROVEMENT BY PEOPLE OF GOODWILL.
Like, duh. Sign me up to the lecturn! I'm gonna do the thinking, and then I'm gonna speechify!

3) Learn how to win in ways that don't include being persuasive, but do include being more competent:

Make government work better for small business
Clone George Soros
Build the Democratic Party
Teach nonviolence

Getting resources to improve doing things that help us win elections. Sounds good. Strengthening institutions that help us to organize to do things like get better press and win elections. Sounds good.

What about things forgotten like running for office and convincing friends and organizing parties and driving people to the polls and collecting donations, and voting yourself, and doing more than bellyache and complain about the water filter? What about knowing the law and organizing human effort and association on many levels, so that the individual efforts of mirror-opposite conservative organization can be nullified, or even co-opted? What about developing a political culture that desires and understands winning, because of the stakes of losing, and fixing that awareness in our organization building?

What frustrates me about these things is that in the end, not enough people are going to go door to door in East Flatbush registering voters and running vans. Not enough people approach the political project as a permanent part of their lives, so that they might look to the personal, the professional, the private, the religious, and the political with equal weight, because, frankly, we're not scared enough to get off our fat, lazy, consensus-accepting asses. When in a single week, I am contacted by more panhandlers, conartists, and grifters in the public space seeking my personal engagement in social matters than I have ever had try to engage me in political association building *in* *my* *entire* *life* (note, present NYC resident professional, there is lots of solicitation in my public space now, former reporter, formerly a student of a liberal Ivy), well, damn, we just don't care enough to take the war out of the parlors, the journals, and the coffee shops.

My point is, I guess, if you want to win in a democracy, you make sure you are part of a majority group, and you make sure your group is the majority by working to bring everybody you can into your group, and then you do everything within your legal power to see your coalition to a majority or plurality count at the polls on election day.

Being true feels good. Saying the right thinks and elaborating the great rational project is uplifting. Running a collection of people bent toward the same goal, and achieving that goal with flair, finesse, competence, shrewdness, planning, and clear-eyed organization, seeing through to the goal over and over again - that's f_____g exhilarating.

That's how you win in our "democracy" (democratic republic), but most democracies operate under proportional representation, so being in the minority doesn't mean you're not represented. Under proportional representation, if registered voters were 40% Democrat, 40% Republican, 10% Green Party, and 10% Socialist, the House would also reflect the same proportion of Representatives.

It's a pretty well-known fact in sociological circles that all societies form elites. The US is no different and has always had an elite group. I'm careful to not call it a "class" since economic class isn't necessarily congruent with elite power, although there's clearly a correlation.

The question for any society is whether there are barriers to entering the elite. Barack Obama is now (or by January 2005), by any measure, a member of the elite; he has many orders of magnitude more power than the average citizen. But his parents weren't, and this is the sign of a society with some measure of mobility. On the other hand, the number of people (from both parties) who gain elite membership through family history (e.g., Bush, Gore, Herseth, Taft) show signs that elite status can be inherited as well.

I think Agre is right that there are people who want to decrease mobility into the elite, for any number of reasons, but largely because new blood in the elite threatens the power base of the existing elite members.

We can't banish the elite and shouldn't even try. We should expand opportunities for mobility, and restrict benefits to the elite that enhance the ability to pass elite status to your children. Bush's call to abolish "legacy" admissions may be the issue with which I have most agreed with him, but of course even without legacy admissions, most children whose parents have Ivy League educations can get into an Ivy League school, for all sorts of socioeconomic and genetic reasons.

Some of us use pseudonyms because our real names indicate our gender, which, on the internet, is a potential source of harassment and trivialization.

But aside from that, isn't part of the point of this medium the fluidity of identity? If this makes one uncomfortable, one might set up a comment system that requires registration (and thereby impose some measure of consistency, if not necessarily accuracy).

Bush has called for the elimination of legacy admissions? How about retroactively? Take away his Yale degree!

What a fucking hypocrite.

On a separate topic... Patrick, for your "World Map in 2100" panel, here's something that gets you half-way there:

http://www.prb.org/Template.cfm?Section=PRB&template=/Content/ContentGroups/Datasheets/2004_World_Population_Data_Sheet.htm

It has stats for 2050 for all countries. Short version: I don't think there will be a Bulgaria in 2100. And Japan will be a bunch of cranky old people living in Philippine nursing homes. And if I lived in the Russian Far East, I'd be taking Chinese lessons.

This isn't a huge issue and I'd really like to avoid having a giant pissing match over it, but I do find myself bemused and sometimes uncomfortable about being a public figure in conversations with people who wholly or partly withhold their identity, particularly when I have reason to suspect (as in the case of "Calimac," and who knows, maybe "sturgeonslawyer") that I actually do know them.

Patrick, with a little canoodling (and if you were willing to force all your readers to go through the Typekey registration process my friends at Six Apart have set up, something I'm not currently willing to do), you could probably force your commentors to give you a (non-revealed) actual name. I think that's probably a bad solution, but it may be out there if you ever want to turn to it.

Blogs are not LiveJournal and LJ customs, like usernames, can be an uneasy fit. Chad & I both have a few commenters who use LJ names; two specifically come to mind. I think with one, I'd linked to something under the LJ-persona; and with the other, I believe the person came to the blogs via LJ, so it's actually a useful identifier.

If someone is doing all their writing on their LJ, it doesn't surprise me that they might want to put that address in the "web page" field. But the little "do I know you" dance is an odd thing about LJ and I think it's entirely to be expected that people would have varying degrees of patience with it.

(I suppose all of this could apply to pseudonyms in general.)

We should ALL be taking Chinese lessons.

Blogs are not LiveJournal and LJ customs, like usernames, can be an uneasy fit.

I'll go along with that. I set up a livejournal simply so I could comment on some LJ's I read without having to be anonymous. Thing is, I registered it using my actual name rather than a pseudonym like Moon_cat or LibrarianBoy, and it felt very weird, even tho' I use my real name every place else online.

It was, in fact, this blog that led me to start posting as "Jimcat Kasprzak". Jimcat is a nickname I've had for over fifteen years now, and there are people who know exactly to whom the name refers. But there are a lot of people on a blog like this to whom the name means nothing.

The last name, and the link to my web site, provide enough information for those who care to find answers to questions like "who is this guy and what's he all about?"

For voting methods the most amusing discussion I've seen is in Duncan Black's book. Black includes in the appendix an explanation of strategic voting on the faculty where Dodgson (Alice in Wonderland) persuaded the voters to successively adopt his preferred voting scheme of the moment. In each case apparently Dodgson proposed a new improved voting scheme that had the side effect of producing his preferred result when the previous one would not. Given Arrow we can take it there is no social welfare function that always works and is non-dictatorial (for a definition of dictatorial) and so on. Being a conservative I am incined to apply a test I consider pragmatic - whatever works - rather than idealistic - meets the highest standards.

Jon Hansen: hah, that's exactly how I got sucked into LJ. I didn't have a general-purpose blog before that, though, so you're probably safe.

I didn't find it weird to use my real name as a username, but then I was after being recognizable. Besides, nothing else came to mind; I could never run away to the Border, because I'd get stuck with a horrible use-name by someone else when I couldn't make up one of my own. No, wait, I think once I said I'd use Kade Carrion (after _The Element of Fire_), but I take it back.

well as I have a long history of aliases I'm really confused as what to do now.

"For voting methods the most amusing discussion I've seen is in Duncan Black's book"

Is this the Duncan Black that's also known as Atrios?

That is a . . . somewhat unusual . . . use of "canoodling," unless the specific implication is that Teresa is the one to be persuaded to set up TypeKey.

Yes, I know. The only excuse is that I was working very late last night.

This comment...brings to mind something that's been increasingly bothering me, which is that some people in these conversations are using the names under which they're generally and publically known, and others are using nonce pseudonyms.

It bugs me, too. For what it's worth, you don't know me personally, Patrick. My full name is Andrew Evan Perrin, although I dislike 'Evan', and nobody who knows me calls me Andrew. I study fluid mechanics at Penn. Do not confuse me with Andrew J. Perrin-- there's one out there, but he is not me.

Well, I've got a pseudonym, and I've just gone through a bruising weeklong round of posts and comments defending my position (start here and on my blog if you really want to read more -- it's this week and last week), so I don't know what I'm doing commenting on this here, but...

Why does it matter so much what my real name is? I can see that if someone you know in "real" life is posting pseudonymously without telling you, it could be a bit creepy. (You don't know me; if you did, I'd send an email telling you.) But my real name would tell you nothing of note, while exposing me to the vagaries and whims and casual voyeurism that makes up the web at large, an audience that includes stalkerish former boyfriends, potential employers in a very tight job market, and fretting-prone parents, all with ready access to Google. (Lest you think I'm being paranoid, let me point to the fate of bloggers like Heather dooce.com and The Sarcastic Journalist who got fired because of their blogs.)

Now, I suppose one could argue that if one isn't willing to take the risk, one shouldn't blog. That seems a rather high-handed approach (and not one I see you making, necessarily, but...) and raises the question of who sets the standards for blog-appropriate behavior. I'd rather leave that decision open to the commons, which includes people blogging using pseudonyms.

I've also seen the argument made that unless we all blog openly, the danger of being punished for blogging under our legal names will continue. This strikes me as a red herring; it presumes that the primary risk is being discovered _as a blogger_ versus the wider range of risks, such as exposure to random nutjobs, known threats, and so on. Again, I'm not claiming you're making this argument, just that it is one I see a lot.

Similarly, I see the claim made many times that pseudonyms provide a shield from responsibility, that anonymous posters and bloggers are more free to write slander and the like, since they feel free from retribution. I don't feel persuaded by this argument for two reasons; first, if one's legal name is very common, like "John Smith" or "Eric Anderson" I can't see that it offers any more accountability than a pseudonym, especially if the real name poster offers just a name, while another pseudonymous poster is reachable via his or her email, blog, etc. Second, it presumes that there are no checks on the pseudonymous poster. There are at least two that operate in my own case: I value my online reputation, and don't want the various people who see me posting as Rana to see me as a ranting whackjob who insults people -- if I do post like that under this pseudonym, it WILL come back to haunt me. Second, I have my own standards, and they operate irrespective of the name I use. So I would argue that the issue is not the name per se, but rather what mechanisms can be used to keep posters accountable, which may include the use of real names, but not necessarily.

A final observation: I've never seen a blogger who uses a pseudonym complaining about the names other bloggers and posters choose to use. It's only those who choose to use their legal names that raise this question. Why is that?

Rana, in answer to your final observation/question: maybe because the people who choose to use their real names can't imagine blogging pseudonymously. Or maybe because for the pseudonymous bloggers to complain in that fashion would be hypocrisy.

Or maybe it's simpler than that: you don't have to ask why someone would do something (or wonder unasking about their motivation) if you do it yourself. They may do it for different reasons than you, but you know there's at least one good reason - yours - and so you assume there may be others.

Xopher, I think you're correct in that assessment, but your response indicates that my last question wasn't entirely clear. I'm not asking why pseudonymous folks don't question the pseudonymity of others; I'm asking why named bloggers do, given that the pseudonymous don't seem to question naming practices AT ALL -- one might assume, by the logic you lay out, that there would be pseudonymous posts wondering why some people post under their own names or expressing frustration with those who do -- but I haven't seen it. (Of course, if you can offer a counter-example, I'd be willing to reconsider this.)

Jon Meltzer ::: Is this the Duncan Black that's also known as Atrios?

Almost certainly not given the vageries of getting on line in this world let alone the next.

The process began in the early 1950s when a Glasgow economist named Duncan Black (1908-91) stumbled on the lost works of C. L. Dodgson on the theory of voting. Black, himself one of the two mathematicians who formalised voting theory this century, immediately recognised the lonely greatness of his predecessor. Dodgson was the first person writing in English to point out that sometimes there is a majority for A over B, for B over C, and for C over A - all at the same time! He also wrote pamphlets about proportional representation and about tennis tournaments. Not until a century after he wrote them did anybody realise their importance. Duncan Black spent thirty years writing a book on Lewis Carroll and proportional representation. But it was unfinished at his death.

If you don't know Duncan Black you don't know voting. I do have a Duncan Black connection that would be worth mentioning only as something to Post.

Probably because the vast majority of the pseudonymous bloggers have experience with — what’s the word I’m looking for? — “nymity” in their off-line lives, whereas pseudonymity of any kind is new to the nymous.

(Sorry — cross-posted. That was meant to be a response to Rana.)

David, that makes sense. Occam's Razor and all that.

As I suggested, I've been feeling somewhat pressured for having made the choice I did; there are some people out there who are not merely puzzled by the pseudonymous, but offended and disapproving. So I'm having to remind myself that y'all haven't been part of what has at times been a very acrimonious discussion (not discounting a few of my own comments) and to pull in my claws and smooth my hair back down a bit.

That is a . . . somewhat unusual . . . use of "canoodling," unless the specific implication is that Teresa is the one to be persuaded to set up TypeKey.

Umm. Errr. Well. Yes, I suppose it is. I don't know what I word I meant, but that is certainly. Ah.

...

LOOK! OVER THERE! A DRUNK BEAR! And even drunk bears don't like Busch.

Waitaminnit. I thought the only people who used their real names around here were sad wannabe-writers shamelessly toadying to the Nielsen Haydens in the hopes of getting their bad fat fantasy novels published.

I mean, come on. That's obvious, right?

Dan -

I wish. Maybe someday...

I thought the only people who used their real names around here were sad wannabe-writers shamelessly toadying to the Nielsen Haydens in the hopes of getting their bad fat fantasy novels published.

Hmm. For this strategy to work, first I would have to write said novel.

You don't, Jon! That's the beauty of it. All you have to do is be clever enough to make it obvious you could write one. And then the Prominent Editors from the Big Publishing House will say Damn, you sure have a way with words, have you maybe written a novel? and you say Well, I've been thinking about it and they say Great, here's a big advance! See how easy it is?

That's the way it works. Everyone knows that.

Not me. I don't even have the energy to stay up late enough at Worldcons to get to the fun part of the Tor parties.

Dan, let me know if you become Ruler of the Multiverse anytime soon.

Rana, I don’st have strong opinions about it myself — except that it’s sometimes a little awkward when you know and are used to calling someone by their name but on line (without any intent to conceal) they tend to only use their handle. (Hello Rob, if you’re following this one. :) )

Re: Jesus: [in terrible anguish] My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?

Augustus Le Plongeon (who was the first to excavate Chichen Itza) thought Jesus said, "Now, now, sinking black ink over nose." In Mayan.

[/random comment]

Jon, I expect that shall happen any day now.

(As if. With my work ethic, I'll be lucky if I get named Bitch-King of Angstmar. Still, a man's reach, &c, &c.)

I use this nym because it is my fandom nym, born from fandom, used in fandom and among most fannish friends, and it maps trivially to my aim and lj usernames (it is, in fact, the initials of my full nom de fanatique, variations of which I tend to use in places where my full, legal name is either overloaded or not the best choice for autodisplay (of course, note my email...).)

Not all of us who post under our legal names are sucking up in hopes of getting something published.

The whole question of pseuds online is something I've been thinking about for a long, long time. I decided 20 years ago (ack! 20 years ago!) that I'd eschew handles and just go with my real name. The trickiest I ever got was to use my initials. Lots of people told me that it wasn't a good idea, because...well, booga-booga! But in all this time, I have never had a single problem or even unpleasant encounter arising from being visibly myself online.

Recently, I started a livejournal, and did it under a pseud. Not a very opaque pseud, to be sure, but still. I bowed to peer pressure, trying to fit into the lj culture. But it feels funny. I'd take it back if I could.

Beth, you can change your livejournal name at any time. There's a way to get it to just automatically switch over, so your current pseudonym will be replaced by "bethmeacham" (say) on everyone's lists. And then you just put a note in your journal saying so, in case anyone is confused. Alas, I don't know how to do this, but I'm sure practically anyone there but me could help you.

I've wondered at the prevalence of pseudonyms on LJ, as they seem far more common there than on other blogs. And also whether it's common all over LJ, or just among the circle of people whose journals I read. Those would be mostly writers, fans, and writers who are fans, but I've read that most people on LJ are high school students.

I didn't use a pseudonym for my journal because I couldn't think of a sufficiently clever one-- no, really I never even considered using one. I have no reason to be pseudonymous-- no one is stalking me and nobody at my day job, which is flex-time and run out of my home, cares that I have one-- and if I'm going to bother to say something, I want people to know who's saying it, so their hate mail, marriage proposals, or offers of employment can be directed to the appropriate party. Also so that when they see my book in the stores, they can think, "Say, I know that woman from the net, perhaps I should read her book, if only to get grist for my planned hatchet job."

As for the prejudice against women on the net, it reflects prejudice in the real world. I can see why one might want a break from it, but personally I would rather present myself as the woman that I am because of it, so that the people who hold weak prejudices can be enlightened. The people who are convinced that women are five foot leeches will never change, but in real life I've seen lots of people alter less strongly-held opinions when they meet a woman who, say, can beat them in a fight or has a doctorate in mathematics or can handle a circular saw. So by being myself on the net as well as off, perhaps I will be one of those women they meet.

Similarly, girls learn what they can do when they see women who are doing it. Again, on the net as well as off...

None of this is meant as a put-down to people who use pseudonyms for anything other than drive-by trolling. It's just why I wouldn't use one.

(who was the first to excavate Chichen Itza)

Every time I see that name, I misread it as Chicken Itza. Which would be a great name for a Mexican chicken chain, you have to admit. "What's that bird? Itza Chicken! Get a giant bucket of Special Mayan Recipe Chicken for just $9.95! This week only at Chicken Itza!"

There's a joke about never having heartburn again in there, too, but I'm too tired.

I was on ARPAnet to start with, so I've always used my real name. Frequently in the mjlayman variant, but there are a number of places where "Marilee" is sufficient.

I had a brief period on AOL with a pseudonym. When I found the then-teeny SF forum, I realized that the men weren't really reading the women's posts and vice versa. I set out to make an androgynous name: Patterner. Turns out everybody thought it was male (one later said she thought I was a particularly *sensitive* male). Allen Steele was particularly ticked when he found out I was female, he insisted I should have used Patterna or Lady Patterner or something. I think there's still some stereotyping by name use this way -- names are default male unless they somehow have a female element in them.

But once I was done with that, I was back to mjlayman. That's my name and I take responsibility for my words, even if sometimes they're wrong or stupid.

"Here at Chicken Itza, we use only the finest chickens, winnowed down to the very best via a grueling stone-basketball competition. No one prepares chicken (by carving heart out with obsidian knife on top of chunky-looking pyramids) like Chicken Itza!"

The strangest reaction to Internet anonymity (imho) are the kids who email me believing I am some computer analogue set up to answer their questions. They absolutely refuse to believe that it is, indeed, me. Nothing I say convinces them.

Jane

Dave - yeah, i'm still following along. :) I've been 'aphrael' online for twelve years, so I often forget that people don't know me.

Patrick - this is your website, and I am a guest here; is the level of discomfort involved sufficient to constitute a problem? If so, i'll try to remember to use my 'real' name here henceforth. :)

Beth Meacham: The sucking up thing was a joke, in case I wasn't sufficiently clear.

(Because I post under my real name here, see. And it's an accusation that gets made every so often by some hostile asshat, especially on Making Light. And since the NHs don't know me from Adam, and from time to time I chime in on the threads about writing, and one might assume... Um, well, it all seemed terribly funny last night.)

"Name them - do it - name them!"

Does anyone else find it odd that the lengthy comment that included the above was posted by
"A New York City High School Math Teacher"?

I have never considered using an pseudonym in the 10 years I've been online. I think part of this stems from the difficulties I had as an adolescent establishing an identity which large parts of my family and community found unacceptable. I'm me dammit and I want you to know it. It is not impossible that ego is involved as well. I dithered a long time about joining Live Journal becaue pseudonymity is so pervasive there. I'm not comfortable with it, but that's my problem. I did finally join and my lj user name is marykaykare. My email is marykay@kare.ws. My typepad site is marykay.typepad.com/gallimaufry. It's important to me on a very deep level. Other people vary enormously. I do think though that the dangers are overrated. I'm sure there are nutjobs out there, but there are nutjobs out there when I walk the street or shop in the mall or go to the grocery store. Shrug.

I also do happen to believe that names and naming are very very powerful magic (for lack of a better term) and I get slightly itchy about someone who wants to conceal his or her identity. This is of course my problem, but pseudonymous/anonymous posters will have to deal with my reactions if we interact at all.

MKK

Dan Layman-Kennedy,

Waitaminnit. I thought the only people who used their real names around here were sad wannabe-writers shamelessly toadying to the Nielsen Haydens in the hopes of getting their bad fat fantasy novels published.

You left out "alcoholic". Otherwise, okay, so...what else are we supposed to do? :)

In "sad wannabe-writer," "alcoholic" is of course implied.

Xopher: There's a joke about never having heartburn again in there, too, but I'm too tired.

Scroan. (I also called it Chicken Itza for years, until I met someone who had actually worked there.)

Obviously, I do not use a pseudonym -- I think I could come up with a better one than this. (I am actually the third male in a row in my family with the name -- I call it the familiy curse.) In my late teens i finally learned not to lie or even exagerrate too much. The simple truth is just easier to deal with over the long haul, despite the immediate tempations. Pseudonyms are just too complicated for me to live with.

Mr. Arthurs;

My pseudonym is for my personal and professional protection. I have a valid email address attached to the posting, and I daresay that I can be identified ultimately with a little work. I have posted to Crooked Timber, to Brad DeLong's weblog, to Halfway Down the Danube, and to John Quiggin's weblog with the same pseudonym.

The people who might care who I am already know who I am. Those who may come to care who I am can certainly contact me should they come to desire that.

BTW, I have been a poster to Usenet for almost twelve years, and during that time, I never posted pseudonymously, nor did I ever engage in sockpuppetry. I always have posted under my full name, using my full - and unmunged - email address, and I have always been responsible for the content of my communications.

As I am now.

My beef with Phil Agre is that he finds "conservatism" to be a sentient, active, and unitary thing, and not as a label descriptor of a political movement of people who believe in "conservative" things for idiosyncratic, personal, and other reasons besides the philosophical, social, and economic.

It makes me a little angry that he does that because it is a little dehumanizing and when he goes off on conservative rhetors and conservatism it denies the fact that our modern collective conservative movement is an aggregate epiphenomenon of a bunch of groups composed of an elective membership of free people who believe in things for a reason, and not necessarily just because they heard it on Bob Grant or on Limbaugh in the morning.

Whatever, your comment about pseudonyms was a typically lazy, jokey, and fannish way of dismissing what I said.

Back in 1994 or 5 when I first had a quirky website that encouraged participation (it was a collaborative writing site, and used my first name--female), I had some entries that talked about the various things the authors wanted to do to my naked corpse. So that made me a little leery of using my real identity in "unofficial" contexts.

Truth be told, I also have students, and would rather not have them come upon my blog blatherings, just as I don't really want to run into them in the gym.

When I set up a livejournal, I used a pseudonym -- partly because it appeared to be the custom of the country, and partly because I've also got a web page with my real name on it. I'd just as soon not have people who are trying to look me up for professional writing-type reasons getting sidetracked into personal natterings about daily life up here in moose country.

It was never meant to be a particularly opaque pseudonym -- anybody who ever knew me while I was active in the SCA would spot it at once -- and I've never bothered using it anywhere else on-line. And for whatever it's worth, I've always posted here under my own name . . . again, the custom of the country and all that.

Bruce, at first I thought "A New York City High School Math Teacher" was JVP, but it wasn't self-congratulatory enough.

I used a pseudonym on LJ. Then I was outed, without my permission, on Usenet. It's not like the pseudonym was completely opaque: it's the username part of my email addy.

The thing is, in the near future (sometime in the next 60 days) I'm changing my legal name. I'll still be the same email addy and LJ, though.

I first started participating in a group called Dawn Patrol and it was indicated pretty much to all that having a 'handle' was cool, a lot of the folks were ham radio users and pilots, and liked a 'handle' or pseudonym.

When I inched my way to my LiveJournal I set it up that way too, as well as when I post to several other things that require ID. I do not pretend to be anyone else when I post to people's blogs, etc. And oddly enough in a lot of venues (ebay for one), someone else is using dragonet, so I have to be dragonet2.

One of these days (in my copious free time) I'll have a Web site, but it will be under Paula Helm Murray.

I know lots of people have old scars around the psuedonymity issue. I mean none of the following in a moralizing way.

I think this issue is tied up to our differing reactions to the compartmentalization of our lives that is so much a part of the modern world. When we mostly lived in small communities of course the teacher ran into the students at the gym, or at least the metaphorical equivalent. There was no way to avoid it.

Over on live journal someone was talking about wanting to switch coffee shops becaus the barrista knew her regular order, and a lot of people empathized with her. I like being a regular. Not so much that I go out of my way to always go to the same gas station/restaurant/grocery store etc, but I understand people who do.

I remember a friend who was outraged when a coworker showed up at a science fiction convention she was attending. She hated when separate parts of her life came in contact. I on the other had get a warm feeling when various disparate parts of my life come in contact.

I'm not saying this is THE explanation of the psuedonym/real name dichotomy, just that it's part of the explanation.

New York etc: I can't find sufficiently vigorous words for your Whatever, your comment about pseudonyms was a typically lazy, jokey, and fannish way of dismissing what I said. One point: your use of "fannish" shows the same dismissive aggregational behavior you say is improper in Agre's essay.

Patrick, I believe I have some of your email:

To: mjlayman@erols.com
Subject: INFORMATION ABOUT YOUR LATE RELATIVE MR HAYDEN
From: "MR.FRANK NICHOLAS"
Date: 21 Aug 2004 02:55:51 -0000

I didn't know you had relatives in Nigeria!

I took Patrick's comment to mean something like "If I know you in another context, please let me know who you are, so that I can match these comments with those". At least that's what I usually mean when I grouse gently about opaque handles. I don't really care about "real" identities in the sense of biographical data, I just want to be able to tie together the things people say in contexts where they aren't deliberately wanting to obscure their identities.

(Some folks do post under handles to get away from routine pressures. I've done that myself. I consider that something different - a handle isn't necessarily intended to conceal an identity.)

Speaking of alcohol: Telepotation: hope for the future?

To me, the article raises more questions than it answers. How long before the process scales up to human drinkable quantities? Should we be concerned about quantum entanglement of our favorite beverages? How do we stop people from confusing qbits with cubits?

And where would be a good bar to meet at, around Noreascon?

Being descended upon by a nasty pseudonymous bunch making death threats and the like under pseudonyms like "Iron Fist" and "Avenger of the Bones" soured me permanently on the idea of pseudonymous posting on the Internet. Before that, I had no particular objection. I just didn't do it myself. The experience convinced me that anonymity in the Internet is a Bad Thing.

When you post pseudonymously, you are posting with a hood on. Since it is so commonly done, 99% of pseudonymous posters behave themselves. But they provide legitamacy and cover for the small percentage who use their anonymity for harassment.

Having gone through the experience, I can tell you that it is, at least in this jurisdiction, very difficult to report crimes commited anonymously over the Internet. Law enforcement does not want to get into tracing someone whose name you don't know who is tracable only though dynamically asigned IP numbers unless they've killed someone or robbed a bank.

I personally discourage Internet anonymity at every opportunity within the bounds of tact. This is a situation that should be allowed to pass into Internet history.

Martin Schafer:

This is an interesting point, but, getting back to conservatism, the aspects of small-town life you mention are part of why I am still uncomfortable with small-c conservatism, that is, conservatism on my definition (not Agre's).

"Traditional" small-town life worked pretty well for a lot of people, but there were ALWAYS people for whom it didn't work at all. Gay people, women stuck in abusive marriages, misfits of all stripes. And for centuries some of those people have sought the relative anonymity of the city, or the solitude of living alone. Most people, maybe, loved being a "regular" in the place where they happened to be; some people hated it; some people left. When Nicholas Lehmann wrote "Kicking in Groups" in response to Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone," I imagined not soccer (his actual topic) but a group of people standing around kicking someone on the ground - the bad side of communitarianism.

Obviously, the mobility and hyperindividualism of (much of) modern American culture are unusual, and create their own problems -- perhaps worse ones, on balance. But I don't think it's the case that "back in the old days" everyone was comfortable with the fit between individual and community. I like being a regular too in certain contexts (but perhaps I like it best in its contrast with other aspects of my life).

This wasn't your whole point, of course...

"but I do find myself bemused and sometimes uncomfortable about being a public figure in conversations with people who wholly or partly withhold their identity"

Isn't this always a problem of being a public figure?

"When you post pseudonymously, you are posting with a hood on. Since it is so commonly done, 99% of pseudonymous posters behave themselves. But they provide legitamacy and cover for the small percentage who use their anonymity for harassment."

Anonymity is also protection for potential victims, however.

"it is [...]very difficult to report crimes commited anonymously over the Internet."

When the net was young and much smaller, and the world was new, sysadmins did a bit of policing as part of their job, but it was usually a matter of controlling the electronic equivalent of jaywalking. The internet has grown beyond any the ability of any small group of admins to police. The biggest commercial sites are not interested, it seems, in hiring people to deal with minor problems and the RL police usually just aren't interested, period. A big problem--the amount of fraud on the internet, as well as things that most of us agree on outlawing (spam, DDoS attacks) is staggering. PFIR addresses some of these issues, but I fear they are a voice in the wilderness.

Jon Hansen: Chad found a link to your Tales of the Plush Cthulhu from another site, and it was fabulous.

Also, what Bruce Baugh said.

Anonymity is also protection for potential victims, however.

It is the current conventional wisdom to teach kids to use some form of anonymity when posting on the Internet. I'm not even sure, in the long view, that this is the right approach: the same technique that may help keep away pedophiles is even more useful for bullying other kids or spreading nasty rumors about others at school.

...the same technique that may help keep away pedophiles is even more useful for bullying other kids or spreading nasty rumors about others at school.

I think Margaret Cho's example is spot on. After posting an anti-Shrub rant in her block, she was inudated with hate-email.

Her response was to post choice examples. Complete choice examples -- including headers and signatures. Most entertaing was the response -- she was then flooded with those same people pleading with her to pull those posts down.

They were fine with hate, until they were exposed. Then, suddenly, they're running. I know one person, who was stupid enough to post from a work account (the message was complete with the mail-server-auto-attached corporate disclaimer) who lost thier job over that.

I don't think that changing the prevailing custom to using one's legal name would really reduce harassment at all. First of all, it's not too tough to come up with "Taylor White" instead of "1337$up3r4$$4$$i|\|." Easier, maybe. Unless you require some sort of check-in, it doesn't really help the problem--and if you are requiring a check-in, who cares what name they post with?

Saying of those who post pseudonymously and responsibly that "they provide legitamacy and cover for the small percentage who use their anonymity for harassment" doesn't ring true. Do you think that they would stop if they were the only ones using pseudonyms? And do you really think that anyone at all is confused when a troll posts? Whatever name they post under, it's their behavior that identifies them.

When I first entered the blogosphere as a commentor on Eschaton about a year and a half ago, I chose a psuedonymn (Jorge, after J.L. Borges). It gives one a sense of distance from both the material world and the other pseudonymous writers posting their thoughts. But when I started my own blog, I decided to go by my real name. I did this for several reasons. My blog is, first and formost, a way for me to get my writing notticed and if one is going to self promote, one should do so under their given name. But going by my real name also means that I have to stand by what I write. It's a stamp of honesty. I say what I mean and mean what I say.

Tom B,
And where would be a good bar to meet at, around Noreascon?

Well, let's see. Bukowski's is actually within sight of the convention center (around the corner)--but I've never been in there, so I can't vouch for it.

I can vouch for the excellence of Brasserie Joe, across Route 9 (or Huntington Avenue) behind the convention center. Superb selection of martinis--and worth the $8 to $9 price (last time I was there) because of the generous size. (meaning, you'll probably only need one). :)

I can also suggest going to the Top of the Hub next door at the Prudential Center for drinks, some nice live jazz music and a great view.

And since you brought it up--is this something Noreascon folks would be up for? Myself, with a one year old and 3 year old who expect to spend a lot of Labor Day weekend at the beach--and me in between jobs (which is a euphemistic way of putting it) I'm not at all sure I'll be able to day-pass even one day at Noreascon, and am not happy about that. (I mean, for Christ's sake-- I live here!)

Evenings however are another matter.

What I find upsetting about this discussion is the implication that those of us who use handles online are somehow automatically dishonest. Most of us, though, fully admit to our pseudonyms, and use them, not to disguise our identities, but to carry them from place to place. My own legal name, Rebecca Scott, is too common. Go on, Google it. The first few hits that come up are for a Playboy bunny. On the other hand, if you Goggle either of my current handles, Inaurolillium or ThePictsie, every single return is me. I have never denied a single handle or username, I will tell my name to those who ask, and I stand by everything I say or I retract it publicly.
Ms. Cramer would forbid anyone to use a handle because a few people abuse anonymity? Not only will this not work, for the reasons posted above and others (for instance, any sort of system that checks identity will be hackable), but that's the same paternalistic attitude that causes all sorts of idiot laws and most of the worst (IMNSHO) problems in the US today.
Yes, there are maniacs and morons out there who abuse anonymity. Most of us, though, don't even use any sort of anonymity. We have a handle that's easier to keep track of than our real names, or that describes something about us. We want to be known by those names. They become part of our identities.
Because I joined an online community which is based on a physical location, I am often introduced at parties or clubs as, "Rebecca, Inaurolillium on SeaGoth and LJ." No anonymity there. At this point, lots of people know who I am who have never met me face to face. And they remember what I have said, slights or praise I've delivered, and all of that has consequences.
Among those who know me, I've got a reputation for honesty and forthrightness, and I find the implication that I am somehow dishonest simply because I use a handle to be insulting.

Oh, and nobody here but Will knows me at all, and he only knows me because we've debated theology a little through his blog, and because I'm with GMR, too.

I don't think (in part from a couple of years of observation) that Patrick cares about pseudonyms, per se.

His use of the term nonce seems telling. There have been times I thought I recognised the tone of typer of a name I'd never seen before, nor again.

That seems strange to me.

I have an LJ, it has my name on the splash page.

I use my intitials when I make a comment, because I'm not worried about people finding out I said something. Heck, a lot of the time I want them to know who I am, so my expertise/experience/what have you, can be factored into how they judge my opinions.

I have also used a pseudonym. That was interesting. I was asked to join a BBS game, with a persona. I was absolute in not admitting to any name other than the one I has (it was normal enough... not Mystic Darkwater, or some such), because that was who I was; there.

A name is how people know one, if it's consistent, then it doesn't matter. It's the people who come in, use a name once, and then fly away who irk me.

TK

A name is how people know one, if it's consistent, then it doesn't matter.

I mostly agree with that statement, but I have some questions. Doesn't that assume a complete disconnect between one's online and offline personae? (I'm talking about the use of a consistent online pseudonym unrelated to anything offline.) When we talk about being responsible for our words, don't we mean that there should be offline consequences for online comments? There are obvious steps (already mentioned) for dealing with those objections, like posting one's real name on one's blog. I think those are steps that ought to be taken in most cases.

There will be exceptions. True anonymity is obviously necessary for those living under repressive regimes. (Ok, so that's a chestnut, but one that needed to be roasted.) Supply your own additional scenarios.

Overall, I still think that going by the offline name is the simplest thing.

It's the people who come in, use a name once, and then fly away who irk me.

Me too. Would you call such a name a 'nominal name?'

I've signed a bunch of posts to NH blogs as just "Vicki", but that's just laziness--I seem to be the only Vicki posting here, and it's 11 fewer characters to type.

I don't remember, offhand, why my LJ is under an online nickname; it made sense when I signed up, a couple of years back. I suspect "Vicki" was already taken, and I've too much experience with people misspelling "Rosenzweig" even when it's right there in front of them to count on my friends, let alone anyone else, finding an LJ account under "vickirosenzweig".

Andy Perrin--I figure consistent means "the name the person uses in all contexts," not whether it's what they got from their parents, or even whether it's their legal name.

"A New York City High School Math Teacher" wrote:

"Whatever, your comment about pseudonyms was a typically lazy, jokey, and fannish way of dismissing what I said."

I merely pointed out the joke. The straight line (the portion of your message I quoted), and the punch line (your online name), were written by you.

If you don't want your balloons popped, don't tape pins to them.

Vicki-- I agree that it doesn't matter if the name is the legal name or not. I said 'offline name' not 'legal name.' I also said 'real name,' which I'll parse as 'offline name' too. I'm 'Andy Perrin' offline and on, but that's not my legal name. I read Terry's 'consistent' as 'consistent in a given forum on the Internet.'

The only time I post anonymously is when I haven't yet created an account on a service and am using a guest / anonymous idiot account. (e.g., on Plastic until a month or two ago, and on Live Journal still.) But I take care to put my name at the bottom of these posts.

The only time I've used a pseudonym was when I posted especially rank captions on "Dysfunctional Family Circus."

Stefan

In completely different news, Ron Reagan is unhappy with George W. Bush.

"What I find upsetting about this discussion is the implication that those of us who use handles online are somehow automatically dishonest."

Nobody implied this. Quite the contrary, everyone discussing the issue has been pretty careful to avoid exactly that kind of categorical statement.

"Ms. Cramer would forbid anyone to use a handle because a few people abuse anonymity?"

What Ms. Cramer wrote was "I personally discourage Internet anonymity at every opportunity within the bounds of tact." That's quite a distance from saying that something should be "forbidden."

I recognize that you have reasons for feeling strongly about this issue, but so do other people, and the variety of human experience being what it is, those other people may come to different conclusions than you do. It seems to me that most people in this discussion have tried pretty hard to avoid offensive generalizations and recognize that there's more than one side to the issue. I suggest you could try a little bit harder to do the same.

Bruce Baugh wrote:

"I took Patrick's comment to mean something like 'If I know you in another context, please let me know who you are, so that I can match these comments with those'. At least that's what I usually mean when I grouse gently about opaque handles. I don't really care about "real" identities in the sense of biographical data, I just want to be able to tie together the things people say in contexts where they aren't deliberately wanting to obscure their identities."

And Terry Karney wrote:

"I don't think (in part from a couple of years of observation) that Patrick cares about pseudonyms, per se. ...His use of the term nonce seems telling. There have been times I thought I recognised the tone of typer of a name I'd never seen before, nor again."

Spot on in both cases. I've got nothing against pseudonyms. What bugs me is identity-hacking.

If you're active in some context we share (for instance, online, fandom, the publishing world) as "Atrios" or "David Gerrold" or "Stanley from Beneath the Earth," that's your identity and it's fine with me. I don't care or need to know what it says on your paycheck or your driver's license. What bugs me, as Terry grasped, is the adoption of nonce pseudonyms for the sake of a particular interaction. While I'm very sympathetic to Kathryn's unhappiness--the stream of liquid pigshit that got directed her way was really quite something--I would argue that the misbehavior in question is specifically an instance of the "nonce pseud" phenomenon, and that it's not especially useful to lump it together with what, for instance, Rivka does.

And Bruce Baugh is right too. I don't think "Calimac" meant any harm, but it really was offputting to have to figure out that this was actually somebody I've known for a long time and who (this is the important part) uses his real name in fandom and as a reviewer. When I say it was offputting, I don't mean that everyone should immediately change their behavior just to suit me. I mean that it was offputting; that--while I happily grant that their are many good reasons to maintain multiple identities in different contexts--there are second- and third-order effects that we didn't necessarily plan for and might not always prefer.

By the way, I quite enjoyed A New York City Math Teacher's long post about the Phil Agre essay. And I know how annoying it can be to write something complicated and get almost no reaction save for a gibe. But Chip Hitchcock is right about the dismissive use of "fannish."

In fact, if we want to generalize, my experience is that science fiction fans are more likely to read, think about, and intelligently engage with a piece of writing like A.N.Y.C.M.T.'s post than are people from the general population.

I don't know who Calimac is, but Sturgeonslawyer has a LJ as well.

I have an LJ name, "Papersky" which I regard as being the name of my LJ, the same way "Electrolite" is the name of your blog. I find the LJ cutesy pseudonymity mildly annoying, and though identifying one's actual friends by clues like their preferences in dictionaries can occasionally be fun, it can also mean I have no idea if someone is someone I know or not. I have my name on my info page. This does mean that my LJ is the second hit on my name in Google, which means I have to consider how public it is and not post obsessing about the pimple on my nose, but in the end that's probably a good thing.

NYC HS Math Teacher wrote:

I liked Phil Agre's essay very much.

But I have very large bones to pick with his reification of conservatism as the animating ideology of whatever "nascent aristocracy" exists in this country, because he does not say who the conservatives are.

That is because he is not giving any ideological ground over the word "conservative." Agre's essay is not perfect. It is written for leftists, not for liberals and certainly not for conservatives. But it is a good start. It is headed towards a time when we won't have to say who the conservatives are, because hardly anyone will want to admit being one.

The right wing has been overusing and misusing the word "conservative" for years. If we are to try identifying who the conservatives are, we can't use the right's definition because that definition is so incoherent and often misleading.

Many people in the center think of themselves as conservatives without much real understanding of what that means. Those people can be split off from the right, and Agre's essay is the point of the wedge. They will have to find something else to call themselves. I don't care what that is, as long as it doesn't cause them to keep running with the wrong crowd. "Centrists" would be fine.

Then there are the people who call themselves conservatives as a smoke-screen: the plutocrats, the dogmatists, and the racists. They are never going to give up. But the more we can do to clarify "conservative" as what these people really stand for, the less effective it is as a shield. By the actions of the perfidious tyrants who have been using it, "conservative" deserves to become a word nearly as odious as "fascist", and I hope that some day it will.

Agre's essay is focused almost entirely on political and economic conservatives, the self-appointed aristocracy who have controlled most of the resources in our societies for millennia. That is reasonable as a first approximation, because fundamentally conservatism is always about the power of a few over the many. But Agre, or someone, needs to consider next the religious and ethnic bigots who call themselves conservatives, who have allied with the wealthy elite, to get the power to push their narrow-minded agendas upon the rest of us.

Now that "conservative" is on its way to becoming a lost word in everyday language, a word that can be safely used only in historicals and academia, what can we call those who wish to protect and continue the ancient aspects of our cultures that are wholly good and harmless? I think there are words enough: traditionalist, preservationist, conservationist. We just need to be careful with our language, so we don't accidentally label decent people as conservatives.

-- Tom

A few comments from a long-time pseudonymous blogger:

First off, on my own motives: I talk mostly on the blog about politics. Now, the psuedonym won't keep me from being on the receiving end of a stream of liquid freepshit (please, let's not insult the poor pigs). But if I keep the identities separate enough that a search engine can't connect them, it will probably keep it away from the mailboxes I use for my job. Fortunately, this hasn't ever happened (though that's luck, in part -- Kathryn's political posts are, I think, milder if anything than mine), but I have had a few really strange correspondants. However, it has lead to a few rare situations in which I've wound up introducing myself to people by the pseudonym -- precisely because my "real name", in that context, would be a meaningless nonce.

That said, it's also the case that a requirement for "real names" can just lead the sleazeballs to adopt real-looking fake names. Here's a case study, in which a company's employees were astroturfing forums related to their product to create the illusion of a large, happy customer base, and to take nasty potshots at their critics. (About a week after that blog post, the head of the company in question released a statement which didn't acknowledge ever doing this sort of thing, but promised never to do it again).

Now, I obviously don't mean to defend astroturfing. (In fact, I generally avoid blogging on anything related to my professional life at least in part because I don't want to wander into it by accident). But it does point out in pretty stark terms that there's no way to actually require a current, legal name on the internet; it's at best a convention of etiquette. And folks who are inclined to take part in these sorts of attacks are probably not the sort to be deterred by knowing it's poor etiquette...

"It is the current conventional wisdom to teach kids to use some form of anonymity when posting on the Internet. I'm not even sure, in the long view, that this is the right approach: the same technique that may help keep away pedophiles is even more useful for bullying other kids or spreading nasty rumors about others at school."

This is a problem, to be sure--the internet can be one more channel for the distribution of malicious gossip. On the other hand, I've also known abuse survivors--sometimes even current victims of on-going abuse--to discuss their problems under pseudonyms. And let's not forget "Salaam Pax". Anonymity has virtues as well as failings.

C. Dodgeson said: And folks who are inclined to take part in these sorts of attacks are probably not the sort to be deterred by knowing it's poor etiquette...

I agree about the lack of deterrence, but where are you going with that statement? If we give up etiquette because many people are rude, then we'll all be rude.

I agree about the lack of deterrence, but where are you going with that statement? If we give up etiquette because many people are rude, then we'll all be rude.

I don't think anyone is calling to give up etiquette. I completely sympathize with Kathryn. It is only proper for her to demand responsibility and decency from those who have been threatening her. It really is the right position for her to take, and I hope it will make a difference, I just can't expect that it will make much of one. The people who have been attacking her are not ones who care about etiquette or are willing to listen to reason.

Free speech is rough. Many of the letters and broadsides published around the American revolution were nasty, brutal, and utterly false defamations of political opponents. I don't think that has changed.

I do think that anonymity should be generally protected on the internet. It has always been an essential part of the right to free speech. That doesn't mean that threats should be tolerated. When political speech goes over the line into violence and intimidation, it has crossed a line, regardless of the medium.

Again, this is not a call for rudeness, or giving up on etiquette. It's just that we can't completely stop all rudeness without giving up on every other principle we have.

I'm with you, TomB. I think we need to protect the right to anonymity. I also think that we are better off not making use of that right most of the time, because it leads to so many complications. I'm worried about a "what's said online, stays online" ethos, in which the worst that can happen to a poster (for, say, making a death threat) is to be booted out of a particular online community. If you connect your online self to your offline self, it's one way of making a statement that you support personal responsibility. (There are others, natch.) You're right that we can't stamp out rudeness (or worse), but we can go on record against it.

C. Dodgeson: That said, it's also the case that a requirement for "real names" can just lead the sleazeballs to adopt real-looking fake names.

There was an article in the WashPost yesterday about Teddy Kennedy and other non-terrorists getting caught by the TSA no-fly list. The TSA advised them to change the way they use their names, for example, to use their middle initial when booking flights.

Just to clarify, I don't forbid pseudonymous posting, not even on my own blog. Rather I discourage it. Abandoning anonymity on the Internet is a social change that must be arrived at voluntarily and by consensus. Otherwise it doesn't work because as someone above points out, people can and do come up with plausible-sounding fake real names.

Regarding the use of extremely common real names: Have a blog; give your blog your extremely common name (Kathryn, for example); the Gods of the Internet will smile upon you and Google will love you and soon you will be the top Kathryn or whatever on Google. I'm not kidding. (This works until Goggle changes the formula.) Also, real people who write books cope with this problem all the time. Add your middle name to your byline if necessary. This problem is not unique to the Internet.

The key is that people feel that they are responsible for their actons online. Anonymity pushes people in the wrong direction.

I should add that there are certain subjects that I can't writie about under my own name and have more or less decided not to write about on the Internet. I don't find this burdensome, but I do keep an internal censor on one shoulder maknig sure I don't post anything that would, say, cause unreasonable embarassment to my children when their friends are old enough to use Google, or that I wouldn't want one of my kids' friends' mothers to read when deciding whether to let their kid come over to play.

On very rare occasions, I have posted anonymously (once in the comments here; though transparently enough that Patrick emailked to ask if I wanted my email address taken off; I declined, since anyone who knew the email address and was here in the first place could know it was me). But I've found that enough people know me that if I write pseudonymously, people figure it out anyway. That is to say that I accept that in a minor way I am a public figure.

This is all entangled, I think, with the subject of electronic exhibitionism, which I think is a developmental stage people go through when familiarizing themselves with the medium. I remember Terry Carr talking about publishing in fanzines (P & T, I'm sure I'm gong to misquote here), saying that when he was a teenager he found out he could get whatever he wanted published in fanzines and he thought this was a wonderful idea. And then when he was a grownup and all this stuff was in print, he realized it was a terrible idea. The Internet is in some respects, just fanzines writ large.

And it does bear mentioning that there are thousands of people out there writing easily-Googled things under their real names who should think again about what they're posting; I remember someone discussing such people as "a whole generation that can't hold public office." But pseudonyms only give the illusion of solving this problem. If Tiptree can be outed, you can, too.

Finally, there is the odd phenonmenon of comment systems that push unregistered commenters to post anonymously. Livejournal is like that, and I'm sort of used to finding a way to sign my name even though the software tells me I'm posting anonymously. But I was taken by surprise the other day by Blogger, I think it was. I didn't want to go through a registration system to post a oneline comment, and am so used to having that take care of upfront, that I hit POST before writing my name on the bottom. (Why a registration system would encourage anonymous posting is a bit baffling.)

"And it does bear mentioning that there are thousands of people out there writing easily-Googled things under their real names who should think again about what they're posting..."

When everyone has something (easily googled!) that he or she wishes unsaid, maybe it will be considered impolite to drag a thirty-year-old comment into a current conversation? The favor might be returned by the other party...

I recall that bit of Terry Carr's. For what it's worth, I don't think Terry harbored much if any serious regret over the fanzine material he published in his teens. Recall that, while Terry did indeed start very young and his initial stuff was predictably bad, by the time he was 16 and 18 he was impressing everyone with his control of tone and knack for deft pastiche.

Of course, that doesn't mean the latter-day Terry wouldn't mine the irony of the situation for a chuckle or two.

I just remember the annecdote being told, I think, the first week of my Clarion. Words don't quite convey the accompanying facial expressions and gestures. It was given as a cautionary tale to impressionable young writers.

I later learned (probably from David) that Terry used to perfect some of these "casual" riffs before the mirror.

Me
A name is how people know one, if it's consistent, then it doesn't matter.

Andy

I mostly agree with that statement, but I have some questions.

Doesn't that assume a complete disconnect between one's online and offline personae? (I'm talking about the use of a consistent online pseudonym unrelated to anything offline.)

I think (in part from my experience) that there will be, even if one isn't trying to be, the name will color how one deals with things.

One doesnt take a pseudonym because one wants to be oneself.

There will be exceptions. True anonymity is obviously necessary for those living under repressive regimes. (Ok, so that's a chestnut, but one that needed to be roasted.) Supply your own additional scenarios.

I don't need to go far. I have personal opinions on lots of things which, by virtue of my being in the Army, I could face repercussions should I make them known (in some cases the risk is situational, in some it it inherent). I know of some people who have suffered (from what are, per the UCMJ legally allowed statements) for not being anonymous.

But to be anonymous in those circumstances can be hard, because who will believe one, without some bona fides, when one claims to expertise.

That requires time, a la Atrios.

Overall, I still think that going by the offline name is the simplest thing.

I agree.

It's the people who come in, use a name once, and then fly away who irk me.

Me too. Would you call such a name a 'nominal name?'

I like Patrick's, "nonce."

TK

Terry, in fact, Sunday's WashPost had an editorial on an Army Captain who had written an article for the Outlook section (didn't violate any rules, but wasn't sunshine and daisies) and was summarily banished to a post near the Iran border, which made him miss his wedding.

Worse, a Marine, good troop, service to the command, and with almost 11 years in, got the boot.

And what he did was within regs. He expressed his opinion, in a letter to his hometown paper.

I forget where his blog is (and I'm in Korea right now, so finding it is only semi-trivial) but if you google under my name ("terry karney" and include the omitted hits, it's in there somewhere. I think after the 30th page. It was back in Dec/Feb... 2003/2004.

TK

I thought the only people who used their real names around here were sad wannabe-writers shamelessly toadying to the Nielsen Haydens in the hopes of getting their bad fat fantasy novels published.

Hmm. For this strategy to work, first I would have to write said novel.

Exactly — until you actually write the novel, it remains a fantasy. Heck, all of my novels are fantasies; even the ones that aren't Fantasies.

OK, let's look at his another way: How many of you defending anonymity and the use of aliases use them in any other context that the Internet? Other than sometimes introducing myself as "Mrs. Hartwell" of "Peter's Mom," I never do.

I think the online world needs to be a lot more like the offline world in that respect. The disconnect between online and offline behavior is a dangerous illusion. You are not uploaded personalities. Get used to it. We're in the future now.

Kathryn, that doesn't make any sense. Why should a single mother working as a legal secretary in a bad law office not blog about it under a pseudonym? Exactly what social good is served by somehow (handwaving here) preventing her from doing so?

The assertion that "the disconnect between online and offline behavior is a dangerous illusion" is just that, an unsupported assertion, and for my money it rather too strongly resembles the usual arguments that the common run of people can't be trusted with new capabilities. The bit about uploaded personalities is, of course, a non sequitur, and "get used to it" is mere hectoring.

I've expressed sympathy for your outlook, given the crap you got from the Little Green Fascists crowd, but I think you're making too much of some supposed distinction between offline and online "worlds." There's really no such distinction; there's just the world. In another time and place, our downtrodden legal secretary might have written a pseudonymous book or magazine article about the experience. The internet simply makes it a bit easier for her to self-publish such writings and get them read, assuming others find them entertaining and useful. It's not about disembodiment or liberation from the chains of mortal flesh; it's just an improved mimeograph machine. The world works as it always has and the ability of people to construct alternate identities on the margins is far from an altogether new thing.

It occurs to me that what Kathryn may be trying to get at is this: You're responsible for what you do, and the existence of the Internet doesn't change that. I certainly agree. If you use a pseudonym in order to blog (or write a magazine article) about the odious conditions of your job, you're responsible for doing that in a just and equitable way. If you create a nonce ID on an Internet discussion forum in order to hurl foulmouthed abuse and libelous claims, you're responsible for that too.

The Internet isn't a magical state change in the nature of moral accountability. Some people do indeed talk as if it is. The proper term for those people is "nuts."

One world different orbits perhaps. In a different context Lois Wilson suggested that too little annonymity in the wide world was dishonest and too much annonymity in the group was equally dishonest.

Some distinction might be drawn between name dropping and you know who I am and I try to make my outside match my inside.

CF one of the regular's question of how to inclue when the actual name isn't recognized with full context and the context matters and compare that with adding honors and awards after the name for extra weight in a disagreement just to be polite.

I don't need to go far. I have personal opinions on lots of things which, by virtue of my being in the Army,

Point taken. I'd ask you if the Army is a repressive regime, but you might not be able to answer that one, at least under your own name... All kidding aside, that circumstance (criticizing one's employer) would be on my list of exceptions.

PNH: It's the people who come in, use a name once, and then fly away who irk me.

Me: Me too. Would you call such a name a 'nominal name?'

Terry: I like Patrick's, "nonce."

'Nunce' might better catch the spirit of such posts.

Patrick, more grist for the "World Map of 2100" panel, if you actually want to talk about how the map works:

http://www.econtentinstitute.org/issues/ISarticle.asp?id=152670&story_id=20992102132&issue=07012004&PC=

Future map tech is one of my favorite topics, and this is a good one.

Umm, I feel obligated to say: Alex Cohen is a reasonable substring of my legal name, although it is not the way that people who know me offline would name me.

Skwid, here. That's me. I go by that online and off. The only people that always call me Evan are my boss, my grandmother, and telemarketer scum. My wife calls me Skwid. Seriously.

I don't bother linking to my homepage 'cause it hasn't been redesigned since 1997 and I'm not too proud of it, but if you Google "skwid" I'm hit #1...and I should hope it's patently obvious that the same character is posting here as you can see there.

Andy - or 'fly-by-night'. Or 'drive-by'.

> Terry: I like Patrick's, "nonce."
>
> 'Nunce' might better catch the spirit of such posts.

As well as having less potential to confuse readers in Britain, where "nonce" is a slang term for "paedophile".

I was about to say Iain must be putting us on, but a cursury Google confirms his claim.

Of course, as we all know, "cursory Google" is Mancunian rhyming slang for The Sin That Dare Not Wear Its Hat.

In my own offline world, I have lots of completely anonymous interactions. I'm just the person buying coffee, the person answering a reference question, the person walking the big dog.

I don't see a big disconnect between anonymous posting and being an unidentified latte buyer. And if I had to use an ID to buy a latte, I'd shop elsewhere.

It seems to me that "anonymity" and "responsibility" are no more opposite poles on the same axis than "communism" and "democracy" - nor does the presence of one lead inevitably to the collapse of the other. The fact that this has often happened in the past is good reason to proceed with caution and mindfulness, but not, I think, cause enough to abandon the concept altogether.

I hereby nominate "ephemonym" as a term for a nonce handle.

(NB: "HP" is how I sign almost everything apart from legal documents, online and off. It would feel rather unnatural to me to sign a post with my full name. HP happens to be my "real" monogram, as well as a riff on an old, abandoned online handle; plus, it looks great as a ligature. However, in real life, no one actually calls me Aitch-Pee. Most folks call me Howard.)

A downtrodden legal secretary etc. probably shouldn't post on the Internet under her own name. But most of the people using some kind of alias don't think they need a reason. They do it because it's what everyone does.

But in real life we don't do that.

I forgot to add that I suspect in many cases the reasons for needing anonymity follow from what one chose to write anonymously (because people behave differently when they think they're anonymous) rather than from an initial need.

But in real life we don't do that.

That's true in general, but there are exceptions. People who are engaged in activities that are illegal and/or socially stigmatized often have use-names. This is the origin of Craft names in Wicca, for example; theoretically, coveners didn't know each other's legal names. Now it's more because using a different name helps the transition into the sacred and/or magical space.

I know a bunch of people who are amateur fire performers. Some of them have nicknames because they did something cool or weird and people started calling them by that; others because they teach 7th grade and don't want their pupils to know they're fire performers.

Some parts of the gay community are first-names-only, though that seems to be fading as a practice. You can see why it was critical in the Bad Old Days, though.

All I'm saying is that a certain amount of anonymity is not more than duly cautious in the physical world, depending on circumstance. You may choose not to be in such circumstances, but a) others choose differently and b) sometimes people have no choice at all.

Maybe it's so ubiquitous we don't notice it, but in real life most people go by several names. Full name, given name, title and surname, nickname, pet name, etc. Some people have more than one nickname, depending on who they're with. (An old friend once calculated that he had no less than eleven distinct nicknames, depending on who he was talking to.) Pet names (as with lovers) can be as ephemeral as an Internet nonce name, and change just as rapidly.

In real life, I've been known as Howard, Howie (urgh), Randy (feh), Ydnar (childhood reverse-spelling thing), HP, Mr. P, Mr. Peirce, Howard R. Peirce, Howard Randol Peirce, Dear, Sweetheart, Baby (ah, romance), and Perfessor. The difference between these names and Internet names is that I didn't choose any of these names, except to ignore a few failed nicknames that I refused to answer to.

Each of these names functions independently, even those that are variations on my birth name. It's not as great a faux pas to call me Howard when Mr. Peirce is expected as it might have been a generation ago. But I guarantee that calling me "Dear" without, in fact, loving me will get an indignant response.

I suspect that everyone posting here has at least as many real-life names as I do.

On preview: Xopher, in traditional vaudeville, circus, and carny communities, stage names were at least as much about anonymity as marquee value. It would not be uncommon for, say, Phroso the Clown to be called Phroso offstage and out of makeup, and to be paid with a check made out to cash.

HP, most of what you discuss isn't the kind of name-for-anonymity we're discussing. Nobody would hesitate to answer the question "what's Mr. Peirce's first name?" -- whereas my firespinning buddy Dirt might not appreciate having his legal bandied about.

Your last para, of course, is about exactly that.

This would all dovetail neatly into a conversation about how multiple personalities are not always a disorder, and in fact are the next step in human evolution, but I'm too tired and I have to go home now. Skillets and keyboards (music type) await.

A bit of an odd perspective:

In the so-called real world, while my co-workers mostly know me as Lenora, and my family likewise, the vast, vast majority of my friends call me Gwen. Including in middle-of-the night emergency scenarios (This has been tested).

Reason being, the local branch of the SCA (This is NOT true of most of the SCA I am given to udnerstand) uses persona names for every social interaction within the SCA, instead of just for events where you are dressed in that role. The phone list includes both names, SCA name first. It's the name you learn first as a newcomer, and the "other" name is sometimes hard to even remember.

Yet, where other branches only use the persona when pretending to be someone from another actual era, this means we're using it for day to day chatter. This means talking about your computer business under your SCA name, or about the book you just read. Or your thoughts on the mayoral candidates. Or your religious views. It's used face to face, where there's no hiding your age or gender.

So, in short, I'm accustomed to using a multiplicity of names for myself and others without using them as a smoke-screen of any form. (Even my online name - also my pen-name for my few publications, also the name under which I sell pottery and paintings - is only 2/3 of my real name word-wise, and 55% of it letter-wise. Except on those occasions I've typed Lenora Raven instead of Lenora Rose... which also doesn't mean what you think it means, as there should be an umlaut in there).

There's aslo something revealing about what kind of names people choose. Sometimes it's laughable, and gives away a streak of immaturity. Sometimes it's wonderfully smart. Sometimes it startles you, and it blooms on them, and reveals new layers. Sometimes, it just fits, like another skin. And this is, for me, *part* of the magic of names; sometimes a new name is more honest, or lets you be more than you are when restricted to what your parents gave you. It's also part of why some people are Gerald, and some are Gerry, and some just G., even in day to day converse. becuase the name slips and slides until it fits.

I have no problems with someone like, say, Xopher, whose use of a handle doesn't hide anything, and whose basic honesty about what he thinks and feels comes through whenever he posts. I never will have a problem with this, or even discourage it, sicne I KNOW that most such people, met in real life, mention their handle if they think they know you under another name.

Caveat: I do not advocate using another name to say something you would not stand behind if you were outed, anything you would beg to take back if anyone foudn out it was you (barring common-sense problems like job- or life-threatening situations or other common sense issues. I mean for childishness, or viciousness.) But I have more often seen people use other names to say MORE of what they mean, in the noblest sense.

I do admit I get pissed off by true anonymity used wrong. Not just the liquid freepsh*t. On the Rumour Mill, once, a young man - a regular visitor - got himself in deep trouble by creating a topic and using an anonymous handle to do so. The topic was on the differences between genders, and he decided that sicne his opinions would be blasted as sexist, he'd stay anonymous - even though he told us several times he was a regular poster and we all knew him.

The parts of the topic related to gender got heated but not flame-worthy. However, he got savaged personally for his anonymity. And deservedly. Once he stood behind his opinions and outed himself, the topic got a lot less vicious and went back to the normal course of things.

Stepping back for a moment to the discussion of Agre and responses thereto -- shortly after the last time I looked here I realized a possible problem with New York etc.'s analysis. I've read in a number of places that reactionary dominance started with a substantial theoretical discussion; not poll-driven, but a sorting out of what was wanted, followed by looking at how to get it and what to say about it to help get it. (This is a feeble description; I'm not much of a theorist in anything and especially not a political theorist.) Witness particularly the Contract On America that gave the elephants official (as opposed to practical) control of both houses of congress -- but that was just the culmination of a process that I've read started with Goldwater. NYe's response seems to me to assume that \all/ that is necessary is to hit the pavement; especially in an age of hypercommunication, this seems like a dangerous assumption.

There are very few new ideas, and using aliases to liberate the inner YOU is not a new idea. For those interested in the notion that you can become a different person by taking on an alias or pseudonym, I recommend the film The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack. There is an extensive discussion of how Elliot Adnipose (sp?), son of a Brooklyn dentist became the cowboy folk singer Ramblin' Jack Elliot. Part of the discussion was of Ramblin' Jack touring through Europe and the young men who became the Rolling Stones being totally blown away by the idea that you could totally change your identity and invent a new persona.

Now, I used to work for the sf agent Virginia Kidd (whose real first name was, I think, Mildred). And so I worked with Jim Allen, whose real name was James Mac argyle -- Virginia convinced him that he needed to change his name to be a successful agent. And working for one of the Futurian in Milford, PA, I was surrounded by and interested in Futurian lore. Now, Judy Merrill changed her name (under the tutelage of Sturgeon, as I recall) so she could get published. But Lester Del Rey -- we still don't know who the heck Lester really was -- he changed his name to change his identity. And there was a lot of that going around. And there are ambiguous cases like Scott Meredith who, I'm told, changed his name to avoid paying alimony. In the context of all this history, I was fascinated by the discussion of name changing in The Ballad of Ramblin' Jack.

To many of you, why Futurians would change their names would seem to have nothing whatsoever to do with the use of aliases on the Internet. But historically, it is tightly tied in with the emergence of the sf "fannish persona." And the early Internet borrowed many social protocols from SF.

But it is 2004 and I would like to think that a lot of the ethnic prejudice that made a name change potentially such a powerful transformer of identity is over. I don't think a lot of people assume Internet personae in order to conceal their ethnicity. (I could be wrong.) A guy named Zimmerman no longer has to change his name to Dylan to be taken seriously. I hope.

But this second use of the alias -- the idea that having a new name can revolutionize your life -- I think that is flourishing. Now. Judy Merrill is one of my heroes, and I am faintly embarrassed at her name change. This is not to say that people who need to keep things separate in order to keep their jobs or who have some other really good reason shouldn't use aliases.

Rather, I see the flourishing use of pseudonyms on the Internet as embarrassing and ill-advised. (And dangerous, but that's a different argument.) I would like to think that in 2004 we are all too smart to believe that taking on an alias can do much to improve our lives.

Xopher: ...using a different name helps the transition into the sacred and/or magical space.

I think you've hit on something in re. the ubiquitousness of Internet handles.

No, online isn't another "world," but it is another space, and I think many people recognize it - whether they'd use the word or not - as "magical." (To most of us, the forces that drive it might as well be sorcery. The accumulated knowledge of the world at your fingertips qualifies, I'd say, for "sufficiently advanced.")

Entering this space touches the same instinct as stepping into a magic circle - you don't come as you are. You put on a fictionsuit that makes you worthy of the endeavor, and you don't give just anyone your True Name. And after all, what right does Joe Johnson have to wander the strange roads and unveil the mysteries of Cyberspace? Ah, but Wizzard2100...

(And also, leaving the question of legal identities aside, how many online handles really conceal more than they reveal?)

Kathryn Cramer: I would like to think that in 2004 we are all too smart to believe that taking on an alias can do much to improve our lives.

I'm not so prepared to make judgments on what human beings are "too smart" for. As convincing an argument could be made that we ought to be too smart to keep playing dress-up and speaking poetry to invisible people, but I'm not persuaded that those activities do more harm than good. We're getting into the territory of mistaking a preference for a virtue; what has no value for you may be a source of great comfort and inspiration for someone else.

None of which solves the problem of the very real harm people can do when they hide behind a persona. I don't know if there's a good answer for this. I'm just not convinced that trying to stigmatize anonymity does anything to address it at all.

I had a nice long post that was eaten by the preview gremlins.

I would like to think that in 2004 we are all too smart to believe that taking on an alias can do much to improve our lives.

I find this approach very sad. You may be happy and satisfied with who you are and who you appear to be and how people address you. Not everyone is.

If using a new name gives a person the courage to speak up, or be listened to, or to try being someone they feel is more true to themselves...

Well, I say that's smart. Wily, adaptable, creative, laudable. Human.

Like fire or any tool, anonymity and aliases can be used for both good and evil. Look at the 1700s version of anonymous blogging: the Federalist Papers. They were written, much like a blog, by several people under one name (Publius). Me, I'm glad they were written. YMMV.

Let's not forget the famous scam literary agent Melanie Mills, whose real name turned out to be Roswitha Elizabeth Von Meerscheidt-Huellessem. I would argue that poor Roswitha was driven to fraud by her unfortunate appellation. If anyone is entitled to an alias, Roswitha is.

[/Thung in theek. Thung THTUCK in theek! ELP!]

Andy, while I'd like to help you, I also feel obliged to point out that your tongue has been permanently stuck in your cheek for a long, long time. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Well, new Electrolite posts for the first time, and a discussion on identity politics that makes me *very* uncomfortable and unwelcome enough that I hesitated even to post at all.

On Daily Kos, where I spend a *lot* of time hanging out, because there I am a small fish in a large pond, and no one is intimidated by my BNF reputation or anything else into clamming up and sitting at my feet, most people use personae, for a lot of different reasons. (I asked.) A majority, but a lot of people *do* use their real names for, but only one out of ca 60 respondents was seriously troubled by it. The overwhelming majority of the minority of people who use their real names were entirely tolerant about it.

One thing I noticed is that a lot of the people blogging under their own names, and who *here* think that everyone else should be obliged to as well, aren't dependent on a clock-punching day job.

That isn't a small thing. Someone just got fired, for example, for asking a "heckling" question at a Bush Rally, from his graphic design firm, who had customers who were upset by this.

Some of us have families who google what we are doing online, then harrass us about wasting too much time on foolish fantasy life. And some of us have personal connections that make the balance between full disclosure and anonymity a complex one.

When I started attacking the Conservative Establishment back this spring, with an expose on the morbid Catholic Separatism of Mel Gibson and Deal Hudson and the rest of Gibson's defenders, I did so knowing that eventually I will probably be "outed" and it will be very uncomfortable when it happens, and I would like to put it off for as long as possible. This is even more true, now that I have started unravelling the money trails and the genuine fascist underpinnings of the Theocon Hegemony, and doing it publicly.

If I were "out to get" my family, I wouldn't care, but I'm not. It's half cowardice, I freely admit, and half charity.

Accountability? I'm accountable to all those who have showed up to read what I write for the past two-and-a-half-years, and ask questions and complain and thank me for stories that made them laugh or cry or both, and who because of my fanfiction have started reading my political statements, and sometimes even changed their minds as a result. They know things about me that I do not reveal to 99% of the people I know in "Real Life," things which I have told because the armour of anonymity gives me the strength to talk about experiences of fear, loss of faith, struggles with depression so as to help others going through similar trials, which one rarely dares to in the mundane world, lest the other scoff and say, "That was not what I meant/that was not what I meant at all."

What does it matter that we know each other only by pen-names, when we can often recognize each other by style and substance alone, after forgetting to sign a post? This last is true in many venues, which is why name-stealing trolls are often quickly identified even without IP logging. Perhaps I do know some of those who post, IRL, without realizing it. So what? I am put in mind of the old stories from Celtic and Indian legend, where identity survives transformation, self-chosen or inflicted, and even reincarnation. We are what we do, speaking ourselves like Thoth uttering the universe.

You can know a man's name, work with him, live next to him, for years - and then he is revealed to be an embezzler, or a rapist, a murderer, or a spy. What did knowing his legal name tell you about him? What mere exterior formal knowledge can illuminate hearts unspoken?

Finally, I'd like to thank Elizabeth Von Marlowe for bringing up the 18th century political writers. I've felt for a long time that with the internet we are reinventing the Enlightenment publishing experience, faster and cheaper, and many of the same phenomenon are true of the web. "Metablogging" is an interesting thing, ongoing epistemology on the fly, defining what it is we are about as we are doing it, and others try to define it for us.

In this, one thing which came up in the dKos discussion was that the world is made more delightful by cool monikers - several people said that, that say, to see the name Rincewind as a posting handle brings a smile, and a twinge of envy: Why didn't I think of that first? There are lots of those, names with puns, ObRefs, wordgames. Or curiousity, as to what story is behind a name that holds a tale in it.

For myself, I think that people have much in common with cats, in the matter of Names.

bellatrys: ...the world is made more delightful by cool monikers - several people said that, that say, to see the name Rincewind as a posting handle brings a smile, and a twinge of envy: Why didn't I think of that first? There are lots of those, names with puns, ObRefs, wordgames. Or curiousity, as to what story is behind a name that holds a tale in it.

For myself, I think that people have much in common with cats, in the matter of Names.

Yes, yes, yes. This is what I think I was trying to say, and would have if I was smarter and could write gooder.

Perhaps the cockroaches have a message for the less evolutionarily advanced.

Speaking of no-longer-anonymous bloggers, Salam Pax is back.

"One thing I noticed is that a lot of the people blogging under their own names, and who *here* think that everyone else should be obliged to as well, aren't dependent on a clock-punching day job."

There's a good point being made here, but for me it's substantially spoiled by the false claim that anyone in this discussion is saying that other people should be "obliged" to do anything.

Even Kathryn has gone no further than to say that while she wishes to argue the point forcefully, she wouldn't compel anyone to do anything. Can we please stop mischaracterizing this as a call for compulsion? Thanks to all.

bellatrys: The person who was fired after heckling at the Bush rally was there on a ticket provided by the client. The client who was offended by his heckling. In other words, the client would not have provided a ticket had he known it would be used to heckle.

So it's a lot more complicated than just "his political speech offended a client and therefore his employer fired him." He was only there courtesy of the client.

I think it's misleading to use this as an example of how speech under your legal name might get you fired. The correct lesson here is to exercise your right to free speech on your own dime, not on somebody else's, and even that is limited (e.g., some public employees are free from discipline based on speech even while on duty).

Kris -- was that "ticket" a paid pass like a concert ticket, or was it merely the Republican campaign's standard stunt of vetting its audience to make sure that nobody who could and wanted to show its vileness was admitted? I expect there are complications in this story, but what I've heard of the campaign suggests there are more complications than you acknowledge.

We've had a round of this in Boston recently, with an office worker getting fired (and the firing being upheld by at least one level of court) for (roughly) discussing how much she hated her job and what violence she'd like to perpetrate on her management. (The postings IIRC were to a personal blog -- certainly not the sort of threat-to-the-recipient that Kathryn has mentioned.) I haven't researched this enough to find any sort of comfortable decision between "she was stupid \not/ to post anonymously" and "that's a reason to dislike anonymous postings"; I'm inclined to the former from personal leanings and the knowledge that having a harmless vent (what I've read said she expressed desires rather than threats) can make people easier to deal with otherwise -- not everyone can be Scott Adams.

One thing I noticed is that a lot of the people blogging under their own names, and who *here* think that everyone else should be obliged to as well, aren't dependent on a clock-punching day job.

Patrick's addressed the "compulsion" myth already. I just wanted to add that I think it is unwise to rely on a pseudonymn for protection of personal privacy. I wouldn't want to see pseuds banned, but I do think that anyone who thinks they can post sensitive material under a pseudonymn with impunity may be setting themselves up for a nasty shock.

As it happens, I have a "clock-punching day job", working for the British government (as a research scientist with the British Antarctic Survey). I am also a politician: Executive Councillor for Environmental Services in Cambridge, and Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for North East Hertfordshire. I think the best rule is, if there's something you don't want some person or group to know you've written, don't publish it on a publicly available website.

(I was amused to see the leader of the Labour opposition in Cambridge looking through printouts of my blog during a recent committee meeting, not least because one of the entries before him was about the recent local election results, and concluded "We didn't quite manage to depose the Labour leader... but we can console ourselves with the thought that Labour will continue to suffer from the same incompetent leadership.")

A friend of mine recently went ego trolling (a term that's new to me--I'll assume it's familiar to everyone else). A children's book written by her had just been published and she wanted to see if the WWW had noticed. To her chagrin, the first hit on her name was a year-old post to a bulletin board discussing Hair. Not that she wrote anything shameful in the post, but she was embarrassed at the thought of her 11 year old readers googling her name and finding that little piece of fan writing rather than something more in keeping with her writer-for-children identity. "I hadn't understood," she said to me, "that you're supposed to use a pseudonym." I, on the other hand, being perhaps of a naturally secretive and devious bent, feel a moral imperative to use my own name so I'm obliged to acknowledge my past idiocies!

CHip, they were free "tickets" that were handed out to supporters. The client gave a batch of them to the company and the company gave one to the guy who got fired. I don't think he should be fired for that, though, even though he was on a client's ticket.

The WashPost recently had an article where a college professor tried getting into Kerry and Bush rallies wearing the opposite t-shirt. The Kerryites didn't do anything, but the Bushites hassled him and eventually kicked him out of the rally.

". . . but the Bushites hassled him and eventually kicked him out of the rally."

As somebody probably said once, power originates from a pork barrel full of guns.

Hm. Think I'd better print a couple more giveaway buttons for Worldcon.

Fourth Amendment Bag - want, want, want.

That is all.

I see a new and unfamiliar word upthread: "ObRefs"

ObRefs spelled backwards, I notice, is "sferbo."

It occurs to me that "sferbo" might be a verbal equivalent of "sgraffito". (from the Italian, same root as graffiti, graphite and maybe scratch, a technique for decorating pottery by scratching the glaze.)

So perhaps sferbo is to verbal as sgraffito is to graphic.
i. e. obsccure verbal glossing of everything, as we silly commentors have the talent for.

Dave, back when I wrote about how interrogation works, you said it needed a wider audience.

It seems someone agreed with you

About.com

Why it ended up in atheism, I've no idea.

TK

Well, damn, the link isn't. I don't know why.

This is the raw link

http://atheism.about.com/b/a/085533.htm

which then jumps to my post

TK

Of course easily Googled is why I’m here…
How did I get so late to this thread? This one is hot.

Martin Schafer said “I on the other had get a warm feeling when various disparate parts of my life come in contact.” I so agree. Many times they contact in great and funny ways.

Many similar comments later…
Here! Here! Rana! I am in complete agreement with Rana’s comments on pseudonyms. One might also ask about authors who publish books under pseudonyms. Are they ashamed of that particular work? Did their publisher give them no choice? If my name was Kim Hill or Jane Smith I might not care, since there are nifty-billion of those people out there. Those of us with distinctive names and checkered pasts or public presents might not want to be known. I use a name my friends will know, and others won’t. Of course it is a game, but don’t we all play games at one time or another? Of course one might use a pseudonym and then wish they hadn’t, as I have done in the past. Then you just have to ‘fess up. I’ve been using pseudonyms since the BBS days. I have so many nicknames, who’s to say what’s a pseudonym?
Signed…
Fan with no name the next generation, Gigi, Gypsy, Ginny, Gen, Geneva, Ginevra, Gee, Greta, The Lady in Green, Rose, Crystal Lee, @--->------, etc., etc., etc.
A closeted liberal conservative post-feminist PWT middle class wannabe.

Kathryn Cramer “When you post pseudonymously, you are posting with a hood on.” well Kathryn you aren’t the Kathy I see at church I’m sure, but you have her name. It’s a cloak, not a hood, and these are widely worn in fandom.

One might also ask about authors who publish books under pseudonyms.

A blogger/soon-to-be author wrote about her decision to use a pseudonym on Tuesday. Apparently her biological father is a deadbeat dad who abandoned her family when she was eighteen (and her sister was younger) after committing several crimes. She'd just as soon not put his last name on her book. Her pseudonym will be the same one she uses on her blog, which is how she is consistently known online. Most of her audience for the book is likely to know her by her screen name. The book is fiction, and questions about responsibility for words seem unlikely to arise. I would consider these good reasons for using a pseudonym.

Perhaps some large part of the world is confused about the MidWest or maybe not - this is an odd association of Idaho and Iowa?

6 Senator Schumer says NY doesn't expect a share of Idaho's farm subsidies, so why does Idaho take a chunk of NY's security subsidies? It's a question no speaker at the GOP convention is likely to address even though a national Democrat like Hillary Clinton raised it from the DNC podium. Iowa is spending bioterrorism funding on corn feed. Maybe that state should, because with NY ranked 35th in anti-terrorism per capita funding and 50th in bioterrorism, it's all becoming pork anyway. When security dollars are allocated, the red states should be the ones that have shed or are likely to shed blood.

Clarke, with all due respect, I can't for the life of me figure out what you're saying. What is this about Idaho, and what does it have to do with the Midwest? Idaho is about as Midwestern as Hawaii.

It's certainly true that the Bush gang has turned "homeland security" into a pork barrel for their southern and mountain-state base. Wyoming gets far more per-capita "homeland security" funding than, for instance, New York City, which of course makes sense given all those terrorist attacks on Wyoming. It doesn't escape New Yorkers' attention that Wyoming reliably votes for Bush/Cheney. Evidently, it's fine and dandy with George W. Bush if New York City dies. This is one of several reasons I no longer read James Lileks.

So, anyway, I'm baffled by the assertion that "when security dollars are allocated, the red states should be the ones that have shed or are likely to shed blood." What? Hello? In what dimension?

I think that Clarke's original point is that the story being referred to confuses "Idaho" and "Iowa," and then goes on to make a bitter observation about how the places which we might have reason to believe might be on the frontline are actually not getting much support in defending themselves against attack.

On the other hand, since "anti-terrorism" money is often being spent on anti-democracy measures, hearing that some state is using the money to subsidize agriculture instead doesn't offend me.

It's been nailed in one - I made some attempt to tie together a sidebar reference (The 10 Ways Bush Screwed New York link omitted)
- from which the quote was extracted as number 6 - and discussion exthread about the Midwest as place and mindset.

Midwest is a word which has changed usage during my lifetime from meaning something close to the old Northwest - that is the Middletown (Indiana) study was a study of the Midwest - the town has changed drastically of course. I think by some back formation from middle of the continent so has the sense of Midwest. Included of course is the dig at the parochialism of some East Coast urbanites as in the story of the Bostonians who drove to Seattle. Being asked what route they took they promptly answered by way of Dedham - .

Notice that it was a quote and from a sidebar source. I can only guess at what the Village Voice meant. You posted it, I only referenced it.

Likely enough before somebody rushes to the defense of the Village Voice the places are as much conflated as confused - though I do wonder.

Finally I'd expect that NYC should enjoy efficiencies of scale such that per capita expenditures might properly be less. FREX in Idaho by law the medical standard of care has been rural not Manhattan. Plague vectors anyone?

Here's in interesting predicament a writer finds herself in because of her choices about pseudonyms.

It occurs to me I only posted my Worldcon schedule under a knowers-of-my-real-name filter. I did this because I don't want my name and porn to be out there where people can find it who I don't want to know those things about me.

. . . but apparently she is a public enough person to be on programming. Interesting.

Gigi Rose: The distinction between the online use of pseudonyms and the current uses of fannish personae is face-to-face (and often long-term) contact. I am not bothered by knowing someone primarliy by a name like "Wombat" or "Filthy Pierre" because I actually know him in a rich social context that provides many more social cues than does the online environment.

. . . and I'm not bothered by bellatrys's use of a pseudonym, partly because of the consistent voice behind the pseudonym and partly because she has a blog where I can go find out what bellatrys has been thinking lately.

And here's an exchange on my own blog where I am not going to breathe a word about moral obligations to use real names. On the one hand, the exchange is frustrating, given that a pseudonymous person posting on the Internet is fairly dubious as a journalistic source. On the other hand, I don't think this guy would be telling me this stuff if he thought he could be traced.

I've often considered whether I should use a pseudonym in my theoretical future publishing career, largely because I feel sorry for future readers trying to pronounce the author's name, and all the ways in which it might be mangled. Trust me, spend some time as a Langlinais and you'll learn some fascinating mispronunciations. Now, if I can just get companies to stop thinking my first name is Evans...

Oh, and BTW, I've updated my homepage to the point where I no longer mind linking to it on various blogs and whatnot, but I just realized that in doing so I've removed most references to my real name. I'll have to fix that...

Grits teeth