anxiety over anonymity & who knows that i keep a blog
Over the past 24 hours I've read three blog posts that I've been weaving together in my head. Sometimes that weaving is most successfully done while writing, and I suppose it makes sense to blog about blog posts.
Ava and Convexer both posted about the anxieties around the fear of being surveilled, watched, and unmasked online and the eggshells it has some of us (most certainly me!) walking on these days.
From Convexer's post on LLM deanonymization:
Needless to say, convexer is not my real name and this is meant to be an anonymous blog. I haven’t said anything here I wouldn’t defend in a court of law. But the purpose of the dumpster site is just to be able to speak a bit more freely about political/sensitive topics, and there are personal experiences I have discussed here that I would prefer my employer and mother not know about.
One day, we will improve our social norms around anonymity and privacy, and collectively embrace the fact that identity is multifaceted and situational. Perhaps we will evolve new rules of etiquette or even laws about trying to unmask people.
And from Ava's post, which also touches on how people shrink themselves from being more weird (and themselves!) IRL due to a culture of surveillance:
You always have to be afraid of someone linking it back to you, of it costing you your job or career, of someone tracking you down, whatever. I feel like realistically, the internet should have been this place where you can be as you cannot be in real life, but we increasingly did away with that for no good reason. I know some people might say you can still just make an anonymous account, but that misses how there is still metadata like device and location data, stuff in the background of your pictures, recognizable tattoos or jewelry, recognizable writing style, the things you talk about matching your real life in some unavoidable ways and more.
The third post by Forking Mad, which I found via Bubbles, was about who knows that you blog. In their words:
My test for what I recount online is simple: Would I stand in the middle of a town-square, and proclaim this to anyone who stops to listen? If the answer is No, then I would not write it online. I've therefore nothing to hide in what I have said. I stand by it all.
To paraphrase Convexer, I would stand by anything I write in a court of law, but I'd also rather not deal with the feelings of my mom and my employer reading it. I spent a lot of time in the public square on Instagram, and too many people receive others in bad faith. What I would share in the public square versus what I would defend in a court of law are very different categories to me. I will always write as if the state-issued license required to continue my career is on the line, even though I have more protections in my current blue state than in Florida.
I often think of sharing my blog link with people back down south now that I have moved states away and I have no presence on the social media sites my friends use. It would be a great way for them to see my sewing projects, flower pictures, and maybe even my more nuanced political thoughts. But the larger and more IRL my audience is, the more people I will think about catering towards, the quieter my voice will be. And I am not writing to contract, I am writing to expand.
A lot will be lost as the internet becomes less and less anonymous and age-verification sweeps the land. I think of the thousands of people in active addiction over at places like r/stopdrinking who either don't know they can be doxxed or don't post or ask for help because of the fear of losing their jobs. I feel like I can only talk about my own sobriety here because I have several years down and strong work protections.
I write here knowing my anonymity clock is ticking, and I hope I keep writing once it's gone.