Midnight Pub
Transparently Opaque
~abacushex
I had to find a corner of the pub in which to take notes, contemplate, smile and nod at other pub members coming and going, and process the twin postings by ~edisondotme and ~partofthemain (Becoming Visible and Remaining Invisible, respectively). Two different approaches that perhaps could land on, or near, the same solution.
(Disclaimer: lest it need to be said, this does not contain All The Answers. You probably knew that, but the author assures you that he knows this as well.)
I have navigated this space in a number of ways-
- I quit Facebook. But even while I was on it, my employer was not listed, I rejected any friend requests from coworkers, and my profile was as locked down to the public as possible. If HR at my company decided to see what I was up to, they'd need to get used to disappointment.
-I quit LinkedIn. Seriously, it's like the Tinder of the business world.
-I have a single moniker by which I can be known (this one, abacusHex) that does not tie to my real identity in any obvious way. But this satisfies some of the requirements ~edisondotme lists, of being able to be known by connections and even friends I've made online. You may not know me, but if it's abacushex posting, you know it's "me." So I use this ID consistently. Again, nothing about what I do for a living except in the general sense is ever shared.
-I have to set a barrier as to how much concealing of identity is feasible or worth the effort. By quitting almost all social media and using what little presence I still have there in a 99% read-only fashion, I eliminate many metadata tracking concerns. Not all of course, but many. I don't use TOR, but I do use alternative DNS services other than the default provided by my ISP.
-Being cancelled. I absolutely agree the extremes of culture, both right and left, have gone so totally off the rails as to now be stuck in the mud, spinning their wheels as they sink deeper in. I don't know anyone who has actually been cancelled. It seems to be a tool of the Yale-and-Harvard educated woke applied to people with public lives and profiles. Nonetheless, if I were to find myself in a small community (say, The Midnight Pub) and find that my opinions and discourses did not sit well with other patrons.... well, that's the price of free speech, isn't it? And really, if I found that was the case for me, would I want to hang around? We can only hope that we have found a place where differences of thought and opinion can be discussed in the original spirit of the Greek Academy, and that no one will be asked to drink hemlock. But if one is determined enough, and the owner/controller of the online venue doesn't feel the situation is worth an intervention, the best thing to do with the cancellers is to ignore them. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom to like everything spoken. And if you don't like what I have to say... just stop reading already. Piss off with this Orwellian thought police bullshit anyway. It's time that every one of us, regardless of where we stand on any issue, left, right, up, down, or sideways, started having this response.
-Want to go even further in your un-cancelability? Quit Twitter. Almost all of it happens there.
-Embracing places like this, that are off the main highways of metadata and content searches. Will it always be this way? Who knows, perhaps Google will one day discover the Gemini universe, and decide there's enough content there to be worth indexing. For now, we seem to be in an unvarnished state.
-What other people think of you- I won't pretend that's an invalid concern. I'll just add that keeping a firm online identity that is "you" but not linked to the "real you" (and making sure this doesn't exist on social media, period) is the most feasible balance between engaged and yet anonymous, and maintaining a defense.
-Have real-world friends. I can't stress this part enough. And the more unconventional your thinking is (in any direction), the harder this may be. But, this provides a grounding and a level of connection that even something as intimate as this here ye merry Pub cannot provide. Cultivate the kind of friendships that can share hard truths and call each other on your bullshit.
To close this, just as in real life, your level of risk or exposure is directly related to how much you want to reveal. But how much damage that can do if ill-received (or profiled by rapacious data miners and advertisers) is limited by keeping that online identity separate from the real you. Even if it reveals the inner musings of the real you. Consider this a starting point on a road map to making one's career safe, and one's online life un-cancelable.
To give you a bit of transparency while preserving the opacity... the moniker Abacus Hex was a play on words from my comic book fan younger brother, making a reference to the lesser-well-known DC comics character Jonas Hex. I said "Abacus Hex?? OMG you have to let me use that, it's perfect! Abacus Hex: a little math, a little magic!"
And he agreed, and so I did. And it's me, but also not really me. Transparently opaque.
mellita
This reminds me of the injunction, variously attributed to either W. H. Auden or John Baldessari, that great art is "clear thinking about mixed feelings". Pursuit of balance between exactness and indeterminacy seems applicable here, too. When it comes to my own online presence, my aim is more and more to be very honest about what's abstract, silent about what's concrete. I'm sure many people here can sympathize with the desire to be taken seriously on this abstract level, that of speech and idea, with little or no regard for the concrete material — the flesh — out of which these things happen to arise.
Balancing the practical with the philosophical, especially with regards to privacy and freedom, is surprisingly tricky, though (at least in my experience). What I mean is that what's practical is oftentimes more doable or reasonable, but what's philosophical is oftentimes more admirable or noble. It's easy to unplug everything in your house and sit in the dark. Sometimes I want that. But sometimes I want to stand in the sun, too.
A troublesome desire wells up in some people to become primarily digital, especially when this would seem preferable to the misery of their material circumstance. This can lead to ruptures in the veil of transparent opacity — stress-pressure buckling and bending, making ripples. Over-sharing. The desire for self-destruction.
I'm inclined to agree that most targets of cancellation are of a particular social class which is highly public and most often associated with an ostensibly 'apolitical' field, e.g. pop-art or non-humanities academia. I think of cancel culture (whether it's even possible for us all to refer to the same thing) as a sort of massive spider perched above us in the air. The body of the thing, the bulk of its existence, is so high and out of view as to be of little day-to-day concern, but its many moving legs do affect what happens on the mortal level of us little nobodies. To make the metaphor even more unwieldy, for all the infighting we see amongst the wealthy and well-known, they seem relatively stable to me, whereas my ground community appears to be in constant flux, as though the legs of the spider were kicking everything up in a great abrasive whirl of misunderstanding, over and over again.
Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter are all trash. My experience of Twitter in particular has soured drastically over the past month, only. I hope to leave them all behind me very soon.
I'm sure everything I've said is suitably opaquely transparent... :-)
abacushex
be very honest about what's abstract, silent about what's concrete. I'm sure many people here can sympathize with the desire to be taken seriously on this abstract level, that of speech and idea, with little or no regard for the concrete material — the flesh — out of which these things happen to arise.
THAT is brilliantly stated.
I like the metaphor of the spider. You don't see the leg coming to kick you until it's almost too late, and all you did was share a different perspective with no malice intended. The spider definitely hovers above FB and Twitter and casual office conversations.
Opaquely transparent indeed. A glimpse of another mind, distilled to show the content, respecting the privacy of the person. Just what the Internet was meant for ;-)
partofthemain
I have to say, as the accidental trend-setter: I think it's really funny that folks have taken my rant to be about cancel culture. I was just talking about social anxiety! The things that come out once you folks have a few beers though...
I quite enjoyed your idea that ostracism necessarily means ostracism *from a certain space*. It's not that that doesn't make it anything to sneeze at: if you've accumulated a lot of social capital in one place, it's gonna hurt to lose it. Still, though, if you get thrown out of one bar, you're not thrown out of all bars: you can just go to the place next door!
(This is a new way of thinking about why projects like Gemini are important, yeah? Otherwise the world *does* become one big bar that you *can* just get thrown out of. I feel a post coming along about this...)
The thing that I do stress out far too much about, though, is really what you said how much concealment is worth the effort. Like, am I really gonna mail cash to Germany in order to make sure the VPN I use is completely disconnected from my identity? Is having Matrix.org know my email really that much better than having Discord know it? If nobody cares, which they almost definitely won't, is any of this worth it at all? I love to worry about it, but know it's just an xkcd.com/538 problem... I'm sure it's just a matter of picking something and sticking with it. I absolutely despise that being decisive is often worth more than being correct 😉
abacushex
I did seem to have followed a bit a train there :-) And there was a bit of a certain clear spirit that one tends to soak olives in, making the usual contributions.
I don't advocate pushing buttons as a goal unless fierce social critic is one's job description. Yet, there is something to be said for backing oneself away from the idea that everyone has to like you. "Am I being an ass, or does this person simply disagree with me?" is always a good self-check.
I love xkcd. There's always something right to the point to be found there :) Unless one is working for Amnesty International, or publishing online as a dissident under the thumb of an oppressive govt, then the usual cautions about sharing the kinds of things that would be targets for identity theft, and using two-factor auth where possible, should be sufficient. It's all risk assessment.