John Gabriel's Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory is actually a sociological phenomenon and could make for scintillating discussion (perhaps integrating the current debate over "forcing" people to use "real" names on social networking sites -- my use of quotation marks should make it pretty clear which side of the debate I fall on)
Hey, that's a good idea!
This is getting traction in the mainstream press -- Fortune has a piece up called
Why Google+ needs pseudonyms.
I use my real name online -- but I'm a straight, middle-class white boy between the ages of 18 and 35. Worst thing that's going to happen to me is somebody asks me about my political opinions in a job interview, or posts satellite pictures of addresses you can find if you run a whois on my website.
danah boyd (no relation) points out that, oh hey, there are people who have more to lose than I do by using their real names.
Another site has popped up called “My Name Is Me” where people vocalize their support for pseudonyms. What’s most striking is the list of people who are affected by “real names” policies, including abuse survivors, activists, LGBT people, women, and young people.
Over and over again, people keep pointing to Facebook as an example where “real names” policies work. This makes me laugh hysterically. One of the things that became patently clear to me in my fieldwork is that countless teens who signed up to Facebook late into the game chose to use pseudonyms or nicknames. What’s even more noticeable in my data is that an extremely high percentage of people of color used pseudonyms as compared to the white teens that I interviewed. Of course, this would make sense…
The people who most heavily rely on pseudonyms in online spaces are those who are most marginalized by systems of power. “Real names” policies aren’t empowering; they’re an authoritarian assertion of power over vulnerable people.
(HT:
Doctorow)
Charlie Stross has a wonderful analysis of everything that's wrong with realname enforcement under the title
Why I'm not on Google Plus; notably, it quotes Patrick McKenzie's
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. I'm going to follow Charlie's lead and quote Patrick's list of falsehoods in its entirety:
- People have exactly one canonical full name.
- People have exactly one full name which they go by.
- People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.
- People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.
- People have exactly N names, for any value of N.
- People’s names fit within a certain defined amount of space.
- People’s names do not change.
- People’s names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events.
- People’s names are written in ASCII.
- People’s names are written in any single character set.
- People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
- People’s names are case sensitive.
- People’s names are case insensitive.
- People’s names sometimes have prefixes or suffixes, but you can safely ignore those.
- People’s names do not contain numbers.
- People’s names are not written in ALL CAPS.
- People’s names are not written in all lower case letters.
- People’s names have an order to them. Picking any ordering scheme will automatically result in consistent ordering among all systems, as long as both use the same ordering scheme for the same name.
- People’s first names and last names are, by necessity, different.
- People have last names, family names, or anything else which is shared by folks recognized as their relatives.
- People’s names are globally unique.
- People’s names are almost globally unique.
- Alright alright but surely people’s names are diverse enough such that no million people share the same name.
- My system will never have to deal with names from China.
- Or Japan.
- Or Korea.
- Or Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Spain, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Russia, Sweden, Botswana, South Africa, Trinidad, Haiti, France, or the Klingon Empire, all of which have “weird” naming schemes in common use.
- That Klingon Empire thing was a joke, right?
- Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly accepted standard for names.
- There exists an algorithm which transforms names and can be reversed losslessly. (Yes, yes, you can do it if your algorithm returns the input. You get a gold star.)
- I can safely assume that this dictionary of bad words contains no people’s names in it.
- People’s names are assigned at birth.
- OK, maybe not at birth, but at least pretty close to birth.
- Alright, alright, within a year or so of birth.
- Five years?
- You’re kidding me, right?
- Two different systems containing data about the same person will use the same name for that person.
- Two different data entry operators, given a person’s name, will by necessity enter bitwise equivalent strings on any single system, if the system is well-designed.
- People whose names break my system are weird outliers. They should have had solid, acceptable names, like 田中太郎.
- People have names.
Now, it's true that Internet Fuckwads use pseudonyms to behave in a way that they probably wouldn't if they were forced to use their real names.
However, any potential benefit of such realname enforcement is negated by the fact that -- and those of you familiar with my opinions on swear filters and DRM may notice a trend here -- REALNAME ENFORCEMENT DOESN'T FUCKING WORK.
Stross also links a Gary Walker piece,
A Firsthand Examination of the Google+ Profile Reporting Process, which pretty much takes a wrecking ball to any notion that Google+'s realname enforcement is, well, even slightly competent.
To wit:
He set up a second Gary Walker account, and used the same avatar -- which isn't personally identifying, just a Lolcat.
Then he reported the second account as an impersonator. To file such a report, he had to prove his original account was the "real" Gary Walker. To do this, he Photoshopped a crooked scan of his picture onto the McLovin ID from Superbad, and replaced "McLovin" with his own name, in a different font from the rest of the ID.
Google accepted this as a valid ID, and temporarily blocked the second Gary Walker account.
To prove his identity, Gary responded from the second account, taking the SAME fake ID and Shopping a picture of Jared fucking Loughner on it.
The account was reinstated.
In short, in a revelation that should surprise absolutely fucking nobody, realname enforcement doesn't stop anybody from using pseudonyms -- it just forces them to use pseudonyms that sound, plausibly, like real names.
Meanwhile, both honest people who want to use pseudonyms and people with unusual real names (Washington Post:
Offbeat Name? Then Facebook's No Friend) are penalized.
So yeah, I think the comparison to DRM and swear filters is apt: legitimate users get fucked, abusive ones don't even have to break stride.
(Related: this morning I saw a comment on ComicsAlliance's article with the
promo pic for the new Batman cartoon that referred to "alfred double ******* a couple of john woo style guns alongside Batman". After a moment I realized the asterisked-out word was most likely "fisting". Which I suppose is still better than CBS censoring all mentions of Senator Coons.)
