(HBSN) Identity

we curate

process of subjectification

and thus identity.

to an area where separation is not the prime defining parameter

Again, no one noticed because names transliterated from Arabic or Malaysian or containing phrases in Portuguese weren’t particularly visible to the real name enforcers.

And, for the most part, privileged white Americans use their real name on Facebook. So it “looks” right.

There is no universal context

What’s at stake is people’s right to protect themselves, their right to actually maintain a form of control that gives them safety. If companies like Facebook and Google are actually committed to the safety of its users, they need to take these complaints seriously.

Folks point to the issue of people using pseudonyms to obscure their identity and, in theory, “protect” their reputation. The assumption baked into this is that the observer is qualified to actually assess someone’s reputation.

All too often, and especially with marginalized people, the observer takes someone out of context and judges them inappropriately based on what they get online. Let me explain this in a concrete example that many of you have heard before. Years ago, I received a phone call from an Ivy League college admissions officer who wanted to accept a young black man from South Central in LA into their college; the student had written an application about how he wanted to leave behind the gang-ridden community he came from, but the admissions officers had found his MySpace which was filled with gang insignia. The question that was asked of me was “Why would he lie to us when we can tell the truth online?” Knowing that community, I was fairly certain that he was being honest with the college; he was also doing what it took to keep himself alive in his community. If he had used a pseudonym, the college wouldn’t have been able to get data out of context about him and inappropriately judge him. But they didn’t. They thought that their frame mattered most. I really hope that he got into that school.

and is a whole lot more complicated than boiling it down to being about anonymity, as Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg foolishly did).

But just because people are doing what it takes to be appropriate in different contexts, to protect their safety, and to make certain that they are not judged out of context, doesn’t mean that everyone is a huckster.

n fact to my eyes the falsity of so called integration between the physical world and cyberspace is exactly that which implies sameness (identity) in a dimension that is utterly non-identical to the point of origination.

It should be clear by now that my argument for the usage of Nyms (as pseudonyms are currently called) is not based on a need for privacy and any other consideration that is relevant (though these are highly important and necessary) but is about the future of the individual and the potential to re-invent ourselves

The pseudonymous argument is an argument against identity specificity: it fundamentally claims that I am a person with multiple identities and have desires of self-description that inherently carry a variety of ways of manifestations.

the rules of social interaction are built, not received

That this originator is a bundle of sense thoughts, a particular set of traits and characteristics that can (presently) be traced to a particular embodiment in the material world is insignificant in relation to the manner this individual desires to self explore in cyber space.

Most forms of identification contain more information than is needed for any transaction.

cyber identity is a process of opening up, of liberating a set of traits and characteristics that is already there or is in the process of developing that has or had no other means of exposing itself to critical thought or reflection.

Cyberspace takes the fluidity of identity that is called for in everyday life even without computer networks , concretizes it, and challenges us to revisit the question of what we mean by identity and to think about identities in terms of multiplicity, as boundaries between the unitary and the multiple self are eroding

The unbundling that is possible in cyberspace allows portions of identity to be disassociated and verified by a third party.

practice the self as a work of art

we will extend ourselves as aesthetic works of art

To be a Nym is to subjectively self describe in a virtualized environment based on hyperconnectivity

the autonomy argument necessitating anonymity

our newly minted avatars, are oscillating representations that slowly but surely are disengaging from their points of origination

aesthetical vehicle for expanding the language of the mind

Because of its vertical and horizontal all pervasive integration Google has a huge say in the matter, and because many of us are its users, our say and stance matters or indeed should.

If this becomes Google's universal policy, soon it will be that of the Internet itself.

We have a duty to change what is wrong, rather than to simply say "move along."

Imagine, for example, if instead of working to change civil rights laws in the American South, the freedom riders had just offered one-way bus tickets to Massachusetts. If you don't like it in Birmingham, you should just move to Boston.

Google is one of the largest companies in the world, it touches billions of people. Governments regularly subpoena data from it. The things it knows about you matter. A lot.