‘I think using real name = authentic is too simplistic and boring.
When you talk like this you locate authenticity at the level of the identity.’
Discussion
‘Authenticity is not about the identity, but the way you use it.’
‘I do admire people who are unapologetically themselves in public. That is a gift. If you have the courage to be authentic while showing your face, that helps widen the Overton window of weirdness. You make it less scary for others to do the same; you make the world more alive and human. But if you can’t do that, like most people can’t, if you feel like you can’t say what is on your mind when your friends and family (or the mob) can hear you, it is more authentic to wear a mask and say what you feel than to stay silent with your face bare. It is the act of being yourself that is the deeper gift; not the name.’
‘Pseudonyms are a social technology with a deep history. Haiku poets took pen names called haigō (俳号). Hafez, the name of the 13th-century Persian poet, is a nom de plume.’
‘Søren Kierkegaard wrote most of his major books using pseudonyms, or heteronyms. Fear and Trembling was attributed to Johannes de Silentio. The Sickness unto Death was authored by Anti-Climacus, named as an attack on one of Kierkegaard’s earlier pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus. Either/Or had two pseudonymous authors, and a pseudonymous editor! All in all 22 two alts have been connected to Kierkegaard. He wrote a book about his pseudonyms.’
‘For better or worse, your face is shaped by the masks you wear.’
from a database theory aspect, nyms have greater uniqueness... like, if you just count the combinations, for all lower case 11,881,376 (same if all are upper) and for mixed case 380,204,032 which is a really lot of very memorable distinct names, let's say that 10% of those are intelligible
because "real names" sometimes are ambiguous this is a problem from this perspective, and partly why most social network systems rely on conflict free identity numbers as primary keys in databases
that is just in terms of practicality for the systems, the matter of being "autonomous" also has a big part in this, thus the conversation about agency - autonomous literally means self-defining as well as self-directing, and taking on a nym is an act of self definition
Thank you. What an insightful comment.
yup, it's a conflict free scheme of reference for humans
there is, however, at least one other mleku, ukrainian, apparently... and i used to go by elfspice but i think due to my work i wound up with impersonators long after i quit that scene... a name that was unique was l0k1 but too short for many name constraints, and i adopted that name to disambiguate myself from other usernames for mention tagging on IRC
perhaps i should slightly modify my handle to improve its distinctiveness
would be a bit of a hassle at this point to do it with my key but maybe warming up for when nostr finally has a succession protocol
Benjamin Franklin first published under the pseudonym of ‘Silence Dogood’, a middle-aged woman opining on the morals of society. Franklin was 16 at the time.