💾 Archived View for soviet.circumlunar.space › pjvm › log › 000002-not-a-pseudonym.gmi captured on 2022-07-16 at 14:03:17. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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by pjvm
14-05-2022
"pjvm" is just my initials, and as a consequence I must essentially treat it as my real name. Starting from "pjvm" it is possible to find certain other accounts where my username contains my full last name - and for any such account abbreviating the username yields a path back to this account - and anyone who knows me by my full name can find this log, or make the connection if they come across it.
In one way, I have treated it as such - I've not disclosed anything here or on the gemini mailing list that I would want unknown to certain family members, or an employer, or other IRL people. In another way, however, I've not been behaving as if this gemsite is in my real name. Until now, this gemsite has not mentioned my full name or really any other real-life information.
Part of it is that initially, I kind of did think of it as a pseudonym: this gemsite was going to be its own thing, entirely separate from my life, and I would primarily be writing 'antilog' posts, pieces nicely disconnected from my personal life. But even when I realised that I cannot really use it as a pseudonym, I still wanted to try and keep it as separate as possible, as limited as my actual control over that might be. I wasn't comfortable with the fact that all the accounts where I've used my name can be connected, in part because I suspect that on some of them I've said or done things that I would now be embarrassed about or disagree with. I also didn't want people to know my demographic information, thinking in particular that if people knew that I'm relatively young, they'd treat me less as an equal.
These two paradoxical lines of thinking - I can't say these things because it's not a pseudonym, but I also can't say those things because I want it to be a pseudonym - severely limited what I could discuss here. I started to pivot towards discussing more actual things going on in my life, but then getting stuck thinking about how I could anonimise them as much as possible.
No longer. From now on, I won't go out of my way to avoid connections to other internet appearances. I'll give my surname unabbreviated and talk more about things happening in my life.
Recently on my Github account, which is directly tied to my email address and thus to here, I revealed that I am P. van Mill and that I'm currently writing my bachelor's thesis. Next to my surname, my education level and a likely age range, the other information that is out there is that I'm Dutch and a man, and that I'm studying at the university of Maastricht.
One thing in particular that I've been wanting to discuss here is a talk that I gave back in march. It gives an introduction to online tracking methods, using as examples some digital invasions of privacy committed by my university. You can view a recording of the talk on the web:
(Peertube) Digital privacy @UM: introduction to tracking methods
Of course, one goal with this is to get Maastricht University to stop what they're doing. More importantly though, the purpose is to inform people about tracking, how it works and what they can do to protect themselves. In the long term, ideally speaking I would like to set up a small organisation of primarily students, centered around digital rights and free software. Next academic year, I'm planning to give more talks and maybe get involved in student politics.
Quite a lot of work went into the talk (and I'm still not done with it). I set up a whole website for it - for a homemade website, I'd say the result is quite okay. I acquired a cheap (I think it's close to the cheapest available?) VPS for this purpose. I tried to advertise the talk using analog methods, specifically posters, which I tried to get put up in the university buildings. I set up a Peertube account and learned how to livestream on it - this was surprisingly straightforward. I made a transcript of the talk, which took me far more time than I had expected, and I still want to write a nice summary.
the website, umprivacy.nl.eu.org.
Unfortunately, the talk was a total flop, as is immediately deducible from the current view count on the video. My extremely small-scale attempts at analog advertising had next to no effect. I've experienced that it's very hard to get people to pay attention to these kinds of issues, no matter how important I might think they are. The talk itself is pretty bad - I don't have much experience with public speaking and here it's worse than usual, with a lot of pausing, mumbling and stumbling.
While I have portrayed it as a failure, for me personally the talk was a success or at least a good start, and I'm very glad I did it. I want to keep taking initiative like this and engage more and more in "meaningful activities" and I really hope I'll be able to build on this particular initiative in the next academic year (until the summer I'll focus on completing my thesis, though).
Speaking of meaningful activities: as ever I think I should do more writing, and as ever this post comes after a long period of silence. I'm hoping that now that I've ditched the pseudo-pseudonym idea and have more to write about, I can make writing a more frequent thing. I should keep in mind, though, that I often underestimate the time it takes me to write a piece.
However, not all my writing will be done here. As I'm treating this as a real-name space, I will restrict myself to the statements that will not cause *too* much trouble with any person I (will) have to interact with in real life. One thing that has become very clear to me is that I really want to make a lot more use of a proper pseudonym. I already have such names, but I've stopped using most of them for various reasons. I want to put them to use again, have a place where I can be much more unfiltered - and by "unfiltered" I don't mean "rude", I mean some mix of "insane" and "strongly opinionated".
I'm still figuring out where exactly I'll draw the line between things I say under my real name and things I'll restrict to a pseudonym. Some things are worth the trouble. But I would rather err on the side of caution.
I will also say that I regret using (part of) my real name for certain things on the internet, including this gemsite, and my honest advice to anyone who doesn't consider themself "old" is: when in doubt, use a pseudonym. You always end up doing and saying some stupid stuff, which itself shouldn't be a problem, but when it's all permanently public it is possible for all the stupid stuff you've done and said to be collected together into one big list of mistakes. Only start using your real name for everything when you've permanently stopped caring what people think of you.
One other thing that I can't do as much here as I'd initially envisioned is convince people. The thing I hate most about the current political climate world-wide is the sheer level of polarisation, which I see - and maybe this is unfair or inaccurate - mostly as an export product of the USA. I perceive polarisation to be increasing and see US social media companies as largely responsible for that - and the effects of polarisation are truly vile.
It seems to me that in the US and more and more elsewhere, there are many people who will stop listening to you completely if they learn just one opinion of yours, or will even stop thinking of you as a fellow human being. If I state here that I support transgender people, just how many people will instantly consider me not worth listening to because of that? And I'm sure that for various groups of people, you can think of some things to say to instantly get them to categorise you as "in the wrong camp" and therefore to be ignored or fought.
In a highly polarised world, I think discussing important things in a way that actually convinces people requires starting very abstractly and phrasing your arguments in a maximally neutral way (or even in "the language of the enemy"). To convince people of anything more applied, you'd first have to talk them out of aligning with one political party on every issue and get them to consider ideas individually. Clearly, if I ever want to make a serious effort at convincing those who are the most difficult to convince, I'd have to make another pseudonym.