💾 Archived View for sud0nim.smol.pub › psuedoanonymous-struggles captured on 2024-02-05 at 09:25:50. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
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I try to keep things anonymous on the internet.
In the fourth grade I made a mistake that has probably impacted my life more than anything else. Me and another kid, Marcus, had birthdays 2 days apart from each other. Marcus was having his birthday party on the Sunday closest to our birthdays, and there was a school event on the Saturday before it. Me, being an impatient 9 year-old, got very upset that I would need to wait a whole extra week before I could have my birthday party, and I had a bit of a temper tantrum, with all my anger being directed towards Marcus for having his party then. I also had a youtube channel at the time where I would post really bad Lego review videos and little skits with the Lego characters. Well in the heat of my temper tantrum I thought it would be a good idea to make a video about my dire predicament. I think the actual content of the video was actually fairly tame, just an angry 9 year old crying to the camera about the situation, but I let my emotions take control when I titled the video "KILL MARCUS LASTNAME" and made the description "If anyone sees Marcus in real life please hurt him badly". My friend Ken ended up reporting me to the school for it and I was suspended for 2 days and barred from using any computers at the school for a month as well as being banned from using the internet for anything besides school at home for a month.
Really that ended up being the least of my real concerns, It turns out that Marcus's mother was a tad on the obsessive side and tried every way possible to escalate the situation. She searched all over the internet, even using different search engines to find if I posted any more things to prove I was a danger. She eventually found a saved link to the original video on AOL search, though I deleted the video upon instruction on the day I was reported and so it didn't actually link to it, but she still used it as evidence. She also scoured around youtube and found my friend Sam's youtube channel, where we had at one point made a series of videos where we used Nerf guns as props for real guns and me and him would take turns as the guy being the shooter/ being shot. Again, prime evidence I was a danger to her son. She eventually would go around the whole school telling people about what happened and how I am dangerous, I stopped getting invited to things, the older kids in our after school care tormented me with it. The real kicker came when my birthday did come around, she had waited until then, about 4 weeks since the upload of the video, when she reported me to the local police department. I hadn't committed a crime, but they had me in to be interviewed. So I spent the afternoon of my 10th birthday in a tiny room in the local police department being asked about whether or not I played violent video games or not.
After this whole incident I've been paranoid about just about everything I post online tied to my name. Every few months I compulsively pruned my social media posts and comments to ensure there would never be any blow-back if I wasn't careful. Even if it's not tied to my real name I would be vigilant about not letting too many details slip so it could never be tied back to me.
However this has become more of a struggle for me with gemini. This is the first place I've ever really posted things since that youtube channel. I already feel like I have let out enough information on these posts where if someone in my life were to find it, they'd immediately know it was me. I always use pseudonyms for the people in my posts, but if anyone were really on a mission to get me, it would be pretty easy to connect the dots and link me to some of my more embarrassing posts here. The shelter of anonymity has let me be more raw here, but has also now stopped me from being able to share this with the real people in my life. After every post I make I hear a voice whisper "what if your Dad found this? what if your future employer finds this? what if this post blows up in your face?"
Plus it's not like any of this is really anonymous, if a state actor were trying to get me it would be extremely easy to tie my IP to all my past identities and connect all of this to me. Part of me is worried that I am worried about that. Why should I be scared that that would happen? it's not like I'm a terrorist on the run or anything, but I'm always in the mindset that I am.