Pseudonymity and the shape of things to come
The trajectories of visibility, anonymity, pseudonymity and recognition can be observed most easily when you pay attention to the failures of legibility and the implementations that seek to increase or decrease said-legibility.
Legibility is the principle of reducing complexity down to a manageable scale because "what gets measured gets managed" I want to briefly look at these questions of visibility through the notions of the pseudonymous and the anonymous.
An example : Ospare is a "writing suit" because "pseudonym" sounds less exciting. Suit is a funny image, a suit of armor, a collage costume, a data-gundam for fighting bad takes, an information batysphere to dive into the ooze of strange stuff floating around the web.
A development : Multisigs as avatars as inventories, a notion that reeks of property rights (and therefore enclosure) but what are you gonna do? Not own yourself in a state of rapid enclosure of capacity and a continuous accumulation of data by monopolies ? There are battles framed as lost, on the terrain of energy, infrastructure, superstructure, stack-level implementation, there's this assumption in certain circles that data is a good that can be held and bargained over, rather than a liquid output that can't simply be pinned down, only cut and sold once it's been bundled as sets.
The structures in place are producing data all around but has it got any use ? There's a massive need for recycling that data into actually useful endeavors that don't serve their current ends, but even then, it's largely a certain type of data that's being harvested, a type that serves the purposes of surveillance and advertising at large, can it be repurposed ?
A lot of those look like strange battles to be fought for when the terrain on which they rest is facing such existential risks as "is energy infrastructure at the scale and in the shape of today viable for the next ten to twenty years?".
The current Web is ending, the move from niche/cultural/salaried access to open/agonistic-connective/ever-growing to enclosed/restricted/superstructural is accelerating as more and more models of information boundaries are crafted to allow for more modalities of communication. The dominant maxim of web3 could be "not to control content but to create context" depending on the way things unfold.
The central tenet of owning your own data-assets is that you're a person that has a certain amount of connections to contexts, produced outputs, data, etc. It implies identification of this entity and their legal rights as recognized by other entities, namely the juridicial institutions in charge of making the laws as well as the powerful economic and sovereign actors that rely on the data and therefore the legibility of the person, in order to accumulate capital or leverage.
It's necessarily about an individual as part of a demographic though, it's not just the one person whose information can be leveraged for gain, it's the connections between many different persons ; it's all about the nodes and the links.
So, this web is going through the motions, one of those movements being one of a shift in visibility, legibility, direct coordination. New or fashionably old institutions are expected to get their shit together and put a leash on the bad tech monopolies, or the tech monopolies are expected to be dethroned by slightly less rich companies that are moving and improving their standing in the space of data extraction, data ownership, etc.
It's a game where the only people who can play are those who have not only the money but also the know-how, either legal or technical.
Enough of web3 though let's get back to pseudsuits and anonymous topologies : One of the old misconceptions of the internet, or maybe an outdated myth about it is that it favored and guaranteed anonymity, not quite.
The internet used to favor pseudonymity moreso than anonymity, the two differ in their effects and therefore the ways they're realized : Anonymity is necessarily about non-attribution. The anonymous act speaks for itself, it has been done by some person that will not be found or can't be associated to the act. And in fact, to go further the ultimate anonymous act is indistinguishable from an accident. A random occurence that escapes the plans and models of those it happens to.
Pseudonymity on the other hand is necessarily about attribution, it creates the boundaries of a name, a time, a context. the action has been done by X who has a place of residence, a bank account, friends, family. (all information that forms the backend of the pseudonym) Anonymity is about something beyond individualism really, while pseudonymity is about motion within contexts of interdependence and relationality.
Intentional anonymity is about privacy, non-legibility, non-attribution, staying off sight, off grasp. And to be both anonymous and aware of it is to control one's existence at a time and place, in a context. Pseudonymity is both more trackable and more complicated in some areas but deeply simpler in others. Under french law, one can plead against someone who hasn't been identified yet, it's called "porter plainte contre X", you plead against the pseudonymous X. This is not just an unknown person but an unknown person that is assumed to be identifiable as related to the crime in question rather than the crime being the act of an illegible nature, an accident.
There's a lot to pseudonymity obviously, the different layers of legibility or identification, whether it's participatory or imposed, in a sense we could also differentiate here between the pseudonym and the pseudepigraph which is the result of an (false) attribution. An inevitable failure of legibility in some sense, the difficulty of tying events to causes in a complex world.
Pseudonimity feels participatory at least in its most basest sense : you've picked up a name or you've been given a name you keep and re-use, eventually integrating it as yours and attributing a certain value or at least function to it, some things you just accept. A pseudephigraph wouldn't need to be as mundanely omnipresent in your waking life, it could be your credit score ID, your passport ID, your immigration papers, etc. It could be your "description" being attributed to a name and set of legal facts that qualify you for a warrant or arrest, and you could have never heard of that attribution until someone somewhere does their job and notifies you for a court hearing. The problem here being that "pseudepigraph" is about "wrong" attribution, not simply an arbitrary and unwanted one.
On the opposite side of that, the pseudonymous as we generally think of it can be both strenght and terror, being able to hide while still keeping attribution (and therefore attention) is a paradoxical form of fulfillment ; the simplest pleasure you can get from it would be having your pseudonym be associated to highest scores in a game you're fond of, online friends making memes with your @ in it, crafting a persona you get to experiment with to the fullest. And not just in these forms of cozy privacy do you find pleasure, it's as varied as life is, it just allows for a layer of mediation.
Like a given name, the pseudonym stakes a claim to an identity you've crafted for yourself, by the actions you pursue, maybe even actions shared with others if your pseudonym is used by enough people that you can't be held responsible for its work. Like a piece of cloth it can fit you for bed or be a sunday suit, until it doesn't fit you anymore.