Today’s links Forcing your computer to rat you out: Self determination starts with the right to decide who can know which facts about you. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2013, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Forcing your computer to rat you out (permalink) Powerful people imprisoned by the cluelessness of their own isolation, locked up with their own motivated reasoning: “It’s impossible to get a CEO to understand something when his quarterly earnings call depends on him not understanding it.” Take Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg insists that anyone who wanted to use a pseudonym online is “two-faced,” engaged in dishonest social behavior. The Zuckerberg Doctrine claims that forcing people to use their own names is a way to ensure civility. This is an idea so radioactively wrong, it can be spotted from orbit. From the very beginning, social scientists (both inside and outside Facebook) told Zuckerberg that he was wrong. People have lots of reasons to hide their identities online, both good and bad, but a Real Names Policy affects different people differently: https://memex.craphound.com/2018/01/22/social-scientists-have-warned-zuck-all-along-that-the-facebook-theory-of-interaction-would-make-people-angry-and-miserable/ For marginalized and at-risk people, there are plenty of reasons to want to have more than one online identity – say, because you are a #MeToo whistleblower hoping that Harvey Weinstein won’t sic his ex-Mossad mercenaries on you: https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies Or maybe you’re a Rohingya Muslim hoping to avoid the genocidal attentions of the troll army that used Facebook to organize – under…Pluralistic: Forcing your computer to rat you out (02 August 2023)