I have thought a long time whether I should release my “About me” page, because like many others I have been brainwashed into a privacy-obsessed mindset. Said mindset is common among normal folks too, but much more so in free software circles and on anonymous message boards, which I have been a part of since forever. While both are in itself not bad things, they promote things such as anonymity and privacy. I, a the time, of course was a firm believer in those things and acted in a way, which would preserve my privacy and anonymity.

Long story short: I think privacy obsession is inherently wrong now. If you are anonymous or pseudonymous respectively, you are being dishonest, and dishonesty is always bad. Hiding behind a pseudonym is not healthy behavior and it leads in a lot of times to something grotesque. If you cannot continue doing what you do under your current pseudonym, this probably bad. If this triggered a knee jerk reaction in you to disagree with me and scream some non-sequitur about how journalists also use Tor, this means you were brainwashed by a cult.

If you read this, you are probably aware of hacker culture, but what astonishes me the most about it, how the successors to old school hacker culture, somehow included a new message into it, which completely contradicts it, namely privacy. When hacker culture emerged all computer data was public domain and accessible for everyone. Imagine telling some computer guy these days, that he should share his user account on his computer with other people. Unthinkable! But in essence only the mindset changed. What kinds of data are you saving on your computer that have to to be kept so terribly secret? Probably nothing at all, because you save all your data in Discord messages and not on your physical hard drive, but I digress. Information wants to be free and so it shall be.

IMPORTANT SIDE NOTE: Obviously you shouldn't upload your own bank data, home address and passwords to your local pastebin, as malicious people will abuse this knowledge and do bad things with it, but this should be obvious. In an ideal world, doing so would be without problems and consequentially also a good thing to do, and I still encourage (You) to release your personal information and drop your pseudonym, but you shouldn't be mentally retarded and thinking your bank info will not be abused when posted online. On the other hand, those privacy people, are so obsessed with privacy, that they in all seriousness recommend things such as not telling your girlfriend/wife your password for “security reasons”.

If you are using the internet regularly or at all and want to do so pseudonymously or anonymously, it will be a constant uphill battle against leaving evidence of who you really are. How a person, that at all costs wants to stay pseudonymous behaves, and how a person behaves, who wants people to believe a lie, that they made up, is almost identical. The reason for this is, because having an alias or pseudonym is nothing but keeping a lie up. You are trying people to believe you are somebody, who you are not.

If you think there is no difference in your behavior between you being pseudonymous and you doing things with your real face and real name, then why would you put up the act in first place. Clearly there is a difference. Seldom this is not the case, because people think they can't be traced back or that nobody will put up with the effort to trace them, start behaving differently.

As the button on the lowermost of my website suggests, I am in favor of (absolute) free speech. While I want to write a separate article on that, I want to mention, that this belief and the belief described in the paragraphs above do NOT bite themselves.

(I will continue this article at some point in time, but not today. Good night.)