My attitude toward internet pseudonyms is probably a bit odd; I’m not sure, though. I don’t know if this will interest any of you, but “why not?”
I played a lot of role-playing games starting in the 70s with D&D and, I have to say, I finally agree with some of my classmates’ parents who were worried that such things would “warp” us. Since I’m not sure what “warping” a teenager entails, I won’t try to sort all of that out, but – at the time – I was highly conscious that role playing, wargaming, and computer gaming were definitely having a massive effect on my mind. I still feel that effect all of the time, because I believe that, collectively, those pastimes polished my problem-solving skills for abstractions in a very effective way.
For example, I believe that the skills we develop in role-play are useful in one of the core activities of philosophizing, which is “putting oneself in another’s position.” It’s a philosopher’s tool, but it’s also an actor’s and a strategist’s. In wargaming, you are constantly asking yourself, “if I were the opposition, what would I be doing?” and collecting a bungh of hypotheticals, subliminally ranking them, then trying to assess them for confounding details. I.e.: is that unit that just appeared over there a feint? Well, it’s an expensive unit so it’s less likely the opposition would risk losing it in a feint, but it’s a highly mobile unit so it’s more likely to be a feint since it can move rapidly to join the enemy’s hypothetical main line of advance. Strategy, in general, is a matter of building and discarding hypothetical cognitive models that you populate with another cognitive model of “what does the enemy know?” For example: it might be worth attacking that unit which may be a feint because, if it’s a feint, the opponent will develop a distorted idea of where my main force actually is – so maybe I should appear to bite at the feint but do it with my own rapidly re-deployable units and see what develops.
The process of flipping your thinking around and forming a hypothetical cognitive model is not just useful for oppositional processes: when I used to write classes on internet security stuff, I constantly maintained a subliminal cognitive model of “what my student probably knows, right about now” which allowed me to get my materials in the right order, present concepts in correct sequence, and come up with relevant examples. Apparently, that worked pretty well, since I seldom got negative feedback on my classes and never once in 30 years had someone tell me my material was scattershot or disorganized. I describe these things as though building an oppositional cognitive model was a conscious thing, but by the time I was in college it was something I automatically did, without paying attention to it. I started paying attention to it, in fact, when I got to my second job and someone mentioned that I had a tendency to always go on the offensive against everyone else’s ideas. That set me back on my heels for a while and a few days later (after much thinking) I went back to that person and explained that I used a similar oppositional model against my own thoughts, always and I didn’t mean any harm by it and I would be more careful not to expose that inappropriately.
My long experience with role-playing and oppositional modeling for strategy built me what I call my “bullshit filter.” The bullshit filter is a mental process that runs between where organized thinking happens, and where the words are assembled into sentences and marshalled to come out of your mouth. It’s the little mental thread that says “no don’t say that!” right before you say something that doesn’t sound right. I had a fascinating conversation back in 2012(?) with Leon M., a bboy and rapper with powerful skills (and all around beautiful human being) about what it feels like to rap – his explanation was similar to my experience of the bullshit filter, it’s just that his bullshit filter was not tuned to bullshit at all – it was tuned to hip-hop timing and phrasing (I’m not going to characterize rapping as rhyming because it does not appear to be that, to me). I’ve thought long and hard about the bullshit filter and I believe that it also comes from years of role-playing: when you’re role-playing, everything that comes out of your mouth has to go through a pre-filter that asks “is this the king of thing that Surly Badger of the Fuel Rats would say in this situation?” That led me to suspect that actors [if any of you dear readers have acting experience, I would particularly appreciate if you could weigh in on what that feels like!] do the same thing.
When I first saw Ian McKellen’s explanation of his acting method, on Extras (above) I nearly injured myself laughing. First off, I love a show that consists of loathsome Ricky Gervais using himself as a punching bag, and then asking top-notch actors and musicians to take a poke at him, too. I feel that McKellen is reaching for a profound truth in his otherwise silly explanation: trained actors build a filter that they drop across their entire cognitive model – they aren’t just asking “How would Gandalf say this?” they are running inside a cognitive model of how Gandalf would, uh, Gandalf – so the output that comes from that is Gandalf-model not McKellen, and then the bullshit filter is watching like a hawk for the slightest sign of “breaking character” i.e.: a bit of McKellen leaking through. I believe that is how it works and maybe how it feels, because I experienced that all the time/many times when role-playing. Probably the height of that, for me, was when I was playing a lot of World of Warcraft, and my main alt, IronBadger of Clan Thunderhoof, kept forcing me to think like a dumbass when I was tanking, because I was so into the role of IronBadger, who was no genius at all, that I felt like I was thinking slower. To the point where some of my friends in the game who knew me personally, asked me why I kept doing certain stupid things over and over. It was IronBadger that kept taking potions of giant size right before trying to lead the party into narrow dungeons, not me.
IronBadger of Clan Thunderhoof, in Orgrimmar before the siege
There is a point to all of this: it forces me to wonder, “who am I?” but not in a bad way. When I used to present consulting reports to CEOs of companies, I was definitely playing a role – it was my “corporate consultant” role and I even, sometimes, referred to it as “corporate cosplay” because, like any actor, I reinforced my own ability to play the role by wearing signs and symbols that reinforced the role: bespoke suit and slim metal briefcase, with expensive shoes. This, by the way, is why Pete Buttigieg used to set my teeth on edge: I immediately caught onto the fact that he was playing the role of a politician, and was acting the part and cosplaying it well – and I had absolutely no idea what was behind the facade. It would be as though Daniel Day-Lewis decided to run for president: he’d be so frickin’ presidential that we’d all feel he was the second coming, even if we knew it was all an act.
And, that brings me back to oppositional cognitive models and strategy: it’s important for us, who wish to strategize for or against someone, to be able to accurately model what they might do in some situation or other. But: in the case where our opponent is also an actor, we don’t know for sure that they’re going to role-play a blockhead like IronBadger or Donald Trump – we might be dealing with a hollow shell that is pursuing a multi-layered strategy that we never see at all. I mention Donald Trump in this context because he’s a good example of a persona that I don’t bother trying to develop a backing cognitive model for: I have no idea what Trump is likely to do because somewhere along the line I concluded that trying to derive a strategic model from all that stuff was a waste of time. I have tried, at various times: follow the money, contrarian troll, political nihilist opportunist – but it doesn’t work, so why bother?
I have sometimes wondered if my way of thinking about people is normal, or sociopathic, but I can no longer imagine any other way of doing it. Besides, it doesn’t matter: this is how I am, now.
All of this is a roundabout response to the discussion on my recent posting about trans rights [stderr] – there was a lot of “who is a sockpuppet for whom?” going around, and I realized that I completely don’t care because, in general, when I am dealing with someone on the internet, I treat everyone as a sockpuppet. Or, more precisely, I assume that everyone is always playing a role – which means that I don’t demand that any one person only play one role. There are some of you that I have come to know fairly well (i.e.: your identity has a fairly well fleshed-out cognitive model attached to it) but I wouldn’t be shocked if I found out that a bunch of you were one particularly bored internet troll who had decided that your life’s purpose was to entertain me while practicing some role-play. I have met one or two people (two, I think – ~waves~!) who comment here regularly, but even then, it was relatively brief and the whole thing could have been a performance. And, if it were, it would make no difference though I’d be impressed by an excellent or irritated by a bad one.
So, as I watched the kerfuffle about who was whom and said what where, I was thinking about Caine. You know, I knew Caine as much as I did under one identity, swapped emails with her under another one and found out upon her death that those identities were also pseudonyms. What I noticed was a very consistent performance of a certain person that I came to identify as an individual. If I had later discovered that Caine was a sub-persona of someone else, I’d be impressed by the performance but I don’t think I’d have been shocked.
When I think about that, I wonder if I am a deeply paranoid person. I know people who have fallen “in love” with performances of personae over the internet. That seems impossible to me, since I’d always be assuming that, to some degree or another, I was dealing with a sockpuppet. For example, I know one person who is very shy in person, but writes fluently and powerfully in email, to the point where you might be justified in concluding that one or the other was an impostor. There, now, I used the word “impostor” – which I had been avoiding so far – because an “impostor” seems to be a false performance, whereas a person attempting to truly communicate in correspondence would be “real”, I suppose. Or, would they? The medium really does influence the message, to the point where the message may get obliterated in the noise. That’s why I tend to be extremely skeptical of everything about how everyone on social media presents their self and everything around them. I feel that that’s also a valuable gift I gained from the role-playing and public speaking I’ve done: I could easily have posted nicely composed and lit photos of myself at every conference where I went, of me drinking in swanky hotel bars, etc., and presented a false persona of urbane sophistication. Back in the mid-oughts, there was one photographers’ model I worked with who used to know a good number of worldly travelers – she’d arrange to go take some selfies of herself soaking in the fancy bathroom in the presidential suite at The Fairmont, or wherever, and post them on Instagram. Nowadays they all do that, and there are fancy Airbnb places that you can rent if you want a spiffy expensive Manhattan office as a backdrop. They’re all sockpuppets, to me.
So now I wonder if my parents and their friends were right, and that playing too much D&D and gaming warped me slightly. Not, by exposing me to satanic concepts and demonology, but by leading me to believe that everyone I meet is a performance to some degree or another. It has certainly also immunized me – to a certain degree – from shock about gender presentation. I don’t really understand what the big deal, for some people is, but it appears that there is outright terror of the idea that they might be having a nice time with someone, wind up going back to someplace private and making out, and then discovering that their genitals don’t match the expectations derived from the rest of the performance. Or, that “hot 16year old cheerleader@myspace.com” is actually a 40 year old FBI agent – also a performance. After all, the point of online identities is that they are disposable.
A while ago, a fellow showed up here asserting that they were a long-time police officer and tone-trolling me (and to a lesser degree, The Commentariat(tm)) for improperly slagging off all cops as bastards. In retrospect, I think I didn’t even waste any time wondering if that persona was really a long-time police officer, or not – my thought process was basically, “uh huh” and I was role-playing right back as if I were communicating with a long-time police officer. I like to imagine that if Ian McKellen (by the way: you absolutely killed it in Mr Holmes!) showed up here and started posting comments in persona as Gandalf, I’d play right along. There are things I’d always wanted to ask Gandalf, anyway, mostly to do with conservation laws and magic. There was a person from Florida who emailed me a few years ago, whose messages were so broken and unusual that I wondered if they were the output of a markov chain generator. [mark v. shaney]
Throughout the kerfuffle, it seemed as though some people were interested in figuring out who was whom and mapping the branching trees of sockpuppets. That’s only worthwhile if you believe that there should be a 1:1 mapping between personas on the internet, and butts in chairs behind a keyboard. I recall being puzzled that anyone cared and thinking “as long as transphobe isn’t posting transphobia I guess I won’t ban them.”
It’s not that I don’t care about transphobia, it’s that I don’t care about transphobe.
“To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.”
— Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband
I don’t know when I realised that while there is a core that is always me there are more peripheral elements of my personality that I bring to the fore in different circumstances, certainly before I was old enough to be able to explain what I meant – I’m not sure I can now, but I think it’s like “Surly Badger” and “Security Professional Ranum”. I have also thought that other people are similar in that respect as I have seen family and a few friends I know very well do just that, they bring the parts of their personality that will get on best with a particular person to interactions with that person. This is why to an extent parents or others are right when they say “Jack is a bad influence on you” – Jack is bringing out parts of you that your parents don’t normally see, because you know they don’t like those parts of you so you don’t use them when talking to your parents. Which is a long way of saying that I usually assume that I am only seeing part of the people I meet in person, how could it be any different on-line?
That’s a lot to chew on, Marcus.
It sounds a bit like don’t poke the bear.
We’re all shaped by the circumstances of our life, so I say sure. D & D probably did help fashion your thinking. So did your parents and your education and your intelligence. In my life, both my parents were very different publicly than privately, so I grew up thinking that life is mostly performance. People are frustratingly complex and they perform roles throughout their lives, with no single role that captures the full personality. Life is about acting. I was a very different daughter to each of my parents. I performed differently with doctors than I did with patients or their families. It takes time, experience and intimacy to see past the performance. Will there be people who sneak past your bullshit detector? You betcha, the world is full of manipulative people with an agenda, but I think the chances of that are as likely in the real world as the virtual world, so I think online relationships can be valid. They certainly are for many disabled people who can’t get out.
Nursing taught me to think about the worst-case scenario and then work backwards to mitigation. Also, trust but verify.
I had a (to me) fascinating experience almost 20 years ago in an online forum that was in many ways a proto-social network. I (and many others) interacted with an online persona whose “thing” was that she was an alter within a body with multiple personality disorder, or dissociative identity disorder, or whatever the latest edition of DSM is calling it. Most people who have this condition exhibit a number of different alters, often of ages, genders, sexualities and races other than that of the host body. If you’ve seen the Shyamalan movie “Split” or the John Lithgow movie “Raising Cain”, you have a Hollywood idea of the condition. The number of alters is usually fairly small – half a dozen, a dozen maybe. This particular person, resident at the time in the USA, claimed to have in excess of twenty thousand. How she kept track of them is anyone’s guess. I interacted with perhaps twenty… several of them on the occasion, years later, when I was able to meet the body in person in the UK.
It was an… unusual experience.
Here was a human explicitly interacting through a number of what you could call distinct sockpuppets, each with distinct names, accents, ideolects and attitudes… but doing so in person, with (as far as I could make out) perfect consistency for each. If someone tells you online that they’re a big black guy who could beat you up, well, OK, whatever, Mr. Keyboard Warrior, I guess I believe you. It can be tricky to know how to deal with someone who tells you they’re a tall young black man when you can see with your eyes that they’re a middle aged woman of Indian heritage who’d blow away in a stiff breeze. Similarly when their alters come across stereotypically New York Jewish, or eight years old, or (and I am not making this up) a skeleton. As a straight cis white male non-offence tourist I wasn’t in a position to comment on what could be seen by some as MASSES of cultural appropriation among some of her behaviours.
I think extended interaction with this person is part of the reason I’m so blase about gender presentation. Oh, you have female parts but present as a man? Just… a man? Not a 90 year old Jewish man who survived Auschwitz? Not a man forty kilos heavier than you and a different race, or a French hitman, or a unicorn? Fine, you do you. I’ve dealt with much weirder. And yes, I think the experience warped me, but I’m fine with that. She died in 2014, and the world is a slightly less weird and poorer place for her absence.
Very interesting – both the post and the comments. I tend to think of myself as someone who “wears their heart on their sleeve”, partly because I am a poor actor and can’t hide my actual emotions anyway. I also tend to value honesty very highly, both with myself and with others. On the other hand, if I am honest with myself, even I do plenty of “role playing” and filtering in everyday life. A lot of it is what Jazzlet talked about – emphasizing different parts of my personality depending on the circumstances and who I am talking to. That raises the question of whether I am just emphasizing different parts of my personality, or whether I am actually changing my personality. I’ve heard that there is a psychological or neurological theory that most peoples’ sense of a singular “self” is an illusion, and that we all actually to some extent have multiple personalities for different situations. Regardless of how true or false that is, it’s certainly true that people in social situations are usually doing a kind of role playing, and that is perhaps even more true online than in face-to-face interaction.
voyager@#3:
It sounds a bit like don’t poke the bear.
Nooooooo! There is no “Evil Marcus”
sonofrojblake@#4:
I had a (to me) fascinating experience almost 20 years ago in an online forum that was in many ways a proto-social network. I (and many others) interacted with an online persona whose “thing” was that she was an alter within a body with multiple personality disorder, or dissociative identity disorder, or whatever the latest edition of DSM is calling it. Most people who have this condition exhibit a number of different alters, often of ages, genders, sexualities and races other than that of the host body. If you’ve seen the Shyamalan movie “Split” or the John Lithgow movie “Raising Cain”, you have a Hollywood idea of the condition. The number of alters is usually fairly small – half a dozen, a dozen maybe. This particular person, resident at the time in the USA, claimed to have in excess of twenty thousand. How she kept track of them is anyone’s guess.
OK, that is really trippy. It really makes me think about how much of personality is performance. Did that person even have a “real self”? Did they know, I wonder? Fascinating.
This is all totally cool, I just don’t understand this last bit. What does banning even mean then? If a McKellen gets banned in the forest, but carries on as a Gandalf, has a McKellen been banned?
I was the person connecting different nyms of the transphobe, and if you were to ask me why I care, on reflection I think there’s three things.
First when transphobic comments keep popping up on various blogs from various people I think it’s good to know it’s actually just one transphobic nutter obsessively repeating himself.
Second I feel that behaviour should be called out. When you’ve been banned from a blog, it’s just plain rude to ignore that and come back as a new name. The transphobe was ranting about how much they hated trans people under one persona; then he’d pop up elsewhere as someone else and start JAQing off, “I don’t know anything about this I’m just trying to understand, can someone answer [insert transphobic leading question]?”. My evolved monkey brain feels a need to call attention to such deception. “Hey, Korg over there isn’t sharing all the peanuts evenly, I saw him sit on half the peanuts to keep to himself.” Then the tribe shames Korg and he feels bad, and hopefully in future he shares the peanuts evenly, to the benefit of the tribe.
Third I’m just by nature analytical. Just as your brain expects subterfuge, my brain wants to work out patterns. If I see two things appear connected I automatically start looking for the pattern, trying to work out what’s going on behind the scenes. It’s not that I’m particularly fascinated by transphobic dickhead, my brain just wants to look beneath the surface and see what’s causing the shadows on the cave wall, to mix a metaphor.
@8, I feel like your desire to link and understand a cohesive individual is valuable, or can be valuable in many contexts. And it has a lot to do with why I feel no qualm about consistently posting under basically a very transparent and simple pseudonym. That is reputation. Reputation is a desirable thing. It’s why I’m fine that at least twice over at Mano’s blog I’ve admitted to being simply incorrect regarding things I said. It shows I am someone that can honestly engage in discussion and actually concede points instead of changing the topic or moving goal posts, or pretending I didn’t say something that was, indeed, quite stupid.
I do find it potentially problematic that someone I regularly engage with, perhaps am very gracious towards is secretly harboring vile thoughts they plan on acting on (even if that action is merely posts in bad faith on message boards). I view it as a harmful type of manipulation.
Although the value of this may not be high for StdErr, necessarily. He seems to just not want people to a shit on his front lawn right in front of him. That seems fair enough. It seems to be overly onerous to expect a blogger to investigate and validate everyone that posts so only the right kind of people are let in, for example. Just ya know, don’t shit on his lawn.
It does ask the question how should you confront unpopular opinions/beliefs when interacting groups within which they are unpopular. If you risk serious physical or emotional abuse for doing so, creating pseudonymity seems like a good idea. My preferred method is to talk them over with close friends where we have built a relationship such that they know, when they explain why my unpopular belief is unpopular with them, that I won’t get angry and start yelling at them, or storm out of the room, or tell them to fuck off, but instead I will actually listen and reflect, and usually shift my mind somewhat on the topic. I’m not sure how someone who is unable to foster such relationships can do this. Perhaps sockpuppets in some cases are attempts at that. Although they more often seem to be used to engage in pettiness, based on my own personal experience.
Sam N@#9:
Although the value of this may not be high for StdErr, necessarily. He seems to just not want people to a shit on his front lawn right in front of him. That seems fair enough. It seems to be overly onerous to expect a blogger to investigate and validate everyone that posts so only the right kind of people are let in, for example. Just ya know, don’t shit on his lawn.
No, it’s not that, at all. I just have not been processing internet people’s ‘nyms with any curiousity about the person behind them. I’m saying “it’s how I think” – or have been thinking – not a deliberate policy decision.
I think my way of resolving confusion has just been to accept the apparent self that people present, and not worry about it. If I have someone who presents a nazi identity and it turns out the same person is also presenting an antifa identity, I have to ask what is truth, and form an opinion of them – but I’m pretty sure my opinion would be “I can’t conclude whether any of your selves is not a performance” – is it worth spending any time on such a person’s opinions because they don’t seem to hold them very strongly. (If one were a nazi role-playing an antifa, wouldn’t one have to first be able to adopt the mind-set of an antifa? This is an issue I intend to visit in my series on the immorality of christians; I seems to me a “sensus divinatus” is an implicit admission the faithful understands skepticism better than they are letting on)
If some nazi were to come in here, pretending to be antifa, I’d think it meant that they might actually be engaging in seeing both sides of the situation and were more likely to give up on being a nazi, than not. Part of how minds get changed is by getting people to flip the tables on their beliefs and try seeing them from the other side. In that sense, continuing to talk to someone whose underlying person may hold reprehensible beliefs in a context where they are repudiating those beliefs, might be good for them.
@10, that’s very instructive, and consistent with other expressions you’ve made (like perhaps you should do some reasonably straightforward checks on who is posting here). Although, it’s also clear you don’t want people to shit on your front lawn. I suppose you’re stating the thing is, that behavior is the person because that’s all we have access to. You view the nazi/antifa as both a nazi and antifa? I reckon I do as well, unless I pull out signals of satire in one over the other, but given my brake tends to be stronger than my accelerator, when both are held down, I’m not going to spend time on someone with such a duality.
More generally regarding your post.
I did not play many free form role-playing games, where you actually get to act free-form. I view my presentations of myself as not being nearly so under conscious control as you seem to describe. I tend to have a strong sensitivity to social cues that overrides whatever I may have been planning. When a room full of 32 students are all looking for me to lead them, I begin acting like a teacher, as though I have authority. Incredibly different from who I am in the role of a student and truly uncertain, indeed incapable of seeing many important aspects of a process I’m looking to understand. But this is in no way a worked out act. I’m just a person that behaves differently in different contexts–that simply is what I am. Serious role play seems like a useful tool for taking more conscious control over that process. (Things get difficult when we start to talk about consciousness and choice, because I am often using conventional words where I feel our conventional definitions leave a whole lot to be desired.)
Good point about putting yourself in the mind of the opposition. Many years ago I had a colleague who was a hot-shot crypt-analyst. I was a bit awestruck by this, since my shtick was making software work, not making it break. The colleague explained to me: “to be good at this, you need the criminal mind”. Damn right!
Also when talking with somebody in person you cannot know whether they are being authentic or whether they are pretending to be a nicer/different person than they truly are. Granted, if you only have to type a text, fooling others requires less impressive acting skills.
Why? Writing and speaking skills are extremely different. When I was in my late teens, I realized that my writing skills were pretty good and I could easily argue and defend myself in a written form but my speaking skills were lackluster. So I joined my university’s debate club for some speaking practice.
When I am writing, I have time to think and consider my words/responses. I can check facts. I’m not obliged to come up with a response in seconds. Nor do I ever have to “fight” with another person who tries to stop me mid-sentence and speak over me.
In order to come up with a good counterargument to something another person said, I usually need some time to think about the problem. In debates I often came up with the best arguments while walking home from the debate club’s meeting (when it was already too late to say them). Ultimately I got to the point that I started preparing in advance stories I’d tell or arguments I’d use in a conversation about some topic. After all, I could always reuse some argument I came up with while walking home in a future debate about a similar topic.
My attitude is the same—as long as some transphobe isn’t posting anything transphobic, I don’t care what other things they post in my blog’s comment section. That being said, there’s a catch. I write a blog post. They post something vague, open to interpretation, and possibly intended as transphobic. I must ask them for a clarification about what they meant. Then we type 20 comments back and forth. Then they finally state something unambiguously transphobic. I ban them. If this person has 10 different nyms, I have to repeat this back and forth 10 times until they have exhausted all their nyms and decide that they are too bored to invent the 11th nym. Ultimately, this is an epic waste of my time. If the transphobe has already posted under these 10 nyms, I might as well pre-emptively ban all of them. Granted, then they might still invent some new nyms. Still, it feels like a waste of my time to swap comments with a nym who has already demonstrated that they post transphobic comments.
In other words: I don’t care if some person posts with 5 different nyms as long as I don’t have to waste my time painstakingly banning each of these nyms one at a time after swapping dozens of comments with every one of these nyms.
Andreas Avester @ # 13: … they might still invent some new nyms.
I inferred, maybe incorrectly, from some remarks by PZ Myers that he had a means to identify and ban specific IP addresses.
More assiduous assholes can find ways around that too, but it should create enough of an obstacle to deter most trolls most of the time.
Marcus —
It matters. In this case one of the big reasons it matters is that it turns out there are less actual hate-sacks here than it seemed like. TERFs and other hate groups like to use lots of scokpuppets in order to pretend they have a huge groundswell of support, when in reality it often turns out, as in this case, that there’s less than a third of them in reality, they just all like to cosplay as an army of hate.
This is one of those things I reckon you’ve never been in a position to experience: actual movements of people whose stated objective is to stamp you and anyone like you out of society by any means necessary. When you are faced with that sort of thing, it makes a REALLY BIG DIFFERENCE how many of them there are, right down to whether or not we need to fear for our lives. Cases like this are shitty but ultimately heartening because you have a whole bunch of them, seemingly, who turn out to all be just MAGA Dave from the suburbs.
@mjr, 7:
They knew. They definitely knew. They were probably in the top ten smartest people I “knew”, and I know some very smart people.
You’re on thin ice talking about a “real self” with a multiple person, in much the same way as you’d be on thin ice talking to a trans person about their “real” gender. As far as they’re concerned, ALL their alters are real – as real as your personality is, so are ALL of theirs. This particular person had an alter they referred to as The Baby Who Was Born, referring to their original personality. Their backstory was that the abuse which was the cause of the MPD/DID/whatever had begun within days of birth and continued regularly for years, resulting in the unusual number of separate alters… every one of which was their “real self”. They did have a few alters who were “front” (i.e. the ones you’d be talking to if you talked to the body either in person or online) far more often than most of the others, but none of them were any more “real” than any of the others.
They presented an interesting problem when their abrasive behaviour in an online social network caused them to get banned, and an argument began over which alter had been banned and whether the ban applied to any or all of the others.
abbeycadabra @#15
I agree. When you face numerous people all of whom want to destroy you, that’s depressing.
Personally, I’d prefer my blog’s comment section to be a safe space for trans people to have discussions among ourselves. Of course, this is the Internet and anybody can join, so a completely safe space is unrealistic, but I can at least try to maintain a space that feels welcoming for trans people.
And this isn’t just about bigotry. If I tolerate commenters who are rude and assholish towards other people, then sooner or later my blog’s comment section will consist of nothing but assholes. Then the polite, nice, and interesting people with whom I actually want to have discussions will be discouraged from commenting in the first place. At which point the only option is closing the comment section entirely. Or quit blogging. Negative feedback demotivates people.
Interesting. In our D&D equivalent, I was the dungeon master, so I did not learn much of acting that way. I did learn a bit about storytelling and how to deal with rule-lawyering though.
I know two professional actors close enough and several more passingly to never trust a professional actor anything. AFAIK, they are all untrustworthy duplicitous bar-stewards. Not even their spouses can be sure whether they are honest with them about anything – and indeed many actors whom I know are chronic adulterers, without their spouse’s knowledge.
I think it is prudent to assume that everyone with whom you are talking is acting a bit. But not everyone is able to convincingly assume several different personas, not even online. Acting is a skill, and as with all skills, there are those who are good, those who are mediocre and those who are so bad, they are unable to recognize just how bad they are. And most people fall somewhere around the middle.
Maintaining several sockpuppets, consistently, and manage their assorted IP addresses, and each with a different e-mail requires effort. There are obsessive harassers who are willing to go through some of that effort (like here, where the transphobe has bothered with several nyms, but not with disguising IP addresses), some even through all of it, but that is not true for most people. Mostly something comes through – either distinctive style of communication or other slip-ups.
Whenever I find that someone has posted under different nyms and has played “devil’s advocate” under one or more of them, I do not trust anything they say, ever. Further, I agree with abbeycadabra – it has some value to know that those transphobic posts were written by one person, not by three different persons.
Interestingly, I use Charly whenever possible, but sometimes that nym is taken and I have to take some variation of said nym. But that is not normally a problem since I do not argue on the internet much nowadays – I have concluded that it is a waste of time.
sonofrojblake — DID does not exist. You’ll find two kinds of DID “patients”. People who have genuinely been conned into believing they have “alters”. People who are using “alters” as cover for shitty behavior. And the latter are far more common.
I find the idea of a ‘true’ personality for someone kinda weird. It seems like a person would obviously change based on their current context. Why would we expect the meat in your head which adapts itself to different environments to have a single unique identity? Obviously there is some continuance there, but the ideas of a single identity which behaviours are expressions of seems not right.
Thanks to being trans the Dangerous Beans nym has more history than my legal name
dangerousbeans@#20:
I find the idea of a ‘true’ personality for someone kinda weird. It seems like a person would obviously change based on their current context. Why would we expect the meat in your head which adapts itself to different environments to have a single unique identity? Obviously there is some continuance there, but the ideas of a single identity which behaviours are expressions of seems not right.
There are a lot of laws and social processes that depend on our having a single “true” identity. I can’t, for example, try to avoid paying taxes on the money Marcus-corporate made. Or maybe it was Marcus-Irresponsible who was driving 20mph over the limit. A single identity does not seem right, but multiple identities seem like they break a lot of things.
@21 A lot of such problems can be resolved simply by the fact that many of us want to be treated as autonomous meat bags, and thus be held responsible for whatever the limbs and whatnot contained within our skin may do in exchange for freedoms. Kind of the tried by a jury of peers concept, except often it isn’t a crime, merely behavior. If we deem ourself not responsible for our behaviors, then logically, we should have which behaviors we can perform restricted, but be deemed not responsible when something goes south. Whereas if we are responsible, then all the typical range of possibilities, but if we do something awful, it should be punished in a manner in which the agent did something they are responsible for. This language is very abstract because I’m trying to account for a wide range of actions. Point is, meat bags not responsible for actions should be restricted to mitigate harm, meat bags responsible for their actions get mitigated only after performing actions, but possibly to a much greater extent. Was the change in personality/reaction warranted by the context? Or was it egregious and problematic? I may be a different person in different contexts, but also, do hold me responsible for whatever my actions were (ideally understood within that context, but if not, it’s a price I’m willing to pay).
Such a situation leaves the alternate personalities individual in a bind, whether an act, or a genuine phenomenon (I have my own thoughts on this, but all it would amount to is probably not, but a great deal of uncertainty is warranted). Do they acknowledge inability to be held as autonomous (because that meat bag could do anything depending on which alter takes control and thus does real things with that meat bags limbs and whatnot, possibly harmful things). I guess try to explore the range expressed in a place where they are no held as autonomous (thus subject to restriction of freedom), explain the situation to all alters expressed over a year, and have them all take an informed vote, majority rule?
I would like to add these thoughts based on what both sonofrojblack (SORB) and Marcus have said. It seems while we can expect an intelligent being to role play stupidity, the reverse appears much more difficult. The woman with alters that SORB described was extraordinarily intelligent. SORB, I’d take that into account about whether or not the alters were genuine genuine, or uncontrollably triggered but with intent, (or just fucking with you, but I have biases that make me consider that the least likely). I may be out of line here, because I truly do not want to cause emotional distress and it seems like you had a great deal of emotional connection to that being.
Finally, I also think I understand a bit more about what Marcus was saying regarding his treatment of sockpuppets, described a bit differently. A lot of us end up filling in what we think about other people. I have this trait that I fill them in with my own proclivities, and tend to believe people are generous and open by default (yes I picked positive traits, I could also say caustic and flippant, perhaps explaining some of my anxiety) . Then I have to re-evaluate after their actions repeatedly violate my assumptions. In other words, I’m not objectively looking at behavior and judging that behavior. I look at behavior, assume others are like me wherever evidence is lacking, then become stunned/disappointed (or grateful given my bad traits) because they are not. One thing Marcus may do particularly well, compared to me, is looking at another person, and not filling in what he does not know with his own tendencies. Is that at least some of what you mean by not worrying and just accepting expression by some identity for what it is?
I’m finally back on the road to the west coast, so I have long drives where these conversations I read in the morning or evening percolate through my brain. Because these are based on my recollections, I sometimes miss important details.
WMDKitty@#19:
sonofrojblake — DID does not exist. You’ll find two kinds of DID “patients”. People who have genuinely been conned into believing they have “alters”. People who are using “alters” as cover for shitty behavior. And the latter are far more common.
I’ve had nowhere near the kind of experience that sonofrojblake has had, but I have spent some time (on and off for a year) with someone who sometimes switched. I’m not at all sure what was going on there but it seemed to me to be similar to self-hypnosis – which is another thing I am not sure about. I have also done experimenting with hypnosis, including on that person (with consent) and it’s … interesting. I am unconvinced that hypnosis is what many people think it is, but I won’t go so far as to say it does not exist. I’d say the same about DID. When they were switched, I did drop a few conversational details intended to explore their knowledge-space, to see how it overlapped with their normal “self”. If I was watching a performance (which I am willing to accept is likely) it was pretty good!
If I were to have an opinion as to whether or not DID (or hypnosis) was “real” I’d be a guarded “yes for some values of ‘real'”
In general, I am reluctant to tell someone “the thing you experience is not real” because I’m not sure what “real” is. That is especially problematic with medical problems: there’s a long sordid history of telling people they aren’t really experiencing a real problem.
As Sam N says, you have to deal with the meatbag, not whatever identity it’s currently claiming. Which is really what happens now.
On DID vs acting: if you’re going to start with the assumption that you can’t trust the person’s description of their internal state, then you’re just left with behaviouralism. You’re assuming that their internal state is unknowable, so all you can do is react to their behaviours and whether or not DID is ‘real’ becomes a meaningless question.
I have a story! This is from the early 2000s, back in primitive internet days.
Some friends of mine set up a local chat board with games, forums, etc. The internet was still a bit barren, so lots of folks in our rural area flocked to it, many of whom did not know one another personally.
There was one guy, call him TimX, who posted a lot. A whole lot. Much of his writing was about his day to day activities — hiking through the woods, problems with his family, grappling with existential questions. He had a bit of a way with words. He formed relationships with many folks on the forum, some of whom became quite involved with trying to help him with his troubles. Some of us noticed, though, that he seemed to write in a somewhat different style when he was responding to people in the comments.
After about six months of this, one day a new person showed up in the chat forum. He claimed to be the real TimX. He had been making all these posts on his own personal blog, and the TimX on our forum had been dutifully plagiarizing his posts as his own for the entire time. The mods checked out the story of the new TimX, and it was completely true. Our forum TimX confessed — he was someone entirely different, a decade or so older, with very little in common with the person whose identity he was appropriating.
Then the fake TimX disappeared. We all wondered what had motivated him to take on the identity of a stranger, but we never found out. I think that was when I realized what a strange world the internet truly was.
@WMDKitty, 19:
Gender dysphoria does not exist. You’ll find two kinds of transgender “patients”. People who have genuinely been conned into believing they are the opposite gender. People who are using being trans as cover for shitty behavior. And the latter are far more common.
How does that sound?
You state baldly that DID does not exist. In the World Health Organisation’s document “International Classification of Diseases”, there exist two entries, 6B64 and 6B65. What diseases recognised by the World Health Organisation do these entries describe?
brucegee1962@@26:
Then the fake TimX disappeared. We all wondered what had motivated him to take on the identity of a stranger, but we never found out. I think that was when I realized what a strange world the internet truly was.
(Keanu Reeves Matrix voice) WHoah.
It seems to me that the internet gives some people a place where they can explore identity. That’s really what I was meandering about in the OP: in my case, I did that exploration pre-public internet and in the context of role-playing.
I often wonder how many people I have met are, basically, flesh and blood sockpuppets. When I see some of the strong emotional reactions of Trump supporters, I suspect that it’s all performance. But, as Michael Jackson said, “the lie becomes the truth”
Marcus @#28
I often wonder how many people I have met are, basically, flesh and blood sockpuppets.
We don’t often find out, and when we do it is shocking – how could we have been so very wrong about the person? Given we were so wrong about them who else are we wrong about? The particular person I am thinking of seemed to be a really nice bloke, we’d known him for maybe three years when we helped move his small family some distance, and we stayed over that night. That evening he over reacted to their baby daughter putting her finger in his eye while he was bathing her, he blamed her for doing it, though she was far too young to understand that he was a different person to her, but he seemed to understand when the girl’s mother and we explained this. It was the only sign we saw that he had a temper. Six months later he beat his wife up so badly she was in hospital for two weeks before beng sufficiently well to be discharged her to her parents’ home. I didn’t see it coming at all and it made me question my judgement, but in his case I think he was more different with different people than most of us are, so there was no reason for us to ever have seen that aspect of him as with us he only ever played the amusing friend. I’ve seen it with other people (though none as extreme as him), while with them you meet someone from a part of their life you don’t normally get to see, and your friend becomes someone somewhat different to the person you know I guess it’s a matter of deree, as I said above I think we all have different sides aspect, and we show suites of those aspects in different situations with different people, when that switches from something we all do to being extreme enough to describe as meat sock-puppets I don’t know.
Funny that you mention it, but actually “Giliell” was my first RPG character. The one fundamentally angry at the world. In some way, all my RPG characters were extensions of me. Sometimes wish fulfillment or exploring aspects that I don’t have the ability to explore in real life.
I may be (scratch that, I am ) easier to fall into asshole mode on the internet than in real life, but I’m still fundamentally me, because everything else would be too much work. I recently wondered about those obsessive haters who seem to put great importance in what who said to whom back in 2014, but of course, if you are permanently playing a persona, you’d have to carefully keep track of whom you’re currently supposed to be.
Why I still care about sockpuppets? Because I do care about people lying to me and I also care about others getting hurt. For example, A transphobe pretending to be a nice person on a forum with trans people will be able to get under their skin much worse than a transphobe being a transphobe.
And yes, I was sorry to learn about RojBlake/DavidinOz. The latter seemed like a nice person.
I think that personally I prefer to be disappointed than to become too much of a cynic.
@29 Jazzlet, when that switches from something we all do to being extreme enough to describe as meat sock-puppets I don’t know.
Maybe the point at which someone is hiding their behavior in certain contexts because they know it is morally reprehensible? My behavior in other contexts may be embarrassing, at times. Also, often amusing, telling. But I am fine with having my friends know how my personality and behavior switch between contexts. And I think I have done some awful things (though then I see your example about domestic violence and, sure, I look great in comparison).
Although this is only one type of sock-puppet behavior. You can’t really change costume and pile on to make a crowd appear to support some pet issue face-to-face. It would be truly amusing to watch someone try.
@Jazzlet, allegedly, many abusers can be quite charming. Sometimes so much so that people have genuine trouble believing the reports about their abuse (and yes, part of that is misogyny and patriarchal thinking, but not all of it).
@#32
Yes, most abusers can be nice towards those people whom they do not abuse.
A relative of mine ended up in a relationship with a man who sometimes hit her. Whenever she had a black eye, she left her home without any make-up and happily went to various social gatherings. Her boyfriend hated it. He wanted to be abusive in secret and appear nice in public.
Didn’t the ancient Greeks have an idea that everyone was (almost?) always wearing a mask and playing a role? I vaguely recall something like that from my old high school drama class. I wonder (not sure) if other cultures too have that or similar ideas – that the person is the role and that the role determines the person? I think too that time and circumstances mean we’re always slightly changing like the metaphorical river that may have the same course but the water is always changing as it flows through.
I think generally the words as they’re written should count more than who wites them alhough it is more complex than just that and reputation and individuals also really matter so .. its complex, multi-facteed and a matter of emphasis and priorities.
When I started goingonline I did for abreif while (decades ago now!) think that usernames were kidna menat tobe like the tagline syouget insome lietters tothe editor eg. “Disgruntled of Suburbia”or “Pay your taxes of Glenelg “and thought itwa s a funexcercise to keep creating new and different ones.
I’ll also from bitter experience note that sometimes playing a role changes you as a person and you risk becoming what you play. There was a time I decided that due to realising I’d made some very bad anti-Semitic commentsin the past I’d “redeem myself” and balance my past errors in one direction by always arguing as strongly as possible for Israel (& esp my imagined extreme Pro-Israeli incl settlers over all position) and let’s just say it did not end well for me and also hurt and annoyed lot of other people too which I now deeply regret.