Weekly Caffeine – Our Pseudonymous selves

Hey Hey, welcome back to the flow of things.

Yesterday I was out due to the Covid vaccine number 2, which had significantly more effect on me.

Almost comically, around one in the morning, my body started to have a very interesting reaction of changing temperatures from hot to cold and back again rapidly, leaving me with little sleep.

So I binged Ted Lasso (Apple+) and ordered in saltine crackers and ate Silver Lake Ramen.

Today I’m back to my routine, into the flow of things which doesn’t stop without you. Being in bed all day and watching the Twitter feeds makes you feel like an observer of the world, rather than a participant.

This is because we can peer into the internet and watch as everyone else buzzes about in their social sharing.

Through the looking glass, you notice our identification with our online selves.

At this stage of the web, a large portion of our online identity is the same as our offline one.

I imagine if we move to a more pseudonymous internet, we can better separate who we are offline and online.

Right now it’s as if we’re trying to prove offline status using online accounts that are limited to the features and dynamics of that one network. And the digital representations of ourselves are very compressed relative to who we are.

I believe the shift to pseudonymity will be healthier for us all, as we will understand more clearly the delineation between who we are online and offline.

With the separation of our real identity online, we can truly become free to be a character version of who we’d like to be. We can blow it up, remix it and test out expression deeper attributes of ourselves than we would immediately offline.

This separation means we can try out personas more easily with less risk to our IRL identities.

I believe this can help us become more flexible as a species.

The internet already gives us massive exposure to new ideas.

And the internet unbounds whatever it touches.

But because we still have a cord-like connection to our true identities online (connecting us from the physical to the digital) we’re unable to truly explore ourselves to our fullest capacity…