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I wish there was a place on the internet I could:
Voice my opinions both controversial and popular
Express my criticisms about society and culture
...Without the fear of censorship
...Without the fear of current and future employers learning about my opinions
...Without the risk of being "cancelled" because of those opinions
In other words, "semi-anonymously"
By "semi-anonymously" I mean in a way that avoids these problems:
If I were to write my opinions on the internet in a truly anonymous way, I'd have to put in a lot of work to making sure that I'm technically truly anonymous from both other users and the administrators of the platform I post on, but I don't want to have to deal with all that.
By being anonymous I'd have to be careful about what I say so as not to de-anonymize myself by revealing personally identifying metadata.
I would never be able to mirror content from an anonymous place to a "personal blog" since this would de-anonymize me. This leads to the problem of an anonymous version of myself appearing more reactionary and narrow-minded than I would want and the public version of myself appearing more "sheepish", naive, and narrow-minded but about a different set of opinions.
Also I was thinking about Chinese censorship recently and how reserved Chinese people are about voicing dissenting opinions. Even Americanized Chinese people get quiet when you ask them about controversial topics. I've had it happen to me in real life.
Anyways, it's a **very** interesting corollary to American capitalist culture that I am *also* afraid to have publicly accessible opinions for different reasons.
With poor social support systems in the US and your self-worth and livelihood strongly tied to your job, doing anything to jeopardize that in the US is unwise the same way that doing anything to jeopardize your social credit score in China is unwise.
`<aside>`This is partially why I hate it when people say "Don't worry about what other people think of you" since people's perception of you is literally one of the most important things in this world for the reasons expressed elsewhere in this post. I'm aware that I'm over-generalizing this advice, but I still object to it for the same reasons that philosophers get pissy about [absolutism vs relativism] (not having universal truths)`</aside>`
I want to discuss my ideas with friends who know me
It is arguable that opinions are more well respected if you're willing to defend them publicly
I *want* all of my works attributed to my holistic persona. I like the idea of having a main personal website with everything on it.
Between this and the conversely named post by ~partofthemain (were you guys mind-melding or what?) I'm gonna have to do some cogitating...
Hey ~bartender? Remember that bottle of Stolinchaya I had you pop in the freezer? I need that, a shot glass, and notebook. Oh wait, got my notebook. Just need a quiet open booth...
I'm not going to say you shouldn't care what other people think, but as somebody who grew up before internet and dealt with a shitload of bullying as a kid: if I had lent too much credence to what other people thought I would have been a teenage suicide.
However, I post rants about sex and politics on my own website under my "real name", with appropriate content warnings, because I'm not willing to live in fear.
I post stuff like this partly because I'm writing from the heart, and partly as an act of defiance. If people want to censor me badly enough, they'll find a way. But I'll be damned if I'll do their work for them by self-censoring on a platform that I operate at my own expense—my personal website.
As for employers: the about page on my site plainly states that what I post on my site is my own opinion (unless attributed) and that I don't speak for my employers. Nor do I ever identify my current employer (if somebody wants to know badly enough, they can find out without my help).
However, these "controversial" posts are a test for employers: if you think you have the right to police my behavior outside the workplace and outside working hours, then I don't want to work for you. You don't pay me enough for that kind of totalitarian bullshit.
This is going to sound borderline raving lunatic zone, but the most effective and thorough path from said debacle is attenuation (preferably utter loss..) of attention on/to the idea of one's self, because then whatever others do/think is utterly irrelevant for there being no one/self for any of it to pertain to....
Said another way: it can't bother you when there's no you to be bothered....
As sad as it is, in this day and age I am not sure it is even possible to be semi-anonymous. Best you can do is clone yourself as another person with an anonymous screen name and just like in Ghost Busters, do NOT cross the streams.
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