JK Rowling, Community and Pseudonymity

Is pseudonymity a feature or a bug?

Like Ready Player One and the metaverse, fiction can tell us so much about the future or things we don’t understand. (I am convinced half the people I speak to have based their entire metaverse opinion on the movie, not even the book!)

So I’m reading the new JK Rowling mystery book because, well, whatever you think of her, the woman is a damned good writer. No spoilers here but the plot centers around an online game and the intertwined lives of its moderators. One key aspect of the book and the story is “Rule 14,” no sharing of any personal information. You can imagine how this leads to information asymmetries AND gets broken all the time.

The book got me thinking about pseudonymity and community. Is pseudonymity always/sometimes/never a good thing?

Certainly, the characters in the book do not want to doxx themselves (reveal their “real” identity) , whether that’s a desire to be a different person than their corporal selves, betray loved ones anonymously, or pursue underage girls. OR TO MURDER. (not a spoiler) But none of these things are very good at their core, are they? We can all understand that if you’re living with a severe auto-immune disease that has you permanently in a wheelchair, you might sometimes want to live a life where that’s simply not part of it. But, it seems like it might be better if those issues were not in your life at all.

I’m not against an escape, a chance to be someone else. But when your whole life is taken up with wearing a mask online, what kind of life is that? If there’s a tone of negativity in my words, I’d like to remove it. This is a rhetorical question. 

It brings me to, why is there this emphasis on pseudonymity in Web3? (to be clear, THIS one is NOT a rhetorical question) I get that part of it is a feature of blockchain technology. The core foundation of blockchain is that it’s a publicly distributed ledger, a database of transactions stored across across a network of computers, immutable and decentralized. No single person or group has control—rather, all users collectively retain control. Given this public database, all transactions between wallets are public.  And wallets are often pseudonymous. Is it a feature or a bug, this reliance on wallet identity?

There’s a movement, started by the co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, to create a Soulbound Token, a token that is your irrefutable digital self. They would function as credentials across various use cases, from academic to governmental. For this to work, the Soulbound Token must form a permanent identity, but must it attach to your IRL (in-real-life) identity? I don’t know.

Maybe this newsletter is just a Luddite’s hope that a Web3 world is not an escape from a crumbling society, a place where we can be anyone we want to be and thus aren’t subject to the same social norms that contribute to a functioning society. I worry that the behaviors we see when people are allowed to act anonymously (see teenage f-insta bullying, rug pulls, bitcoin money laundering schemes, catfishing on dating sites…. The list goes on) aren’t conducive to the best parts of being a human.

I’m also a marketer, and the privacy and audience development conundrums from the current system make my head spin! But we’ll get to that later…

I’d love to hear opposing opinions on this. (not opposing opinions on JK Rowling, though, please, I don’t have time for that quagmire today)