alt Hacker NewsI post under my real name here, pretty much the only place I post. It keeps me honest and straight in what I say when I choose to say it. I tried talking to my children about leaving as clean of a footprint on the internet as one can in anticipation of future people/systems taking that into consideration. I don't know what it will be but I would expect some adversarial stuff. Trying to keep clean is what I'd prefer for myself and my kids.
On other hand, the Neal Stephenson's Fall or, Dodge in Hell book has an interesting idea in early phase of the book where a person agrees to what we now know "flood the zone with sh*t" (Steve Bannon's sadly very effective strategy) to battle some trolls. Instead of trying to keep clean, the intent is just to spam like crazy with anything so nobody understands the core. It is cleverly explored in the book albeit for too short of a time before moving into the virtual reality. I think there are a few people out here right now practicing this.
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I have lived my life on the web under the assumption the other Tom Clancy will leave enough chaff in my wake to make things hard. But probably not because I make the same 5 or 6 jokes over and over.
I am similar in that all of my interactions are with my real name and it is unique enough that just putting it into google will instantly identify me. There is one other 'jeff sponaugle' but I think he is far more annoyed with my presence than I would be with him.
On the plus side, someone will sometimes say while talking to me - oh your are that Subaru guy, or that youtube guy, or whatever and that is fun connection.
How would "flooding the zone" actually work in that case?
AFAIK the strategy is usually used to divert attention from one subject that could be harmful to a person to some other stuff.
Wouldn’t spamming in that case provide more information about you?
> as clean of a footprint on the internet
The only winning move here is not to play.
That whole book seemed like a collection of interesting threads that ultimately go nowhere.
I honestly don't even think I understood the ending. Or the middle, if I'm being extra honest.
I think Anathem addressed the "flood the zone with shit" much better in something like three paragraphs.
I think as the younger generations come of age they simply will not care about that sort of thing. Like it or not, it's part of the culture and might just be accepted as the norm.
While I think the strategy is effective it is also likely equivalent to the dark forest. To me that's a case of the cure being worse than the poison.
Autonomous Proxies for Execration - spam bots whose entire purpose is flooding the internet with spam so as to make identifying anything true utterly impossible. If you can't differentiate between real and unreal information in online comments, then online comments stop being a significant factor in shaping public opinion. You need to abstract - identify reliable sources of information, individuals or institutions that do the work to collect and curate.
We're already seeing this as a side effect of the mishmash of influence operations on social media - with so many competing interests, mixed in with real trolls, outrage farmers, grifters, and the like, you literally cannot tell without extensive reputation vetting whether or not a source is legitimate. Even then, any suggestion that an account might be hacked or compromised, like a significant sudden deviation in style or tone or subject matter, you have to balance everything against a solid model of what's actually behind probably 80% or more of the "user" posts online.
There are a lot of aligned interests causing APEs to manifest - they're a mix of psyop style influence campaigns, some aimed at demoralization, others at outrage engagement, others at smears and astroturfing and even doing product placement and subtle advertisement. The net effect is chaos, so they might as well be APEs.
I expect more people over time to use local LLMs to write every single post they make online.
Fifteen years or so ago I read an article arguing that by the time Millennials are nearing retirement and have more political power, people will give less of a shit about what you did online in your twenties because we will have, out of necessity, learned that asshattery in your twenties is largely irrelevant to your trustworthiness in your sixties.
When I was that age, you could tell the kids who had political ambitions self-censored online. But now every is buck wild so you have to ignore that when looking at people.
For example, a MASSIVE portion of Millennials and younger looking at the Main election are pretty chill about the leading Democratic candidate having a Nazi tattoo because of this very thing. Basically, "dumb, drunk, deployed Marines will get cool skull and crossbones tattoos in their early twenties, and so what if he said a couple ill-worded somewhat misogynistic things in his twenties, that was decades ago, and he's obviously a different person."
Contrast with Bill Clinton, where he literally had to explain away university marijuana usage TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE FACT.
Point is, I think we're witnessing this evolution happening right now.
> I tried talking to my children about leaving as clean of a footprint on the internet as one can in anticipation of future people/systems taking that into consideration.
I don’t think you’re wrong, but the fact that people consider it inevitable we’ll all have an immutable social acceptance grade that includes everything from teenage shitposts to things you said after a loved one died, or getting diagnosed with cancer, makes me regret putting even a moment of my professional energies towards advancing tech in the US.