Pseudonymity is Cowardice
2025-10-12
I've recently been enthralled by the growing trend of pseudonymous writers. These pseudonymous writers give lofty justifications for their pseudonymity, such as the fact that they have the 'freedom' to say what's truly on their mind or that it's increasingly good OPSEC due to 'bad actors' out in the world. Many of these pseudonymous writers I look up to, like ARX-Han or Gwern, but I also feel that there is a level of cowardice in pseudonymity. These guys act on it like it's the 'smart play' or whatever, but to me, I believe that if you feel too afraid to say what you truly believe due to some level of unintended consequences, then maybe you shouldn't be saying it at all.
Now, this is easy for me to say because I haven't (yet) experienced any negative outcomes from a lack of pseudonymity. No one has sent me a death threat or cyber-attacked me or whatever, mostly just because I am still an obscure figure—no one really gives a shit about what I say anyways. I could be shouting slurs or horrible hot takes on these posts, and I'd still probably not really get any negative kind of outcome from it because, well, no one really gives a shit about me. But also, I don't really care about anyone else either, at least not in some extremely emotional sense. I absolutely loathe 'discourse' and I believe that most people are wrong about most things, whether it's a Xitter thread or a NYT best-selling piece of nonfiction. It's all retarded to me. But no, I'm not implying that I'm any kind of intellectual either.
It's quite clear that my writing here is amateur at best, but I don't care. No one except academics reads true scholarly work, so having it bleed into the culture is practically impossible. It's clear that academia is a recursive circle-jerk machine funded by the marketing surrounding the undergraduate 'experience' that many young upper-class people get caught into. It is unfortunately the key to the gate that is access to the petit bourgeouis, the professional managerial class. They get to use gay spyware on their stupid little work laptops and become little Slack/email divas who incessantly harp on minutiae because they can't cope with the fact that their jobs are not only fake, but perpetuate harmful ideas about the meaning of work and productivity itself. It's more than a cope. It's more than a lack of perspective. Learning Excel macros does nothing for anyone, seriously. Oh, Excel has had Python integration for like three years now? THEY WON'T USE IT ANYWAY!
So look, being a pseudonymous writer is the same thing as being a coward to me. Even though I haven't experienced any real negative outcomes from a lack of it (YET), I still don't care what anyone would do because I can always just, I don't know, turn my computer off? Even then, I still would keep saying what I want to say because even though people would eventually come to hate me, I'd still want to try my best to endure the weight of the unadulterated and pure Truth.
It doesn't matter who is listening. I have the comfort of knowing that I will always be truly alone.