@anildash.com over on #BlueSky tried to shame me for using an anonymous burner account the other day. It's pointless, not the least because I'm called "anonymous" even when I use my actual name. The #technology snobs want "anonymous" to be a slur. That's a very uneducated way to regard anonymity.
Conversely I think that Anil Dash ought to be ashamed of turning his own name into a brand, which he did by the cutesy #tech culture trick of purchasing a vanity domain name. He's Anil-Dash-Dot-Com, like Real James Woods. Dash has used the apparatus of corporate technology to buy himself a badge of superiority. "I'm a Real Person™! See, I paid for the blue check and everything."
This is a very old trick, one that existed long before the personal computer and the #Internet made it so much easier. The chief virtue of the Internet, so far, has been that it's been possible to amplify old scams a millionfold without half-trying. You can buy all sorts of things with your name on them now from some website or another, but well do I remember from my childhood in the 1970s and 1980s how you could find some fly-by-night company through a magazine advertisement who would sell you pencils and pens and stationery all with your name on it. (Think Grimes from the infamous "Homer's Enemy" episode of The Simpsons.) I think also of that moment in Jules Dassin's Night and the City in which the sweaty spiv played by Richard Widmark, temporarily feeling like a big shot, gets himself an office with his name inscribed on the glass. Harry Fabian has MADE it! (He's on the run from the entire London underworld within a couple days.)
It's a load-bearing racket in #capitalism: the more money you're willing to pay, the easier it is to be recognized as a "real person", a person of substance, someone who can't simply be brushed aside or kicked into the gutter. There's not a single honorific of importance in Western society that hasn't been bought in some way, which isn't obtainable through intrigue and bribery. They let Elon Musk into the Royal Society, and faked up a "FIFA Peace Prize" for Donald Trump: one can purchase just about ANY badge of status.
On the contemporary, corporate-dominated #Internet, anonymity has been made into a deliberately poisoned gift, a doublethinkful thing. The snobs proud of their Real Names™ also freely abuse anonymity (cf. @whstancil.bsky.social and @mattyglesias.bsky.social &c. using sock-puppet accounts.)
But one of the most useful perks that great social status and privilege confers upon a person such as Yglesias or Stancil or Anil Dash is a certain leeway in committing small crimes, the sort of crimes that "everyone" commits (such as being deceitful and abusive on the Internet) but which are tolerated so long as they're being committed by someone sufficiently important.
The scope of permissible crime grows wider as status increases, to the point that VERY powerful and important persons in the United States and "The West" are de facto allowed to commit sexual assaults and even child molestation without much expectation that they'll ever be brought to justice. There may be even be, in Christian circles (e.g. within the leadership of Christian churches and priesthoods) the quiet conviction that the really powerful and important people must have their depraved appetites appeased, forgiven ahead of time because these persons are supposedly mighty warriors for the Christian faith.
Now that's an extreme case of the lenity that's accorded to people of high status. The scale of social privilege is an exponential one: there's a very thin slice of the population that gets the really lax treatment, who are (quite probably) able to get away with literal murder, and then the benefits dwindle away quickly once you descend from the loftiest heights of the exponential slope. But even relatively unimportant persons with soft privileged careers, such as opinion columnists or #technology entrepreneurs, enjoy far more impunity and freedom from worries about getting done for small offences than the ordinary human being on Earth. It's the poor and marginalized peoples of the world who get stuck with the label "criminal", as if it were a state of being, an "ontological evil".
Indeed, if you're of sufficiently lowly social status, you're regarded as essentially criminal for doing things that aren't illegal and are even commonplace, but which have been designated as visible proof of criminality by those of greater privilege. Driving a car, for example, can be interpreted as criminal activity according to the social profile of the driver and the attendant circumstances. Wearing a mask tends to be regarded as a criminal sort of activity, which is largely why the United States refuses to acknowledge the virtue of wearing face-masks to hinder the spread of airborne disease. There's other reasons, such as systemic anti-Asian racism, but the chief reason why wearing disease masks in public has roused up so much irrational hatred is because of a mystical conviction (prevalent among Christian bigots, especially) that only a dishonest person would wish to hide their face.
And of course #anonymity is regarded as fundamentally criminal in this same dysfunctional society. Only a scoundrel would possibly want to hide their "real name"!
Why does a scale of social status and privilege exist at all?
It's like a decision-making shortcut, a way for those with relatively more privilege (e.g. @anildash.com or @jessesingal.com) to make snap decisions about those with less. They wish to ostracise as many people as possible, on sight.
In computer-science terms this might be called paring the search tree. Dash and Singal and other persons with relatively high social status feel that they have very busy lives and that their time is extremely valuable (after all, they're special and thus their time matters more, and they feel worse about "wasting" that time) and thus they wish to spend the absolute least amount of time possible on the worries of the people beneath them on the social ladder. In a hundred different ways they are inclined to think that such people have earned whatever problems they have, and thus that their lowly social status is effectively a judgment upon them, something deserved. The more conservative they are, the more likely it is they'll say it outright: people WANT to be poor and marginalized, or they're too lazy and demanding to achieve anything better for themselves. High social status is always thought to be earned and the result of hard work.
The exponential scale of privilege is especially admirable in simplifying the lives of the very rich. To be rich and powerful, to inhabit the upper strata of U.S. and "Western" society, is to have immense power over shaping one's personal environment and passage of time. Poor and lowly persons must run around according to the timetables of others; persons somewhat higher up can at least buy themselves occasional oases of leisure; but the true movers and shakers of the world can leave almost ALL their cares in the hands of someone else, and spend their entire lives as if taking one long languid vacation. Such persons travel wherever they like, whenever they like. They don't honor appointments; indeed it's considered a "power move" for a sufficiently rich person to blow off an appointment. They're not held to oaths or promises. To an astonishing degree they're permitted to do that which is regarded as the most disgusting and vile of crimes among the lower classes: rich people get to beg for money.
Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of the Pnictogen Wing