I’m not either of those people (though, fittingly enough, I suppose you’ll have to take my word on that), but I might be able to help with your curiosity.
I’ve never understood the idea of an identity one isn’t invested in. It doesn’t matter to me, emotionally, whether people are insulting me-under-a-temporary-name or me-under-a-long-term-name. They’re still insulting me. I was, according to both memories and external records, much more nervous about interacting with people under the Brin name when it was new than I am now. (I think this is mostly because I didn’t have as much experience yet with the communities I was in, so didn’t have as good an idea of what would get me yelled at and how to avoid it.)
“What gets me is that people completely squander the potential of the Internet by building a unified identity on it. Like, you can do that in meat-space?“
To me, the potential of the Internet is a world where communication is text-based by default. Sure, I could build an identity in meatspace, but I’d have to communicate in voice all the time: always scrambling to keep up with the pace, no time or opportunity to correct “typos” (or to decide that the thing is better left entirely unsaid), often not even getting to speak at all because of meatspace’s utter lack of support for cross-posting (which means I have to either crowbar my way into the conversation by talking over people until they shut up (this rarely works), or (more likely) waiting for everyone else to spontaneously decide to stop talking so I can get a word in edgewise). (Apparently neurotypicals have some kind of Asking for a Turn to Speak ritual involving staring at the current speaker’s eyes, but I’ve never managed to find out the details.)
I’m also faceblind, which makes unification of meatspace identities a lot harder. I dislike the assumption that meatspace identities are naturally unified, because it leads to things like my former art teacher thinking he doesn’t have to introduce himself to me before trying to strike up a conversation at the park. (He does have to introduce himself, or else I’m going to give him the cold shoulder, as is customary for unaccompanied* adolescents approached by adult strangers. (Especially when the adolescent is female and the adult is male, but I come from a culture with very strong talking-to-strangers taboos such that that would be frowned upon regardless of the genders.)) People might wear several nametags on the Internet, but at least they don’t expect you to recognise them unprompted when they’re wearing a different nametag or none at all, and they don’t have to switch nametags when entering a new environment.
Hanging out with Australians is neat too, and something that’s often cited as being the potential of the Internet, but it’s more of a bonus to me.
*I was with my mother, but she was in the bathroom at the time.
I can definitely see now how someone such as yourself would see different potential in the Internet.
Though, one part that jumped out at me was, “I’ve never understood the idea of an identity one isn’t invested in. It doesn’t matter to me, emotionally, whether people are insulting me-under-a-temporary-name or me-under-a-long-term-name.“
I suppose an implicit part of not being invested in an identity is to be able to wear that identity, and the things you do with it, without deeply considering it to be you in the first place. Like, somebody’s not insulting me-under-the-name-NuclearSpaceHeater, they’re insulting NuclearSpaceHeater. If it becomes inconvenient to be NuclearSpaceHeater, I will go be somebody else. If you don’t mind my asking, do you feel that you’re capable of imagining what it is like to be a spy?
I think the difference here is that I’m emphasizing the part of identity that consists of what the locals think about you. Hence why maintaining different names is liberating: there’s no worry about the locals changing how they think about one identity based on everything you do everywhere else. Which yudkowsky may have had a problem with in regards to people having a lower opinion of HPMOR based on his LessWrong work. (But, of course, possibly easier to use LessWrong social capital to get readers of HPMOR, and vice versa. Tradeoffs, as there are.)
Hmm. I suppose I can imagine being a spy, but not being someone with an aptitude for spying. Doing my mission in spite of caring about my infiltration persona, rather than not caring.
“I think the difference here is that I’m emphasizing the part of identity that consists of what the locals think about you. Hence why maintaining different names is liberating: there’s no worry about the locals changing how they think about one identity based on everything you do everywhere else.“
I was confused by this at first, but upon closer inspection I think you’re using a narrower definition of “local” than I was thinking of. You seem to be referring to people who are local at the present moment. I might well describe myself as caring what the locals think of me, but I’d mean that I care about the thoughts of everyone who is at least sometimes local to me, simultaneously.
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