I wrote this also in the 90’s when I started my own site and my own blog as one of the first blogs.
But 30 years later, I think there are many reasons why you would not want to do this. (I also stopped doing so after 15.000 posts or so).
– you will grow and you will change opinions about things often 100 percent, the internet memory is however forever
– you will enter in different careers and depending on the customer you would not want to be completely frank about every little thing you think or what your preferences are or what your experience is
– in real life there are larger groups of persons with very different and often extreme viewpoints on either religious related, political related, culturally related etc viewpoints. This has grown and grown and has become a real life danger if you get picked up by some internet thread on some social media forum. This has changed from the 90’s where the internet was filled with intelligence and a hopeful view on the world. It is easy to fall into the trap of engaging in various discussions
– you get children and often different social circles where you want to engage into blanco your children might not like at a certain stage you posting stuff (or pictures) (or opinions)
– there are tons of frauds and criminal networks who gladly scrape everything you are from there not in the least for phishing
So more or less: because there is also the real world with the 20% of people who are on the fraud/extreme religious/extreme political/other criminals/dumb side and there is real life social interaction and personal growth the following 30 years where once you write something it becomes stone
Fully agree. Before mass social media really took off, I used a site called Friends Reunited. When I read what I had written there only a few years later, it was kind of embarrassing.
No problem I thought, I'll just delete my account. They did not have a delete account function. So I overwrite everything I had written, replacing it with random characters (would not allow me to just put nothing when there was something already there either).
One of the main reasons I want to be better blogging than I am is because I want to see myself change, I want to change my opinions.
I want to have processes to review what I wrote, and review how strongly I felt about it at the time, and update my stances.
Personally I think the danger is far over-rated. We see the spectacular & loud exceptions to hundreds of millions of people actively posting & sharing & having fine undisturbed lives. Not everyone is going to have 15 minutes of being under attack in their life, but there's kind of a tacit assumption that having been online is all too likely to explode upon one's face at some point. And indeed, we do need to respect this possibility, make it a known idea, but this fear I think has way too much representation, & the opposing view, that it's very unlikely to ever be an issue I think is way undertold & undershared. As usual, subtle, nuance & complex gets sand-blasted away by something emotional & heart plucking & attention-grabbing.
And in the aftermath, we have humanity being silent. Humanity loses a shared heritidge it could have, for understanding itself better. Because it was, in my humble opinion, unreasonably afraid someone might attack their words. Personally, I strongly feel that values of onlineness & openness & democracy each should make us push back a lot harder.
That is an argument for not tying everything you write to your name in public. It is not inherently an argument for not writing it, or for not publishing it (it might - exercising some editorial instinct about what you publish is good).
As I noted elsewhere, the argument in the article basically boils down to leaving a record, and specifically leaving a record for your descendants, and then argues that archive.org will be reliable enough to ensure those records survives. By arguing for leaving it for your descendants it does argue for there being some way for your descendants to identify your writings, but that does not require them to be publicly linked to your name.
You can do both. Most of my writing is easily linked to my name either directly from usernames or profile links, or because I've left enough bread crumbs in things I've posted (HN is the trifecta; it's in my profile, my username isn't unique but the link is easy to guess, and I've given plenty of breadcrumbs). I take care about this, and think about it, because as far as I know my name is globally unique, and so I don't even have any hope of disappearing among others with my name in search engines etc.
Some of it would be embarrassing if some people dug it up in the "wrong" contexts today, but I have a good idea about the "worst bits" and none of it are things I am not willing to stand behind today even if I've changed my mind about them or now think they were dumb.
But not all my writing is possible to link to me at all, at least as far as I know. And that is also a conscious choice for some of the kind of reasons you gave.
Some I may not care to tell anyone about at all. Some there are plenty of notes about in my papers and digital records so it'll be easy for my descendants to find if they care.
But 30 years later, I think there are many reasons why you would not want to do this. (I also stopped doing so after 15.000 posts or so).
– you will grow and you will change opinions about things often 100 percent, the internet memory is however forever – you will enter in different careers and depending on the customer you would not want to be completely frank about every little thing you think or what your preferences are or what your experience is – in real life there are larger groups of persons with very different and often extreme viewpoints on either religious related, political related, culturally related etc viewpoints. This has grown and grown and has become a real life danger if you get picked up by some internet thread on some social media forum. This has changed from the 90’s where the internet was filled with intelligence and a hopeful view on the world. It is easy to fall into the trap of engaging in various discussions – you get children and often different social circles where you want to engage into blanco your children might not like at a certain stage you posting stuff (or pictures) (or opinions) – there are tons of frauds and criminal networks who gladly scrape everything you are from there not in the least for phishing
So more or less: because there is also the real world with the 20% of people who are on the fraud/extreme religious/extreme political/other criminals/dumb side and there is real life social interaction and personal growth the following 30 years where once you write something it becomes stone