Pseudonyms lets you practice agency

From the recording of Stalker (1979), directed by Andrei Tarkovsky

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I don’t think I would have become a writer if it wasn’t for the internet forums of the early 2000s. I remember in particular a Swedish forum where my neighbor and I would go to read about filmmaking. I had never written in public, and I would not have dared to do it in real life, but this felt more like a video game. Everyone had wild, colorful pseudonyms. There were no faces. We thought it would be fun to pretend that we were a grown up, so we made a user, spun up a backstory, and began debating people. I wrote things using what I thought of as an adult voice, going on for hundreds of words about the ethics of piracy or the camera work in Tarkovsky’s films, while my friend and I laughed hard.

But, well . . . then people started complimenting us on our writing. I logged on and saw that another user had commented saying that it was fascinating to see someone who was able to articulate their thoughts so clearly—I can still feel the rush of adrenaline. I was a writer. I had taken on the identity of a character that was more agentic than me; having tried it on, and felt how good it was, that agency became mine.

C. Thi Nguyen writes about games as a way to explore new ways of being agentic. You can be 13 years old and experience the agency of building a railroad empire. You can play the board game Sign and experience the agency of being a group of deaf children inventing a new sign language to express what you need to say.

The internet is like that except you author the game yourself. You decide what type of agency you want to explore.

Identities as interfaces

When people email me saying they want to publish their writing but feel insecure about it, this is my first suggestion: invent a character who is not afraid, one who can say all the things you can’t. Play it. See what it’s like. If you make a fool of yourself, you can erase the character and make a new one.

An interesting reply I sometimes get is that this feels inauthentic. I sympathize with this. I think our imagination is often less interesting than reality, so our attempts to polish and invent make things drab, meek, and lifeless. But I think using real name = authentic is too simplistic and boring.

When you talk like this you locate authenticity at the level of the identity. “This is my authentic identity; the rest are fake.” But I have a lot of identities! I’m a father, a husband, a writer, a coordinator at a gallery—which of these identities is the authentic one? It is more useful to think of authenticity as being about how you play your identities. There is a way for me to play husband authentically, and there is a way to play it that is not. And so on for every other identity I have—including the obviously fictional ones. Authenticity is not about the identity, but the way you use it.

Identities are interfaces. They mediate between your interiority and the outside world. Each identity provides a set of affordances—things they allow you to do. If you have access to the identity “cop,” you can do and say things that others can’t. 

When you create a pseudonym, you can give yourself access to affordances that you lack—like the character I played as a kid which gave me the affordance to write in public. If you use those affordances in a way that is true to your spontaneous reactions behind the mask, you are authentic. Often more so than when playing “yourself.”

In small pseudonymous internet forums, for example, people are typically more colorful and individually distinct than in places where people use their offline identities—because they don’t have to think about their careers or what their neighbors will say about them. 

I do admire people who are unapologetically themselves in public. That is a gift. If you have the courage to be authentic while showing your face, that helps widen the Overton window of weirdness. You make it less scary for others to do the same; you make the world more alive and human. But if you can’t do that, like most people can’t, if you feel like you can’t say what is on your mind when your friends and family (or the mob) can hear you, it is more authentic to wear a mask and say what you feel than to stay silent with your face bare. It is the act of being yourself that is the deeper gift; not the name.¹

Taking on new identities unblocks me

Recently, I saw an interview with a musician who complained that it was so hard to write music for himself; when he wrote for others, it just flowed. This is common. Your main identity gets heavy with significance and expectation; you lose all spontaneity.

I experienced this in my twenties. I had been writing in various forms since my days on the internet, and it had become increasingly serious, status-enhancing, and centered around my personal identity. I wrote for magazines, did readings, and lectured. But the more my writing became entwined with my name, the more nervous I got about doing it wrong. At 24, I stopped publishing. Everything I wrote for publication felt so constrained and anxious, it wasn’t true to what I felt. I kept writing drafts that I filed on my hard drive. Then, at 28, I had twisted myself into such knots that I couldn’t even write privately.

In 2018, a year after Maud was born, I visited some musicians in their rehearsal space. These were friends from high school, and we fell into a jargon we had back then—we made up absurd characters, improvised, and told obscene stories. For whatever reason, I switched into my falsetto voice and started singing to a disco jam the guys were doing. The lyrics had almost nothing to do with me. They were told from the perspective of a man who had been bullied as a kid (which I was not, believe it or not) and who was excited by his discovery, late in life, that he was a profoundly sensitive sex partner (which wasn’t exactly what I was feeling).

The things he said were so embarrassing! It was cathartic. These suspect and cringe lines came from a true place inside me, a deeper and more authentic place than the serious writing I had been doing when I got blocked. It just poured out of me for days.

Bambino—this was what he called himself—wasn’t an identity that allowed me to express the full range of what I wanted to say. But he was a gift. He reminded me, at an emotional level, that I can set myself free by creating a playful distance between myself and whatever identity I use as my interface with the world. We did two concerts before disbanding. I’m not sure about the causality, but soon I was writing again.

Either/Or

Pseudonyms are a social technology with a deep history. Haiku poets took pen names called haigō (俳号). Hafez, the name of the 13th-century Persian poet, is a nom de plume. 

Søren Kierkegaard wrote most of his major books using pseudonyms, or heteronyms. Fear and Trembling was attributed to Johannes de Silentio. The Sickness unto Death was authored by Anti-Climacus, named as an attack on one of Kierkegaard’s earlier pseudonyms, Johannes Climacus. Either/Or had two pseudonymous authors, and a pseudonymous editor! All in all 22 two alts have been connected to Kierkegaard. He wrote a book about his pseudonyms.²

But what is happening online is on a radically different scale. Whereas previous generations had to convince publishers to print their works so they could hide their faces, spinning up new personas and alts is trivial now. Entire worlds spring up where thousands of pseudonymous users interact, building lore together, creating new cultures. Many of my most authentic connections are in spaces like that.

The name I use on the blog—Henrik Karlsson—is not a pseudonym. It matches the name on my driver’s license. But I try to treat it as a pseudonym. I didn’t tell anyone I knew when I started blogging. I wanted to be free to invent a self that could say things I felt weird and afraid to say offline, outside my marriage. I wanted to be free to invent a self that could say things I felt weird and afraid to say offline (outside my marriage). I wanted to run experiments, to feel what it was like to inhabit different ways of being in public, different agencies. The character I ended up “playing” looks a lot like me. He lives on an island in the Baltic Sea, like me; his wife is named Johanna, like mine; he used to be a programmer, and before that a poet, like I used to be a programmer and a poet. But I want to keep a playful distance between him and me—he is an interface, not my inner self. Also, he is more thoughtful and intrepid than I am, more grounded and loving. There is a small, aspirational gap between my inner self and my interface.

Or rather, and this is the point: there was a gap. The gap has shrunk. I played a deeper version of the person I was offline, under conditions where I felt safe to do so—where it didn’t matter that people laughed at me. And this game allowed me to embody what it feels like to be more earnest and agentic and loving.³

For better or worse, your face is shaped by the masks you wear.

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It also helps a lot when you share the essays with people you think will like it—forwarding emails, sharing in group chats or on social media—so thank you for that.

/Henrik

1. Some will, naturally, reveal themselves to be assholes when they are protected behind a pseudonym. This is sometimes used as an argument against fake names. Schopenauer:

Anonymity is the refuge for all literary and journalistic rascality. It is a practice which must be completely stopped. Every article, even in a newspaper, should be accompanied by the name of its author; and the editor should be made strictly responsible for the accuracy of the signature. The freedom of the press should be thus far restricted; so that when a man publicly proclaims through the far-sounding trumpet of the newspaper, he should be answerable for it, at any rate with his honor, if he has any; and if he has none, let his name neutralize the effect of his words. 

It is a weak argument. You can just block or ignore the assholes and keep the upside of pseudonyms.

2. In his posthumously published book about pseudonyms, The Point of View of My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard makes an interesting argument for pseudonyms. Kierkegaard says that he used pseudonyms because he wanted the reader to be uncertain about how much of what he was saying was something he believed (far from everything). He would add details that makes you question the trustworthiness of the authors of his books—as in Fear and Trembling, where Johannes Silencio is talking about how to deal with despair, while, quite obviously, being in despair himself. This unreliability of the authors forces the reader to “stand alone” (staa alene) to use Kierkegaard’s phrase. As a reader, you can’t pretend that you are not responsible for what you believe—you can’t say, “Oh, but Kierkegaard said so.” Or, worse: “Everyone does that.” No. You are left alone with these strange and unreliable authors and you have to come to your own conclusions.

When I hang out in pseudonymous internet forums, I feel that vertigo effect that Kierkegaard was going for. A pirate parrot posting an analysis of AI training cluster build out? Can I trust this? The instability of the identities forces me to embrace the dizziness. It has made me a better thinker.

This dizziness is something I strive to achieve when I write, too. I want to destabilize the essays so you are forced to wrestle with them on your own. But it is hard to do when you use your real name. My parents read this now; people on the island where I live read it; and so it is costly for me to be as careless about my reputation as Kierkegaard is with his pseudonyms’s. I protect myself with a modicum of respectability. And I worry that this will make the reading too safe for you; that it makes it too easy to outsource your judgment to me, so you do not feel the dizziness of your freedom and responsibility.

A pseudonym would be better in this regard.

3. I’ve been doing this again for the last six weeks while writing this essay: spinning up new personas elsewhere on the internet to allow myself to practice some of the qualities I feel uncomfortable practicing with this identity (such as frankness and shame). It has been liberating.