Stop, Don't Use That Pen Name!

A critique of anonymity among the online literary set.

There’s this writer who’s a good friend of mine (I'm not sure if he'd like me calling him a friend. On again, off-again. Maybe a good enemy. Whatever he does, he does it goodly). He disappeared a while back, after deeming everyone around him spiritually deplorable—which is not that unusual for him. After a few weeks, a mutual friend shared a link to a YouTube channel that this guy, let's call him Boo, had apparently recently created. He’d made it under his real name. First, middle, last—the whole shebang. The name choice was surprising because, for one thing, Boo’s only ever gone by his internet handle.

His first and only video, titled tersely, featured in no particular order the following constituents: A Midwestern wood, Boo shirtless, a lighter, and a Social Security card. He burned the thing right there on camera after telling the world his legal name and digits. I suppose it was a try at liberation. For months he bummed around the city outskirts making a forest camp, bathing in the lake, shoplifting. Hobo stuff. One night he made his tarp by a baseball field because his usual spot was taken over by a raccoon which looked suspiciously like it was infected with rabies.

Suddenly, someone wakes him up. A cop shines a light in his face. There has been a violent rape in the area. He asks Boo to recap his night, then his day, then his week. Then he leaves and returns with a second officer and Boo is asked to repeat it all again into a recorder. After a bit, the cops chill out and then they leave. "Got the description, it was a Latino male."

Boo lived outside the parameters of civilization, only uploading updates every now and then so as to be a beacon of light for other NEETs. (Those not employed or receiving education or training.) Eventually, he compromised in two ways: he signed up for food stamps so he could purchase McDonald’s for sustenance, and he rejoined our group chat. He capitulated when the winter months froze him out, and also when his groin turned gangrenous from the damp and the walking. What can ya do. Not for nothing, but that channel was not unsuccessful he had gained a healthy sub count.

Most of his content was book reviews and /pol/-adjacent cultural criticism. (/pol/ being 4chan’s extremist- and provocateur-filled politics board.) Later, he professed to me his goal was to become “4chan famous.” A worse milieu to become famous in I've yet to think of—tough one. But, like with most things, Boo got bored and deleted the channel  so he wouldn't have to bear the knowledge that it had ever existed at all. He still hasn’t ordered a new card.

The concept for this essay came to mind after hearing the Sidebar podcast interview ARX-Han, author of Incel and the blog Decentralized Fiction. I should say, “attempted to listen.” Look, I tried. I really did. I enjoy his essays a lot. But this was like listening to a bass guitar in a steel silo over a Zoom call. It was, being blunt, the worst sounding interview I’ve ever encountered. I could decipher one in every twenty-five words. I’ve heard indigestion more erudite. How could anyone upload two and a half hours of this and think it’s listenable? 

The distortion was, of course, deliberate. The interviewee uses a program to alter the pitch of his voice in order to mask his identity.

If one functions in the sphere of alt-lit self-publishing, particularly the new right side, then there are good reasons for hiding one’s identity. Last autumn, Bronze Age Pervert was the subject of an Atlantic piece wherein the author deduced and revealed the name and personal details of the Nietzschean far right author. A similar unmasking piece by The Guardian soon embroiled Raw Egg Nationalist, who runs the dissident outlet Man’s World. When a rando finds your name and address on the internet it is “doxxing,” a practice disdained widely as harassment. But, for some reason, when a legacy publication like The Guardian or Forbes conducts an information campaign publicizing an anonymous, private figure’s identity it’s merely “holding them accountable.” Why this is, I don’t know. To me, they seem exactly the same.

What this ARX-Han interview made me realize is that we have reached a point of total farce. Instead of gradually becoming more confident as writers, showing the world that mass media doxxing campaigns are either great for reputation or otherwise inane, we are regressing to the point where an author, a well respected, intelligent, and popular author in the sphere, finds it necessary not just to invent an alter ego but also to nuke his voice to the point where it is impossible to make out his words. What planet did we drop from? This is no longer simple neuroticism. This is an annulment of literally the only thing that makes one a writer: making words which people understand.

I see this as an extension of a broader issue. The ubiquity of anonymity in our sphere is a result of cowardice, and a stagnation in a stage that allows you to be a dilettante forever.

For my part, I had two pieces published under an acronym before deciding to rip off the Band-Aid. Both were in Unreal Press anthologies and written under D.G. Even then I think I found something viscerally distasteful about inventing an elaborate code like “Frater Asemlen.” One of these stories shared its binding with the writing of a young Guatemalan author. In my opinion, he is the best young writer in this thing of ours today. He writes magical realism in the Latin American tradition. Sometimes I recommend his stories to people “irl,” but then I have to say what name he writes under. Anonymous. Not even an individual. He is everyone, everyone who ever wrote under the name Anonymous, which is to say he is no one. He is unrecommendable. And because of that, if you’ll allow me for a moment the sin of wearing the hat of a marketer, he is unreadable.

On the rare occasion that an author of old (see: not dissident or New Wave) used a pseudonym, it was usually during a larval stage of his or her career. Stan Lee famously invented a spur-of-the-moment name because he believed comic books were an unbecoming art form and he wanted to preserve his real name’s reputation for the novels he ended up never writing. In fact, later in life he made ‘Stan Lee’ his legal name. Twain was, of course, Samuel Clemens. But Mark Twain was not an alter ego, it was not a profile picture, and it was not a façade. It was a ‘stage name’ of sorts, a memorable moniker publicly attached to a real man. That’s a very different phenomenon than hiding behind ‘Anonymous.’

Truthful writing is, at its highest level, stripped of craft, of structural considerations, of expectations of audience reactions. Rather, it is a form of possession. It’s a form of worship to an unearthly being. There’s something deeply un-earnest about using a mask while performing an act so profound. It is most often found in our sphere’s lowest writing, which uses this mask as an excuse to churn out terrible, repercussion-free tripe. In turn, this lowest writing drags down the rest of our sphere.

There are legitimate reasons to use pseudonyms, but when an entire movement consists almost entirely of—hell—is defined by anonymous pen names, it makes me question our seriousness. Why is every cover graced with a byline that seems like it should be preceded by an @? Even the Beatniks, in the culture restrictive of the ‘50s, did not use pen names. Even Soviet dissidents only used them in paper contexts—in their underground tertulias, everyone was on a first name basis.

Look, any literary movement which reaches critical mass after a period of dissident-ism will inevitably become official. Fact is, you already have venture capitalists like Noah Kumin banking on this axiom. But let me say this: it works both ways. When a movement goes all-in and bets the whole pot, that’s the moment it becomes legitimate. That’s the long and short of this essay: call me CIA, but I want to see more people putting their money where their mouth is and ditching these silly noms de plume.

---

For more work like this, consider subscribing to Futurist Letters.