Dear Mark Zuckerberg,

[arkster]

Do everyone a favor, will you? Go on the World of Warcraft forums for a week. Under a girl's name.

Be a girl for a week. That's it. Seven days. You can afford to take that much vacation from being Mark Zuckerberg.

And then you may try to tell me we don't need pseudonyms on the internet.

You will never – ever – reach a full understanding of the life of someone who has to put up with this kind of shit every day. But you will get an inkling of the vast gap in your current awareness of human society on this earth.

Try it. Try being a girl for a week. Or if that's too threatening to your privileged psyche, try a Chinese name on for size. Try being anyone other than the white boy from Harvard that you are, and see how much of an issue your "identity" suddenly becomes to other people. See how badly it interferes with what you're trying to do, and who you actually are. See how inconvenient and yes, inefficient, using your real name can be if that real name is feminine or nonwhite.

Go on, try it. It's the internet – no one will know. At least, not until you have your way.

I read the Time feature, and frankly your vision of the future is revolting. An internet without strangers. Go on Amazon, and see only your Friends' reviews. Read webforums, and see only your Friends' posts. Stay within the same group of people, no matter where you go. Holy christ. If I had grown up reading only the books the people around me read, watching the movies the people around me watched, spammed entirely with the advertising Liked by my peer-pressure-mandated Friends?

I might have taken years to come out of the closet. I might have taken years to leave my hometown. I would never have gone to Sweden, I certainly wouldn't have gone to Tasmania. I might not even have made it to Japan. How long would it have taken, in your vision of the future, for me to find a gay adult who made it out okay? There wasn't one there in my existing social network. I had to get on the internet, and talk to strangers.

You're not pitching something new. You're giving us something we've already outgrown. You think everyone wants to have the same old people, the same old closed networks, everywhere, with us, forever.

Because it's all a very good deal for you and those like you, born into privilege, grown into power, surrounded forever by other Exeter boys who like what you like and do what you do. But for those of us who would like to move up a little, maybe change the class structure that you're so far into you don't even see, or maybe just those of us who want to go somewhere different and meet someone new, the internet is our best tool. You would take that away, and not even realize you were doing it.

Because of course you could go anywhere and meet anyone, with your passport and your skin and your name, and not feel the slightest danger or threat. So why can't we? I hear you cry. Why can't we use our real names for everything, online and off?

So I'm daring you. Be a girl for a week. Find out.


With all my heartfelt and pseudonymous contempt,

Lina D.

Comments

[etherealdreamer.livejournal.com]

Today, I realized I was lucky that Jorge and I hadn't gotten married yet, because I applied to a new position with a new company. Why? Because my maiden name is Hunter. A perfectly generic, white name. My married name will be Enciso, an obvious Hispanic last name. One of the ladies in my office was telling me that before she married her husband, her last name was Martinez, and she couldn't get a job. It was only after she changed her last name to his (Felde) that she started getting call-backs.

How sad is that?

[arks.livejournal.com]

It's pretty sad and it's pretty fucked up. And this jackass would say that showed a "lack of integrity".

Needless to say he's never been unemployed in his happy life.

[sharkswlazers.livejournal.com]

Try having a Muslim last name. I love it, but people are super freaked out when they first meet me.

[deadshrimpblues.livejournal.com]

And this is why I deleted my Facebook account two weeks ago. I was justified in the action when it demanded to know WHY ARE YOU DELETING THIS ACCOUNT?? and wouldn't let me go on until it pried a reason from my fingertips. I hope "Fuck you, Zuckerberg" was good enough for whomever eventually reads those things.

[arks.livejournal.com]

I wish I could. I really, truly do. But it's my in-box for my students still in India; that's what they use to uplink to the world.


And now I suppose I have this, (http://www.facebook.com/note.php?saved&&note_id=181700525175537#!/note.php?note_id=181700525175537) for whatever good it will do wheresoever I can spread it. I was just hit by the irony of posting this where only my circle of people might read it. I want to show it to strangers.

[spamchang.livejournal.com]

This.

[el-regrs.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I'm shocked that people are STILL trying to get me to join Facebook.

Sorry, Mr. Z. The internet isn't full of unicorns and rainbows. Oh, and believe it or not, not everyone with a sekrit identity is up to something shady.

Also an interesting post by a Bob Kessler in the Time magazine article comments:

I think the most interesting thing about Zuckerberg is how he views friendship. Taking into account this article, the Sorkin/Fincher film, and what I saw on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago, he seemingly views friendship as connections. That's it. He doesn't seem to have an emotional connection with his friendships.

The most fascinating thing about The Social Network, to me, was that he basically left his BEST FRIEND out to dry. He screwed over his best friend (Saverin), and didn't seem to care about it. To him, it seems, Saverin was just another connection whose importance and value could seemingly be quantified.

Given everything that he has done with Facebook, it seems like Zuckerberg understands human CONNECTIONS, but doesn't fully understand human INTERACTIONS. He doesn't think conversations have intrinsic value just as he didn't seem to think that his friendship with Saverin had intrinsic value. It was just another connection for him.

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2036683_2037183_2037185,00.html#ixzz18FWl5pzj

I've never seen the movie, and only skimmed the article, so I'm not sure how true it is, but it certainly is interesting. And would certainly explain some of this supposed 'equality' and 'no walls' crap.

[arks.livejournal.com]

I could see how it would even be well-intentioned, in a simplistic or subconscious way. He's following the model from which he's benefited.

[pimpstergust.livejournal.com]

Haha oh yeah me and Alex play on a server with a relatively high amount of adult/mature players. But yeah when getting into a group with a dude from other servers he was SHOCKED and CHAUVINISTIC when he found out that Alex was in fact a girl (no matter that she was outplaying him and the rest of us 'cause she's hardcore, girls still can't do that shit on their own), and when we told him our guild master was also a woman (leaving out the fact of double degrees in medicine and biology), he laughed gaily at such a quaint notion.

And that's just the internets. :(

Being a future teacher, I also study this shit and it's pretty hilarious how much less we have progressed than we think. :(

[arks.livejournal.com]

She's a bit lucky, too, in that without obvious pronouns she can go by 'Alex' without remark.

It's a weird disconnect: to have enough awareness of history to know that we needed progress, but then to turn around and dismiss all that history so we can be complacent with here-and-now.

An aside: Some years back I went on the Craigslist discussion forums under an androgynous handle; I was asked almost immediately if I was a girl, and when I said no the response was, 'but you're too polite'.