Hacker News Reader

Comment by thomastjeffery | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately that isn't a solution. When you keep separate identities, the only thing that can exist across platforms is your own participation. Everything you say and do is isolated to whichever identity and platform you are using in that moment. You still don't have the opportunity to exist completely, because your self has been fragmented. Even if you did manage to create a cross-platform identity, the product of your participation is fragmented, and every story you tell is objective to that platform's context. Even if you tell a story that links across platforms, you are still isolated to that specific cross-platform context.

View on HN

I think this misses the point. As the article points out, people could and would act differently in different contexts: Home, the Church, the Bar. They weren't lacking opportunity to "exist completely".

The whole point of the omni-context is that you are putting yourself in a space where you have to act in a way that is appropriate to all of those places.

I would say things in the Bar that I would not want the reverend, my grandmother or my children to hear - but in the uni-context I have to mediate my speech to what is appropriate to all of those audiences or risk judgement for it.

The uni-context discourages expression. It's like a dystopia where everything you say and do is recorded and can be recalled for judgement at any time. And yet people sign up for it.

Trying to maintain separate context, different identities across platforms is an attempt to fight against that and to limit the risk that something I say on one plaform is not going to destroy my social credit in every other platform where I participate.

> The uni-context discourages expression. It's like a dystopia where everything you say and do is recorded and can be recalled for judgement at any time. And yet people sign up for it.

It's a panopticon, where we self-censor because we fear unknown future reprisals. Did we really sign up for it? Or has Our (collective our) ability to reason and push back against it been curtailed by financial incentives to build it?

Yes, but the context itself is still omnipotent to everyone who participates with it. It's not a bar if it's everywhere. Wearing a mask to the everybar is a way to compensate for the fact you can't leave. You must fragment your self to compensate for the global scope of the bar, just like using a struct to reinvent lexical scope in a globally scoped program. The problem isn't really solved, it's just semantically moved.

What we are really missing is the ability for expression to be subjective by default. When we participate in socially global contexts, everything we read and write must be coherent to the generalized expectations of the entire group of people who are participating in that context. Instead of your words being taken out of context, they are constantly assumed into the context, implying your own interpretation is objectively wrong. The meaning of every expression is decided and relevant, even when it shouldn't be.

> your self has been fragmented

Unless you are more after acknowledgement than sharing/helping others (and be on the receiving end sometimes), this is non-problem.

Maybe not to your self, but it has a significant effect on the actual interactions you have.

it's a huge mental/emotional burden actually. It's really not good for your soul.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com