Balancing an online identity is difficult.

@protoconal – March 20, 2022, 1:04am

[Author’s note: I updated this piece as a university student. I wrote a novel intro, discussing/commenting on the internet reality I grew up with. But it doesn’t change that this is an underdeveloped piece about identity written by a struggling 17-year-old.]

As a Gen Z teen growing up on the internet, the majority of my formative years were spent online, submerged in hateful [and usually] right-wing content-sphere created by [again, usually] white, racist, problematic millennial Youtubers [ahem, see the likes of Shane Dawson, Colleen Ballinger and Jake Paul].

Every new subscription box ping reinforced the idea that the internet can be a place where the same place where you can watch a Maker blend their creativity with a practical invention [see. Bob from “I Like To Make Stuff”‘s “Wooden digital clock”], and ‘drama reporting’ about one’s white supremacy, can co-exist [see. Keemstar… h3h3].

Every new ‘beef’ between Youtubers, manufactured or naturally formed, reflected a side of the internet’s dehumanizing, unforgiving and permanent nature. One minute after a video is published, it can be downloaded, re-uploaded and shared. Thousands of faceless profiles, some controlled by actual bodies, some controlled by bots, can bully, threaten, spam, dox and infringe on the physical realities of others. The blood that the collective has on its hands, the lives that have been lost, and the people who have been bullied and hurt were all motivated by hatred, intolerance and misinformation is justified through questionable logics of morality.

Growing up in this environment made me fear it…

When I began using the internet as a child, I was smart enough to understand the benefits and requirements for pseudonyms and anonymity. Seeing an environment constantly influx that catered to our natural desire to gossip to the point of extremism, it was apparent the way to stay ‘safe’ was to feign anonymity.

Only my maker knows I’ve made my fair share of embarrassing posts and have been blessed with the all-consuming void of obscurity. No one will see these embarrassing moments; a future version of me can rid them of their existence. However, honestly, I feel envious and a form of second-hand fear after witnessing the carefreeness of others in managing their personas.

This fear, ingrained in me from the beginning of my digital journey, makes the development of the ‘apparent’ self-consciousness in my online personas especially tense. In simpler terms, the anxiety is immense. Trying to manage multiple online personas and their projections while focusing on minimizing personal information leakage is hard.

Part of the issue is that anonymity requires breaking up one’s identity into smaller pieces. With more shards, it’s harder to identify a whole person, as a keen eye would need to study the mosaic to understand who the person is. But It’s hard to explode your identity into individual, unique masks with no trace of the previous one you were wearing. The internet’s supposed permanence of identity automatically means that every interaction I’ve had was merely a performance of one aspect of an identity, not a whole.

[When I wrote this, I was trying to justify to myself in associating my real name with a public identity. I was also going through an identity crisis, which comes with the territory of being 17, transitioning to university and pretending to know what it means to be a professional business person. Now I’m 19, and I still don’t have it figured out, but I can admit to you that I don’t know what’s going on, but I’ll do my best to give you clarity.]

In an honest account, Protoconal is a public-facing professional identity. My extensive digital footprint, composed of a disparate lump of abandoned and active accounts and handles, makes changing between digital personas or so-called ‘disguises’ challenging. So, I’ve given up and tried to design a ‘personal, professional identity’ in a world dominated by the requirement of an online presence. If I’m too weird online with my real identity, I will carry the ‘sins‘ and face the informal social control or social shame for ‘fucking too much around on the internet.’

Though the birth of this new identity is tied to my reality, the threat of someone uniting all the parts of my digital footprint is extra stressful. I hope the day never comes when a potential employer finds out I enjoy reading [gay, hockey] romance novels.

Or worse, discover my art Instagram account.

[Author’s note: a post-script was deleted; it was a mistake written too late in the evening, and it wasn’t very slay]

Edit History

Original Draft Written: March 20th, 2022 – 1:04am
Original Draft Published: April 15th, 2022
Link to Original: [Github]

Transfer to WordPress: November 30th, 2024 – 10:52pm
Revised Copy Published: November 30th, 2024 – 11:09pm

Revised Addendum Published: December 1st, 2024 – 12:03am