Twitter, Facebook and Reddit tried to censor me. Here’s how I fought back.
Identity. The very concept has come a long way since the 1950s when you were assigned a name by your parents, you got a crew cut at military school and had a choice between two kinds of pants — big city slacks or farmhouse trousers. Now we can choose our avatars (my blog userpic shows me holding my chin, a gesture I don’t have the confidence to do in front of people offline), experiment with non-gendered haircuts like the “NoHawk” (hair shaved in a line down the middle of the head and extra long on the sides) and can comfortably show up for work wearing everything from khakis to chinos. So when I told Facebook, Twitter and Reddit that I wanted to register WITHOUT a username and was rebuffed, I was shocked by their retrograde views on identity.
Who are these companies to say that I must be defined by a rigid set of characters? Are they afraid that people, seeing a profile with no name, will “fill in the blank” with some kind of slur deemed “politically incorrect” by today’s campus “thought police”? Or is this the case of a group of nomencentrits who refuse to acknowledge their name privilege?
Either way, I was not about to back down to the corporate power of Big Usernames. And that’s when it hit me. Instead of pouring more money into Facebook, Twitter and Reddit by giving them my killer content for free just to have them “monetize” MY self-expression, I would share my social content in something called “meatspace”. There would be no need for a username because instead of going through the filter of the internet, I would simply deliver my updates directly to people on the street, over the phone via randomly dialed numbers or inside the toilet stalls at Panera Bread®. I yell in their ears about how much I love pop singers, I sarcastically brag about eating junk food for dinner and even re-enact humorous animated gifs of my favorite sitcom characters acting sassy. And if anyone asks my username or “meat name,” I purse my lips tightly closed and stare them right in the face so they know I don’t have one, and then I run away. Oh, and if they ask, “what’s with your hair?,” well, stay tuned for my next article, “34 Things People With NoHawks Are Sick of Hearing.”
