Here’s my attempt at an answer. Note that nothing in this answer is meant to make any claims about the credibility of Ben’s or Nonlinear’s accounts.
Ben Pace wrote a post saying “Hey, you know Kat Woods and Emerson Spartz? The people who run Nonlinear? The people listed on Nonlinear’s website as running it? Well here’s some info about them qua their role as running Nonlinear”. It’s an instance of taking a professional identity and relaying claims about their behaviour under that known identity.
In his post, people using the identities of “Alice” and “Chloe” take the role of Nonlinear employees/contractors/whatever, and talk about stuff they experienced in terms of those roles.
In Nonlinear’s post, they make claims about things related to the identities of “Alice” and “Chloe” behaved in their roles as Nonlinear employees/contractors/whatever.
In all of these instances, you’re taking an identity/reputation someone has established in a domain, and making claims about behaviour associated with that identity in that domain, so that you can keep the reputation of that identity accurate. So you’re not e.g. saying “Hey you know Joe Bloggs, the person who is publicly identified as CEO of NonCone? He actually secretly has Y weird habit in his personal life”—that would be an instance of cross-domain identification.
So: the way revealing Alice and Chloe’s names is different than what Ben did is that it takes an identity established in a domain, and links it to cross-domain information. This is bad because it makes it harder to set up identities in domains the way you want, which is valuable. But it seems like it could be justified if it turned out that Alice was (e.g.) a famous journalist, and that Alice’s claims in Ben’s post are totally false—then, knowing that the journalist did sketchy journalist stuff under the name of Alice would be very relevant to judging their reputation as a journalist.
I don’t think that works. Imagine Pat and Sam had a series of really bad interactions and each thinks the other has done something seriously wrong to the point that other people should avoid interacting with them under some contexts. Sam (though it could have just as easily been Pat) posts publicly first, posting under a pseudonym, naming Pat, and detailing the interactions.
Does this mean that Pat is now permanently unable to use this “post your concerns publicly” community process to warn people about Sam, since if they ever do this, it will clearly link Sam to Sam’s pseudonym?
Here’s my attempt at an answer. Note that nothing in this answer is meant to make any claims about the credibility of Ben’s or Nonlinear’s accounts.
Ben Pace wrote a post saying “Hey, you know Kat Woods and Emerson Spartz? The people who run Nonlinear? The people listed on Nonlinear’s website as running it? Well here’s some info about them qua their role as running Nonlinear”. It’s an instance of taking a professional identity and relaying claims about their behaviour under that known identity.
In his post, people using the identities of “Alice” and “Chloe” take the role of Nonlinear employees/contractors/whatever, and talk about stuff they experienced in terms of those roles.
In Nonlinear’s post, they make claims about things related to the identities of “Alice” and “Chloe” behaved in their roles as Nonlinear employees/contractors/whatever.
In all of these instances, you’re taking an identity/reputation someone has established in a domain, and making claims about behaviour associated with that identity in that domain, so that you can keep the reputation of that identity accurate. So you’re not e.g. saying “Hey you know Joe Bloggs, the person who is publicly identified as CEO of NonCone? He actually secretly has Y weird habit in his personal life”—that would be an instance of cross-domain identification.
So: the way revealing Alice and Chloe’s names is different than what Ben did is that it takes an identity established in a domain, and links it to cross-domain information. This is bad because it makes it harder to set up identities in domains the way you want, which is valuable. But it seems like it could be justified if it turned out that Alice was (e.g.) a famous journalist, and that Alice’s claims in Ben’s post are totally false—then, knowing that the journalist did sketchy journalist stuff under the name of Alice would be very relevant to judging their reputation as a journalist.
I don’t think that works. Imagine Pat and Sam had a series of really bad interactions and each thinks the other has done something seriously wrong to the point that other people should avoid interacting with them under some contexts. Sam (though it could have just as easily been Pat) posts publicly first, posting under a pseudonym, naming Pat, and detailing the interactions.
Does this mean that Pat is now permanently unable to use this “post your concerns publicly” community process to warn people about Sam, since if they ever do this, it will clearly link Sam to Sam’s pseudonym?