Thread by @balajis

Thinking about how to express this quantitatively, but mass pseudonymity is a stable equilibrium in the internet age in a sense that mass publicity is not.

https://twitter.com/ATabarrok/status/1400890663386767363

If you're familiar with the inverted pendulum from control theory, the equilibrium is unstable. The pendulum will swing all the way to one side or the other without constant, costly balancing.

This is a metaphor for the real name internet environment. Too hard to stay balanced.

Here's a visual of getting a pendulum up into the inverted position, and then keeping it stable despite the gravitational force that keeps swinging it to one side or another.

That stabilization is expensive. Eventually energy runs out.

In a real name environment, where everyone surveils everyone, we seem to swing to either wokeness or Xi Jinping Thought, to socialism or nationalism, or some unholy fusion of the two.

Thesis: there are strong incentives for tribal behavior in a zero-sum, real name environment.

One alternative to a real-name, zero-sum environment (like Twitter, unfortunately) is a pseudonym-friendly positive-sum environment. Something like Mirror, Bitclout, Ghost, Substack, Locals, and the new generation of decentralized media.

Pseudonymity is symmetric privacy, like the opposite of asymmetric information.

As AI improves, we can get realtime avatars that look like anyone and can speak in any tongue or accent. No one can then cancel *or* discriminate against someone else online.
investopedia.com/terms/a/asymme…

There are models for how asymmetric information & adverse selection can cause markets to collapse (eg Akerlof, Rothschild-Stiglitz)

What about the converse: symmetric privacy enabling markets that symmetric surveillance inhibits? The pseudonymous economy.
nobelprize.org/prizes/economi…