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Once again, the topic of naming things shows up in the forums. It's an interesting thought, even if the most recent thread (Do nicks or handles matter) on the topic seemed to trivialize the idea.
That launched me into a search (in my library) for the book containing the short story. I have it online, but I prefer the comfort of a book. Ah, yes. There are any number of important things going on, there, in the less than a hundred pages that it takes to tell the story.
Vernor Vinge wrote True Names in 1979-1980 (according to the original, from June 1979 to January 1980), but it has echoes of the environment we find ourselves in today. One of the strongest messages that I heard then, and that is even more true today, is that it is sometimes wise to have backdoors, and that is even true with one's identity. I have never made any particular secret of who I was, but the buffer between my online identity (shrdlu) and the person I was in real life was very convenient.
What you call yourself is important. Just as your physical appearance announces who you are, the name you call yourself online creates a first impression. It does more than say who you are, of course. It also *affects* who you are. I don't know how many people here would remember Tale (an elder god from early usenet days) or Spaf, but I would posit that those choices affected them for years after the things they'd been known for were gone and forgotten.
That story was written about the same time I started using shrdlu (yes, Virginia, there *were* computers back then), and reading it affected me deeply. There it was. An interesting AI. A description of the padded cell that our country seems bent on becoming. People like me (no matter how dated some of it seems now, it still captures the feel of writing code, and taking systems).
"They had discovered Mr. Slippery's True Name and it was Roger Andrew
Pollack TIN/SSAN 0959-34-2861, and no amount of evasion, tricky
programming, or robot sources could ever again protect him from them."
Originally posted by Dark Tangent
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Vernor Vinge wrote True Names in 1979-1980 (according to the original, from June 1979 to January 1980), but it has echoes of the environment we find ourselves in today. One of the strongest messages that I heard then, and that is even more true today, is that it is sometimes wise to have backdoors, and that is even true with one's identity. I have never made any particular secret of who I was, but the buffer between my online identity (shrdlu) and the person I was in real life was very convenient.
What you call yourself is important. Just as your physical appearance announces who you are, the name you call yourself online creates a first impression. It does more than say who you are, of course. It also *affects* who you are. I don't know how many people here would remember Tale (an elder god from early usenet days) or Spaf, but I would posit that those choices affected them for years after the things they'd been known for were gone and forgotten.
That story was written about the same time I started using shrdlu (yes, Virginia, there *were* computers back then), and reading it affected me deeply. There it was. An interesting AI. A description of the padded cell that our country seems bent on becoming. People like me (no matter how dated some of it seems now, it still captures the feel of writing code, and taking systems).
"They had discovered Mr. Slippery's True Name and it was Roger Andrew
Pollack TIN/SSAN 0959-34-2861, and no amount of evasion, tricky
programming, or robot sources could ever again protect him from them."
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