Keep My Full Name Out Your Fucking Mouth

One of my goals is to keep my identity hidden on the internet. I know what you are thinking, and that's part of the joke, don't worry—I say that I want to keep my identity hidden online while also writing approximately 3.6 million words about myself on a blog that is also on the internet. It's supposed to be at least partially funny when you see my full name written as "Joe K***" on this blog. But I also take it seriously, in that I make 100% certain that my surname does not show up on the blog, and check and recheck every so often.

I like to pretend that I'm doing the best I can to protect myself from getting sued in court. Like: can anyone actually prove that this is Joe K*** writing the words that appear on the blog authored by "Joe K***," according to each blog post that Joe K*** allegedly wrote? I mean, technically speaking, yes there is. Someone with access to such information and a desire to do so (i.e. the police, maybe) could pull up IP addresses and cross-reference and figure out when certain blog posts were published and then prove that I was on Blogspot during those times. I don't think it would be that hard. So there's that.

There's also the fact that there is enough personal information contained in any number of these blog posts that someone who knows me and knows my story and maybe has even participated directly in some of the hijinks described on this blog would know right away that this is me, that it couldn't be anyone else but me. Like, someone who doesn't have my brain and my memories wouldn't have access to all this information, at least not all of it together like this.

But this isn't really what I'm talking about today. The examples I just gave are all examples of someone having access to my chosen creative media online (in this case blogging, but also social media in general), and using the information on there to prove that it is indeed me writing that. What I'm actually afraid of is the opposite. I'm afraid of someone having my name to start, and then being able to use that name to find out information about me online. That's what I'm trying to prevent.

In its most basic form, this looks like someone typing my name into a search engine like Google. Does anything that actually pertains to me, this specific "Joe K***," show up on the first few pages? And if so, what can I do to change that?

I don't really have to worry about the blog too much. The asterisks covering my last name are actually a second line of defense. The front line is an option that Blogger provides allowing you to make your blog ungoogleable (Blogger being part of the Google family to begin with). Obviously that box has been checked for over a decade now.

But the biggest stick in my craw for a while now has been the fact that one of my Twitter accounts pops up on the first page (and the avatar of that account, clearly a picture of me, shows up pretty early in the Google Images searches). I guess this requires a bit of an explanation.

Because ever since the infamous Alleged Hazing Documented Via Twitter Incident of 2009 (a story for a different time), I've had my own personal Twitter account locked down as private. Private accounts don't typically show up early in the Google search.

Up until recently, I had a Puke on Your Birthday Twitter account that was public. That made me a little uncomfortable, that searching "Puke on Your Birthday" would land on that account as the very first match, and that account had a link to the blog, and so on. I privatized it, excised the link in the mini-bio, and muted all the accounts I followed, so this is a moot, but even before all that, it was still someone who knew of the existence of the phrase "Puke on Your Birthday" to start with. Someone who knows just my name isn't going to be able to make that connection through the erstwhile PoYB Twitter.

No, what I'm actually talking about is a Twitter account that I made in 2013 as a joke. This was during my six-week sojourn in Avis hell, when I really truly thought that I'd be spending the rest of my life as some sort of corporate monkey shoveling money for Satan at the airport. There was this idea that I would eventually need to "move up the ladder," so to speak, and that a prim and proper online presence would be integral to that movement.

So my plan, instead of deleting my Twitter account (or Facebook, etc.), was to just create a new Twitter account that was public, and put my name on it, and then attach my name to the most boring, innocent, banal tweets I could possibly come up with. The idea was that if someone googled my name, they'd find this account, see no moral or social or employment-related infractions, and it would thus give me plausible deniability. I could hang my name on something that could never get me in trouble. Even if that was really fake, and the other twitter account with my name on it was really legitimate, the latter was private, and so all I'd have to do in this hypothetical in-office supervisory tongue-lashing(?) would be to say that other account was "deleted" and that this public account was "actually me." What are they going to do? Accuse me of having two Twitter accounts? On what grounds (besides possible time-traveling to the future and seeing a blog post I write in October 2022)?

You can foresee a problem with that, though. It's me we're talking about. I can't start a comedic bit online without attempting to bring it to some weird and unsavory places. Tweets that started out as "banal"—a retweet of NYT here, a crockpot recipe there—eventually turned into tweets that were purposefully lame, like to extreme levels. I'll drop a bunch of my favorite examples at the bottom of this blog post, but just to give you an example up here, there was one that went: "What a beautiful night! Sitting on a deck in Avalon. I think I just saw a shooting star. :))) #wishimay #wishimight #orionsbelt #fate" Which is definitely pushing it as far as plausible deniability goes, ya know? But the bit had since consumed its original purpose.

Plus, I quit Avis soon after I made the account, and now that I am a union-backed public servant, having a "favorable online presence" isn't even a concern anymore. Not that I can do whatever I want online, but the bar is much higher in terms of punishment. The bar also doesn't exist for reward, since raises and promotions are all spelled out in the contract, and have nothing to do with your social media presence at all. Which is fucking insane that it could be for anyone, when you think about it, but that's another anti-corporate spiel for another time.

But here's the other thing. The bit, as much as I enjoyed it in 2013, eventually flamed out. Eventually, I was tweeting every once in a while, and most of those tweets were a Slowpoke-less version of the Slowpoke meme. It got old relatively quickly (to me, and I'm sure that the shelf life was 100x shorter for anyone who followed the account). So eventually, I would forget about the account for large chunks of time. Eventually, I forgot about it so long that I didn't even remember the email account that it was attached to.

So jump to 2022, when I'm doing my annual tightening up of my online presence, and I decide to log in to the account in order to delete it. And I can't! Because now Twitter is telling me that the only way I can log in is to confirm via email that I really am the owner of the account, but I don't have access to the account anymore. It doesn't even tell me the name of the email address! As if they are making an in-joke at my expense, they instead tell me that the email connected to the account is: j************@g****.com. Which is kinda funny in a meta way, but also very frustrating.

Guys, it took me months to figure out what those asterisks stood for! Stupid fucking Twitter keeping my goddamn full name next to a picture of me right there on Google! Not good! I mean, look, if someone is really going to google my name after meeting me, and this Twitter account is all they can come up with, the absolute worst thing that could happen would be that they would think I was impossibly lame. Less bad is the possibility that they would get the joke, but I don't know how likely that is, to be able to understand that someone is attempting to do some kind of lame meta humor and utterly failing, right after you meet that person. On the internet, you can believe what you want to believe, and I could imagine that people would want to believe that I would actually tweet about shooting stars and be sincere about it.

So anyways, that account is now deleted. It still shows up on google, but if you click on it, Twitter tells you that "the account doesn't exist," which tells me that most like it's just Google being a little slow on the uptake, and that eventually that nonexistent Twitter account will fall in the rankings of a search. And other than that, nothing that I can see. Slowly but surely, I will become a ghost of the internet, haunting the blogging corners of your internet browser.

Here are some of my favorite tweets from that old account. I have erased my name from them, obviously. Let's send it off in style. Good luck and godspeed, old friend, as you travel through the far reaches of internet obscurity.