#TinyLetter

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The real problem with anonymity

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then San Francisco (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

According to "the greater internet fuckwad theory," the ills of the internet can be traced to anonymity:

Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Fuckwad

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/greater-internet-fuckwad-theory

This isn't merely wrong, it's dangerously wrong. The idea that forcing people to identify themselves online will improve discourse is demonstrably untrue. Facebook famously adopted its "real names" policy because Mark Zuckerberg claimed to believe that "Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity":

https://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2010/05/14/facebook-and-radical-transparency-a-rant.html

In service to this claimed belief, Zuckerberg kicked off the "nym wars," turning himself into the sole arbiter of what each person's true name was, with predictably tragicomic consequences:

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

Facebook is, famously, one of the internet's most polluted reservoirs of toxic interpersonal conduct. That's not despite the fact that people have to use their "real" names to participate there, but because of it. After all, the people who are most vulnerable to bullying and harassment are the ones who choose pseudonyms or anonymity so that they can speak freely. Forcing people to use their "real names" means that the most powerful bullies speak with impunity, and their victims are faced with the choice of retreat or being targeted offline.

This can be a matter of life and death. Cambodian dictator Hun Sen uses Facebook's real names policy to force dissidents to unmask themselves, which exposes them to arbitrary detention, torture, and extrajudicial killing. For members of the Cambodian diaspora, the choice is to unmask themselves or expose their family back home to retaliation:

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/facebook-cambodia-democracy

Some of the biggest internet fuckwads I've ever met – and I've met some big ones! – were utterly unashamed about using their real names. Some of the nicest people I know online have never told me their offline names. Greater internet fuckwad theory is just plain wrong.

But that doesn't mean that anonymity is totally harmless. There is a category of person who reliably uses a certain, specific kind of anonymity to do vicious things that inflicts serious harm on whole swathes of people: corporate bullies.

Take Tinyletter. Tinyletter is a beloved newsletter app that was created to help people who just wanted to talk to others, without a thought to going viral or getting rich. It was sold to Mailchimp, which was sold to Intuit, who killed it:

https://www.theverge.com/24085737/tinyletter-mailchimp-shut-down-email-newsletters

Tinyletter was a perfect little gem of a service. It cost almost nothing to run, and made an enormous number of peoples' lives better every day. Shutting it down was an act of corporate depravity by some faceless Intuit manager who woke up one day and said "Fuck all those people. Just fuck them."

No one knows who that person was. That person will never have to look those people in the eyes – those people whose lives were made poorer for that Intuit executive's indifference. That person is the greater fuckwad, and that fuckwaddery depends on their anonymity.

Or take @Pixsy, a corporate shakedown outfit that helps copyleft trolls trick people into making tiny errors in Creative Commons attributions and then intimidates them into handing over thousands of dollars:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/01/24/a-bug-in-early-creative-commons-licenses-has-enabled-a-new-breed-of-superpredator/

Copyleft trolling is an absolutely depraved practice, a petty grift practiced by greedy fuckwads who are completely indifferent to the harm they cause – even if it means bankrupting volunteer-run nonprofits for a buck:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/02/commafuckers-versus-the-commons/

Pixsy claims that it is proud of its work "defending artists' rights," but when I named the personnel who signed their names to these profoundly unethical legal threats, Pixsy CEO Kain Jones threatened to sue me:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/02/13/an-open-letter-to-pixsy-ceo-kain-jones-who-keeps-sending-me-legal-threats/

The expectation of corporate anonymity runs deep and the press is surprisingly complicit. I once spent weeks working on an investigative story about a multinational corporation's practices. I spent hours on the phone with the company's VP of communications, over the course of many calls. When we were done, they said, "Now, of course, you can't name me in the article. All of that has to be attributed to 'a spokesperson.'"

I was baffled. Nothing this person said was a secret. They weren't blowing the whistle. They weren't leaking secrets. They were a corporate official, telling me the official corporate line. But they wouldn't sign their name to it.

I wrote an article about for the Guardian. It was the only Guardian column any of my editors there ever rejected, in more than a decade of writing for them:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/05/14/anodyne-anonymity/

Given the press's deference to this anodyne anonymity, it's no wonder that official spokespeople expect this kind of anonymity. I routinely receive emails from corporate spokespeople disputing my characterization of their employer's conduct, but insisting that I not attribute their dubious – and often blatantly false – statements to them by name.

These are the greater corporate fuckwads, who commit their sins from behind a veil of anonymity. That brand of bloodless viciousness, depravity and fraud absolutely depends on anonymity.

Mark Zuckerberg claimed that "multiple identities" enabled bad behavior – as though it was somehow healthy for people to relate to their bosses, lovers, parents, toddlers and barbers in exactly the same way. Zuckerberg's motivation was utterly transparent: having "multiple identities" doesn't mean you "lack integrity" – it just makes it harder to target you for ads.

But Zuckerberg couldn't enshittify Facebook on his own. For that, he relies on a legion of anonymous Facebook managers. Some of these people undoubtably speak up for Facebook users' interests when their colleagues propose putting them in harm's way for the sake of some arbitrary KPI. But the ones who are making those mean little decisions? They absolutely rely on anonymity to do their dirty work.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/04/greater-corporate-fuckward-theory/#counterintuit-ive

[filmnoirsbian]

hi! i really loved your thinkpieces on the tierneytxt tinyletter, but the website no longer exists! the way you wrote about savoring your time and romanticizing your day really changed the way i go about living my life. reading your tinyletter writings was a transformative experience for me. is it possible you would ever put those writings up again? if not, i totally understand. please have a lovely day!

I'm not sure I'm able to still access those letters, but I do something similar on my patreon which is linked in my pinned post :)

[ourincrediblejourney]

2011-08-31:

Mailchimp Acquires TinyLetter We’ve acquired TinyLetter. For those of you who don’t know, TinyLetter is a beautifully simple email newsletter app created by Philip Kaplan and launched late last year. We’re pretty excited about this. Sure, we think TinyLetter fills a gap in the MailChimp offering and all that, but more importantly, we think it has the potential to fill a significant gap we’ve seen growing in the social conversation. … We’re trying really hard not to make things disruptive for existing TinyLetter users. 

2017-12-11:

MailChimp to Phase Out Its Popular TinyLetter Email Service But now TinyLetter's days as a standalone entity are numbered, [Mailchimp Co-founder and CEO Ben] Chestnut told me in October. When I met with him in Atlanta and mentioned my newsletter plans, Chestnut advised me to stick to a basic MailChimp template instead of a TinyLetter, to avoid any potential headaches when MailChimp swallows up TinyLetter.

2018-01-05:

MailChimp’s CEO clarifies: TinyLetter won’t shut down this year "We have no plans to make changes to TinyLetter in 2018. And we’ll let you know what to expect before we make any changes in the future. In the long term, we do intend to integrate TinyLetter into MailChimp. Doing this will better enable us to support the product and its users. But we’re taking it slow because we want to get it right."

2023-11-29:

Since then, our business priorities have evolved, and we've been laser focused on building tools to serve marketers and help small businesses grow. The TinyLetter community's needs have changed too, with some customers moving to Mailchimp to scale and monetize their newsletters, and some moving to alternative services that cater specifically to writers. With all of that in mind, we've made the decision to close TinyLetter and focus on our core Mailchimp product. On February 29, 2024, we will officially sunset the product and you'll no longer be able to access your TinyLetter account or letter archive. You'll still be able to log in and access your account until February 29. We know you worked hard to build your audience, so we strongly encourage you to log in before February 29 to export your subscriber list.

[angevinyaoiz]

Whew, FINALLY got tinyletter to work and sent out my first newsletter! Wrote some more detailed updates about zines, fanart, and other stuff I'm up to. You can read it (and subscribe) here!

Stuff is pretty busy this month, but I always have some time for my delusions

[leviathans-watching]

Hi , I am subscribed to your email letters but I want to unsubscribe from my email address (I want to use that email for work purposes) how do I do it? I really enjoyed your letters btw

Aww thanks!! All for the way at the bottom of the emails there’s a button that says “unsubscribe”. Just hit that and it should take you right off!

[drawpaintwritemakethings]

the whole sky

ink brush drawing on yupo paper

8.25 x 11.5 inches

yupo is a synthetic paper that is waterproof, stain-resistant, and durable

Don't let one cloud obliterate the whole sky. — Anaïs Nin

New Tinyletter today, it contains all the launch codes.

[thejaymo]

Row It Back | Weeknotes

The other week in my review of Day One app I said that I was a bit of an Automattic fan boy. This week I’m going to row that back. 

[sindar-princeling]

today's entry is sent!

[cranberrylane]

i love the author's notes in bc

[mogwaipoet]

Here's my how-to-find-me post

I wrote this in the dying days of Cohost but maybe somebody here wants this information too

I've been trying to fill Mastodon with shitposts for years but I can't do it alone.

I'm trying out Tumblr for longer form stuff. It seems like a serviceable blogging platform, though I haven't figured a combination of who to follow yet that hits the balance I'm looking for.

Both of the above have associated RSS feeds so you don't need to sign up for those services or even visit the web sites to read what I write there. It makes interacting a bit harder though.

Topic Lords, my pirate radio internet audio zine, comes out every Monday like clockwork. Each week I invite a different pair of friends to talk about their latest ADHD rabbit holes. Listen using your favorite podcast app or sit and stare at the web site like a weirdo.

If you pledge to the Topic Lords patreon you get an invite to the Topic Lords discord. It's a nice space, good cozy Dunbar's Number of people, and I'm fairly active there.

Someday I'll probably update twinbeard.com again?? I keep meaning to redo the blog with a better interface and an RSS feed, and also write about the Pico-8 games I've shipped since 2020, but it keeps not happening.

Video games on itch.io. Some of them are on Steam too.

I used to have a TinyLetter but Mailchimp bought that and shut it the fuck down. I didn't even get a cut!

[myfriendpokey]

newsy news

greetings all, in light of the cohost news i figure it's probably a good time to go back to maintaining a mailing list. i had one before on tinyletter but THAT went under... anyway, i won't go ham on updates but figure it'd be a good resource for anyone who wants to stay up to speed on future game releases etc, esp ones i might not be putting on my itch main yet. will send the first one in a few days w some of the inkbrush drawings i've been doing as a test. TAke a look yall: https://www.freelists.org/list/harmonycorp

peace, stephen

[pepprs]

hi and happy march! i hope everyone is doing well. a couple tiny updates:

i still haven’t remade, created a substack / tinyletter or whatever, etc. and once again i don’t know if i will or actually want to. for right now im actually kinda leaning against it; maybe just poking in here and saying hi on the first day of every month is enough! (though i don’t want to promise that i’ll make this a regular thing — maybe fully cutting myself off from social media is truly what i need to do and will do eventually — but im finding that opening the apps once every few days and then doing a tiny monthly update on here does feel like a healthily constrained yet enjoyable thjng to do rn. so maybe i will lean into that for as long as it feels good to.)

february was an unexpectedly hard and hectic month for me: scary health issues (i had to go to the er 🤪 i think im ok or at least will be soon but there are still some unknowns to figure out in the weeks ahead) and some intense work stuff. and / but… I HAVE MOVED OUT!!!!!!!! my apartment is a half-unpacked disaster and i am dealing with some absolutely brutal emotional backdraft from the whole experience lol but i feel so so so gratified and thankful to finally be in a situation where, for the first time in my life, i can truly begin to genuinely, stably, sustainably recover and thrive. it’s going to be a long journey with some pain and discomfort along the way, but i know it’ll be worth it 🥹 maybe i’ll find a healthy way to let you know how it goes!

i hope you’re all doing as well as you can be! im manifesting a marvelous march for my many magical mutuals 💗🫂🪄☕️🐈

[shanastoryteller]

tinyletter, which I use for the newsletter, is shutting down in february (rip)

unfortunately most newsletter services are very pricey so i'm wondering if people have suggestions for low cost or free replacements?

i was thinking of just doing a patreon with only a free tier but then people would have to have a patreon account and resign up, which is a pain

I'm open to suggestions! please and thank you!

[lil-tachyon]

Hey gang it's been a while but I've retooled the whole newsletter thing since Tinyletter went under and the first new email goes out in a bit. Also I'm not doing art full-time anymore so that might be the best place to get updates from me for the foreseeable future. Sign up here if you're not already.

[angevinyaoiz]

Email list for doodles, writing, and other things

increasingly annoyed with social media BUT I also enjoy shoving my cursed but beautiful drawings in everyone's faces. So I've started a lil casual newsletter/email list!

Basically I'll probably just use it to periodically send out collections of the doodles I already post here and on Twitter, updates for my website, and for my more longer/involved projects, like my short comics and the zine I've been putting together for the fair next month, right to ur very own inbox!

All of this is very hobby for me, but it means a lot to be able to share my work and connect with people with similar interests! If you like my art or writing in general I hope you can check it out and consider subscribing <3

[leviathans-watching]

just sent out this month's tinyletter!! if you aren't subscribed, but would like to be for next month's letter, click here! if you're like 'hey, what is this?', click here for the past letters.