In a world of leaky metadata, generative reputational damage, and diegetic narratives the nature of authorship is evolving.

Discussing identity, authorship, in a post-darknet context is nothing new. Whether it's boomers using anonymous emails signed only with a PGP signature or someone uploading missives, manifestos, and ebooks using nothing but elliptic curve cryptographic signatures. There's always some elaborate dance between work and identity begging to be dissected whenever the technology allows for new freedoms by which we can angle our identities around.

First, we have the author as metadata: an identity-forward narrative that blends together personal life with fiction. Then we have the author as a process: victims of parasociality. Finally, we have the author as identity: "I create therefore I am" bleeding into "I am what I am" without making any excuses.

For years, we have focused on authorship identity to build credibility. Even with a pseudonym, you are trying to maintain some sense of continuity. For a time, this has its benefits. Consistency is good for SEO.

We're told that this is what we need to be commercially viable, a cohesive brand.

Let's take R.L. Stine for example. For some of his young adult genre, he'd go by Eric Affabee but for his choose your own adventure series he'd go by Zachary Blue. This sort of technique creates a virtual linkback system so that the overall idea of the author forces itself to take up more space in your mind.

Author as metadata, author as mind virus, author as demagogue.

This leads to vanity and can dilute the message. Sometimes the medium is the message, but metadata being the medium can be limiting.

This puts the emphasis on the flow states themselves. Their construction, purpose, and "did you use an AI to make this? Did you use Roland or Behringer?"

Sometimes this becomes an extension of Authorship as Metadata. For example, you can be an author in certain circles, and you become associated with the psychological process of the community you find yourself a part of. Like if you're a post-rat, a lesswrong poster, or someone getting accused of being "Landian" simply because you follow some group of people called TPOT.

This is something where your identity becomes inferred. Less metadata, more synthetic data. You are being judged based on the reactions and associations made about your work rather than your work itself. This is not optimal, freedom of association is not freedom from consequence.

This mindset can be a prison. Your flow state is turned into a commodity. You are milked for your ability to help facilitate capital flow within a particular simcluster with minimal risk. Your value is parasocial, conceptual, and pegged to the attention span of an audience who is under no obligation to see you for your own merits.

Authorship as Metadata or Process can often be miscontrued for Authorship as Identity. Even if you are anonymous, you are still attaching metadata to your work. If you ever post your work, it will be scraped, categorized, and added to a collection of other work. To this end, Authorship as Identity speaks to a more muted endeavor.

Creations as a way of life, fusing metadata and synthetic data into one ball. The man who writes nothing, publishes nothing, but keeps trailers full of notebooks filled with chicken scratch that few will ever see until well after his death. The hacker with a botnet using an LLM he wrote himself to spread his message of peace and love where the only true narrative is the collective subtext and its impact on society at-large.

This is where you go beyond death. The fourth estate of the noosphere. Perfection. In this mode, you only have one directive, one true will, and that's to create something. If it's meant to fall into the hands of tangible world, then maybe it will.

You want to have a freak accident that leaves you with no fingerprints. This way you can truly be free. Free from the shackles of both authorship and identity. Free from association, free from the temporal shackles of imposed desire for relevance.

Ultimately, the goal is that you stop thinking about yourself. Stop thinking about whose hands your work will fall in to or who is going to interpret it in a certain way. Worrying less about what it might mean if you publicly admit to the worst person you know having made a good point.

There are forces in play that want you dead so that more profitable endeavors can occur. These are distractions. It doesn't matter who you are or what associations others make of you. If you cannot create something for the sake of itself, then you might as well not even be alive. Not an author at all.

Don't let them tell you that you should find one thing and do it well. You can create anything you want on your own terms and do it as poorly as you'd like. Nothing matters, this is not a manifesto on how to be successful, it's a missive on how to free yourself from fear. Anything else is an emergent property of that.

In a world of leaky metadata, generative reputational damage, and diegetic narratives the nature of authorship is evolving.

Discussing identity, authorship, in a post-darknet context is nothing new. Whether it's boomers using anonymous emails signed only with a PGP signature or someone uploading missives, manifestos, and ebooks using nothing but elliptic curve cryptographic signatures. There's always some elaborate dance between work and identity begging to be dissected whenever the technology allows for new freedoms by which we can angle our identities around.

First, we have the author as metadata: an identity-forward narrative that blends together personal life with fiction. Then we have the author as a process: victims of parasociality. Finally, we have the author as identity: "I create therefore I am" bleeding into "I am what I am" without making any excuses.

For years, we have focused on authorship identity to build credibility. Even with a pseudonym, you are trying to maintain some sense of continuity. For a time, this has its benefits. Consistency is good for SEO.

We're told that this is what we need to be commercially viable, a cohesive brand.

Let's take R.L. Stine for example. For some of his young adult genre, he'd go by Eric Affabee but for his choose your own adventure series he'd go by Zachary Blue. This sort of technique creates a virtual linkback system so that the overall idea of the author forces itself to take up more space in your mind.

Author as metadata, author as mind virus, author as demagogue.

This leads to vanity and can dilute the message. Sometimes the medium is the message, but metadata being the medium can be limiting.

This puts the emphasis on the flow states themselves. Their construction, purpose, and "did you use an AI to make this? Did you use Roland or Behringer?"

Sometimes this becomes an extension of Authorship as Metadata. For example, you can be an author in certain circles, and you become associated with the psychological process of the community you find yourself a part of. Like if you're a post-rat, a lesswrong poster, or someone getting accused of being "Landian" simply because you follow some group of people called TPOT.

This is something where your identity becomes inferred. Less metadata, more synthetic data. You are being judged based on the reactions and associations made about your work rather than your work itself. This is not optimal, freedom of association is not freedom from consequence.

This mindset can be a prison. Your flow state is turned into a commodity. You are milked for your ability to help facilitate capital flow within a particular simcluster with minimal risk. Your value is parasocial, conceptual, and pegged to the attention span of an audience who is under no obligation to see you for your own merits.

Authorship as Metadata or Process can often be miscontrued for Authorship as Identity. Even if you are anonymous, you are still attaching metadata to your work. If you ever post your work, it will be scraped, categorized, and added to a collection of other work. To this end, Authorship as Identity speaks to a more muted endeavor.

Creations as a way of life, fusing metadata and synthetic data into one ball. The man who writes nothing, publishes nothing, but keeps trailers full of notebooks filled with chicken scratch that few will ever see until well after his death. The hacker with a botnet using an LLM he wrote himself to spread his message of peace and love where the only true narrative is the collective subtext and its impact on society at-large.

This is where you go beyond death. The fourth estate of the noosphere. Perfection. In this mode, you only have one directive, one true will, and that's to create something. If it's meant to fall into the hands of tangible world, then maybe it will.

You want to have a freak accident that leaves you with no fingerprints. This way you can truly be free. Free from the shackles of both authorship and identity. Free from association, free from the temporal shackles of imposed desire for relevance.

Ultimately, the goal is that you stop thinking about yourself. Stop thinking about whose hands your work will fall in to or who is going to interpret it in a certain way. Worrying less about what it might mean if you publicly admit to the worst person you know having made a good point.

There are forces in play that want you dead so that more profitable endeavors can occur. These are distractions. It doesn't matter who you are or what associations others make of you. If you cannot create something for the sake of itself, then you might as well not even be alive. Not an author at all.

Don't let them tell you that you should find one thing and do it well. You can create anything you want on your own terms and do it as poorly as you'd like. Nothing matters, this is not a manifesto on how to be successful, it's a missive on how to free yourself from fear. Anything else is an emergent property of that.