The online Crucible: Who gets to have a byline and who has to get burned

Writing as witchcraft, online abuse, and the power, pleasure and danger of a byline.

From Robert Eggers’ 2015 film “The Witch” starring Anya Taylor-Joy.

“Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!”
-John Proctor, from The Crucible by Arthur Miller

Prologue: A not-unproblematic classic of American theater

This quote is from the climactic scene of The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s not-unproblematic horror-drama of the Salem witch trials. The speaker is John Proctor, who arguably instigated the whole witch trial mess by first seducing, then abandoning, his teenage mistress, Abigail, who then cried "WITCH” in a scheme to take down Proctor’s wife. Now, Proctor has returned to his principles and his wife, and is refusing to sign his name to a confession of witchcraft, which would validate the torture and murder of his fellows and implicate others. There are a lot of problems with this play, especially its notions of women’s virtue and vice, but Proctor’s meditation on the power of names is a great moment in America’s theater cannon.

Anyway. I bring this up because I want to talk about names and authorship. I want to talk about what it means to sign our names to our writing, and the witchcraft of building what is colloquially called a “brand” over time. I want to talk about who gets to sign their name to their work, and who doesn’t, and why. I want to talk about when claiming our work is a privilege, when it is a courageous choice, and when it is simply not an option. And I want to talk about the still-vital tradition of bringing mob violence to women, femmes, and other gender minorities and members of marginalized groups whose speech rubs white heteropatriarchy the wrong way. And John Proctor’s speech seems like both an appropriate and ironic segue into it.

What’s in a name? The pleasure and menace of a byline.

For anyone reading this publication for the first time, I don’t sign my full name to my newsletter. When I was filling out my info on Substack in April, back when I started this newsletter journey, I took one look at the “author name” field and had one of those movie-montage moments where your past traumas all flash before your eyes. Then I drew a great white blank. Finally, I typed “This Is Rachel” into the empty space in lieu of a first and last name. For my author photo, I cropped an image from a backdrop from the classic 1956 sci-fi film Forbidden Planet, a retrofuturist retelling of Shakespeare’s The Tempest with a gorgeous, campy aesthetic and its own issues with gender equality. (It gets a shout-out in the title song of The Rocky Horror Picture Show.) This seemed like the safest choice.

As time goes by, using a pseud has begun to bother me more and more—or, rather, I am bothered by the fact that I should feel afraid to use my real name online. I’m working on a memoir and thinking about pitching it to agents. I’ve started submitting creative nonfiction to literary journals again. And there is a deep hunger in me to sign my name to this work.

There is magic in a byline. Seeing my name in print is the writerly equivalent of standing on stage with an electric guitar and the amp cranked up to eleven. Since I first started writing for a local arts alt weekly in the mid 2010s, I was hooked. Publication is talking with a megaphone. And it confers not only volume, but a particular kind of authority. And when your name is on the byline, you hold that authority. I’m a tiny femme. I look far younger than I am. I default to vocal fry. In a crowded room it’s hard to get anyone to listen to me. But none of that matters when I’m speaking out from under a byline. Seeing my name in print is the best high in the world.

The dangers of public life

I’m not going to detail here the ways in which internet mobs have blown up the lives of women, trans and nonbinary writers, and other journalists of marginalized identities who have triggered easily triggered bigots on the internet, although I will link to some good journalism on the subject, and I encourage you to learn about GamerGate and other instances of mass online abuse if you’re not familiar with this dark history. (For a recent, high-profile example of how vicious the virtual public square can be, I point you to the “controversy” around olympic boxer Imane Khelif, who named Elon Musk and JK Rowling in a criminal complaint after they unleashed an internet mob on her for not looking feminine enough during a boxing match. YouTube’s Matt Bernstein and Contrapoints have a wonderful breakdown of what happened.) Anyone who isn’t a white cisgender man is at higher risk of mobilizing an angry internet mob, especially when we, as writers, engage certain topics that should not be sensitive, but for some reason are sensitive—like science fiction, video games, tech, gender, or politics. And the left is absolutely implicated in online abuse and bullying, as well.

The danger of this kind of harassment and bullying is compounded because most people’s personal information—such as home addresses, cell phone numbers, family members’ names and addresses, etc.—are easily findable via Google through databroker websites. If you anger the wrong person, they could show up at your house—or place an anonymous call to your local SWAT team. These scenarios are not hypotheticals.

And when I google myself—well, there I am. I mean, really. There I am. My name—my phone number—my address—all appear on datamining sites. I’m not hard to find. This is terrifying. It wouldn’t be hard for a bad actor to “dox” me—internet speak for revealing someone’s address, phone number, and other contact info to an angry internet mob—if they wanted to.

When the internet mob came for me

And there are more personal reasons that I’m cautious. I feel a visceral cringe in my body when I think about exposing myself online because I’ve personally endured cyberstalking and online abuse.

My crime was publicly supporting a community member who had been assaulted by a popular community member. Well, it was a little more complicated than that. At the time, I was a somewhat-well-known blogger in an urban subculture. The community was stunned by the victim’s disclosure of abuse. The perpetrator claimed that the victim was a liar, and in the pre-#metoo landscape, no one was sure who to believe.

This all happened more than ten years ago, and the perpetrator is incarcerated, and all the major actors have moved on, so I’m going to reproduce an excerpt of the blog post that brought down the internet’s wrath:

Here's something I've learned: Being a good friend in some contexts does not preclude being a monster in other contexts. A lot of violent people get away with a lot of shit because their friends can't wrap their minds around the idea that someone who is nice to them is also capable of violence. Accepting such a notion would cast doubt on their own ability to judge character, and worse, it would force them to acknowledge that people may have the capacity to practice good AND evil—that the one does not necessarily preclude the other.

The legal system sets the bar pretty high when it comes to judging guilt. And it should, because it exercises judicial power. We are not the legal system. We are individuals, and our standards are our own. And the community's standards emerge from their aggregate. What kind of community do you want to foster?

I believe her.

At first the response to my post was overwhelmingly positive. I had struck a nerve, articulated something that needed to be voiced. Supportive comments piled in, and out of those supportive comments grew fruitful discussion, and out of that discussion—believe it or not—grew an actual miniature movement. I found myself facilitating, along with others, in-person meetings about how to recognize and prevent abuse in our community. Everything seemed to be happening around me, disorientingly quickly, like a rising wave I was happy to ride. It was exhilarating.

And then—the backlash came. Now I was fielding comments and threats that came faster than I could read them. Sock puppet accounts—fake accounts used to deceive others—were messaging my friends and acquaintances with wild claims about me—my favorite is that I kept a “burn list” of people who I was planning to ruin with false rape accusations. I watched my network of connections evaporate as being associated with me became poisonous.

It’s hard to explain how terrifying and consuming online bullying and abuse can be to someone who hasn’t experienced it. The feeling of primal, somatic terror at being so completely rejected by the group, regardless of whether it’s happening on the internet or whether you’re actually in a Shirley Jackson short story, is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. From your body’s perspective, there’s a constant shrieking emergency you can’t escape. Which makes sense, because the one of the most dangerous things in the world for a human is exile from the the community. The stress is exquisite and relentless. My body rejected food and refused sleep. There was a constant feeling of dread, like a live explosive had landed in some close by, but unknown location, and I was waiting for the detonation to come. I locked down all of my social media accounts and stopped checking email and texts out of sheer exhaustion, which effectively locked me out of a huge part of public life. “I wake up feeling burnt. Damaged. Corroded. I crawl up from an insane, nauseating, unreal pit and slowly come back to the world. I have constant headaches,” says another victim of mass public bullying on the physical and psychological toll the experience takes. This resonates.

I am lucky that no one actually moved the online harassment I experienced into the physical world—although they could have, and I endured fear that they would. And I am lucky that a group of ride-or-die friends stood by me through the raging storm that tore apart my social world.

But yeah, I have some PTSD.

How are other creators navigating these waters?

At an impasse, I took to “Notes,” Substack’s answer to Twitter, to ask other writers how they handle the tension between holding space for their identities as creators and protecting their safety. I received many intelligent and nuanced responses from writers who balance their values and priorities in a variety of ways.

Some of you were cautious, and kept your hands, feet, and identifying information carefully in the social media rollercoaster car.

illustr8d

I don’t use my real name or my picture because I’ve been white-knighted [attacked by an online mob] twice, once with people threatening my life (on Twitter).

It was scary even knowing it would be hard to dox me (and they weren’t able to at that time).

Sanna Salanimi

My chosen last name is directly translated from Finnish to mean “pseudonym.” Two reasons: First, I write on sensitive topics that I have first-hand experience with that I don’t need my 9-5 cohorts catching wind of. No shame there, just privacy. Secondly, there’s the criminally insane ex. Sometimes I resent that I can’t have socials to promote my work because of him. Safety first. However, this is weird— I find that Sanna is a better writer than me. I’m keeping it this way.

Others understand the risks of doxxing and hate, and make the courageous decision to write under your own names anyway:

Ava Robinson

I let it all hang out. I figure if I’m doxxed for being a [sex worker], for being an abolitionist, for ____ then so be it. I have disadvantages and privilege/access so I do my best to hold the duality of both. It doesn’t come without fear but it also comes with liberation. That, and I’m also querying a memoir.

Robin Taylor (he/him)

Let’s face it, as an out trans person on the internet, I’m a prime target. I knew that when I named my [Substack], and I did it anyway. Why? Because I know there are loads of trans people and families out there who need to see someone stand up and be themself in front of the whole world. This is how I have chosen to build community, and it has worked very well for me.

Then there were also folks who used Substack’s paywall feature to ensure that their most sensitive content only reached friendly readers. Or who signed their real names and made their content available to all, but used paid services to hide their personal information online so that they were less vulnerable to doxxing. (More on that in the resources below.)

Then there was the response that, to be frank, made me mad enough that it inspired me to bang out this essay.

You check your privilege; I’ll check the chip on my shoulder

This commenter opined that, as a journalist, he couldn’t trust the word of any writer who didn’t sign their real name to their work.

Friends, to say I found this comment tactless and frustrating is an understatement.

There’s a lot of privilege on display here. Cis male journalists are less likely to be doxxed by orders of magnitude, and far less likely to experience the kind of stalking and harassment mentioned by many of the other commenters, and described by me above. And the crassness of saying this in a thread that included references to personal experiences of bullying, stalking, and abuse makes me vomit in my mouth a little. (It’s also not even an entirely accurate statement; it’s absolutely possible for a pen name to command trust; see: Mark Twain.)

But what really bothered me about this comment is that there is a grain of truth in it: Over time, as we create a body of work, we build credibility, momentum, and a sense of identity as an artist—and all that aggregates around our names. It attaches to our names, and is carried by our names. In contemporary speech, they call it building a brand, but it is so much more than that.

Really, it is a kind of witchcraft.

The writer is a witch. And witches have always been burned.

When we create a body of work over time, we are creating an energy, aesthetic, and style particular to us. We are demonstrating our values, proving our reliability, conjuring artistic charisma. Others begin to vibe with us and look for our bylines. We all know what it feels like to see an author’s name and know in our bones that this person speaks for us, that we want to hear what they have to say next. Joan Didion, Rebecca Solnit, adrienne maree brown, Sophie Strand—these names vibrate in my being. I associate them with work that has transformed me, or helped me to more deeply articulate myself. I feel deep kinship and connection with these writers, and that connection is carried and communicated in their names.

Signing our real names to our work is not always necessary, or even optimal. Some bodies of work benefit from pseuds. (See: Ziggy Stardust.) But in other cases, the link between self, name, and work adds authenticity and trust to the spell we’re casting. It means something.

So what does it mean that misogynistic violence has made me afraid to write from under my own byline, to build my brand, invoke that magic around my own name as I build a body of work? What is being stolen from me?

Sure, I could build a brand around a pseudonym, in the tradition of Mark Twain or George Elliot. In the event that I ever say anything that stirs up the sleeping monsters on the internet, the false name might even protect me (and it might not). But I don’t want to do that. In doing that, for me, with this project, something is lost.

This leads me full circle, back to John Proctor:

A little dramatic, but the fit isn’t bad.

Postscript: What this witch decided

I ended up signing up for a service that deletes your private information from databrokers. I’ll see how well it works, and how safe I feel, after it’s been operating for awhile, and make a decision about whether to start signing my real name to this newsletter, as well as my work elsewhere. Watch for a big reveal, friends. It’ll be like that time Clark Kent came out as Superman.

Hit reply or meet me in the comments!

In the meantime—this is a community issue that affects all of us, and I would love to continue this conversation in community. What are your thoughts? How to do handle the tension of creating in public in an unsafe world?

Resources

Where to turn if you are experiencing online abuse or have been doxxed:

• Crash Override Network is a crisis helpline, advocacy group and resource center for people who are experiencing online abuse. We are a network of experts and survivors who work directly with victims, tech companies, lawmakers, media, security experts, and law enforcement to educate and provide direct assistance working to eliminate the causes of online abuse.

Services that remove your data from data mining sites (I don’t get any commissions from these links, I’m just leaving them here as a resource):

• DeleteMe is very expensive, but from what I’ve heard, it’s probably the most effective service at doing what it does. You pay per data point removed. Notably, their site also provides DIY manuals to help you remove your data yourself free of charge, but this gets overwhelming fast.

• Incogni is a subscription service that removes your info from data mining sites.

• Aura is another such subscription service.

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