The early internet couldn't verify identity. Thus, if someone said they were "18/f" we assumed they were 44/m. If they said anything younger than that, we ass

The early internet couldn't verify identity. Thus, if someone said they were "18/f" we assumed they were 44/m. If they said anything younger than that, we assumed FBI. Everyone was bullshitting everyone because identity could not be proven. 56.6kb wasn't enough for rich media lifestreaming culture. It was only text and the occasional person who owned a scanner. You could call this version of the internet a Derrida paradise. As internet speeds became better, identity still couldn't be proven, but it could take on characteristics that were more natural for our senses: faces, motions, and sound. Compared to pure text identification, this development is quite the relief for minds used to living in such identity paranoia. Social media companies piggybacked off of this relief and built entire networks which incentivized positive identification, which was the core for the ad tech revolution. But, the problem with positive identity is that you will attract the very old, very battle-tested, and very entrenched wolves who know how to hack identity: the politicians, the social sciences, the charlatans, the trolls, mass media agents, the psyop engineers, the alphabets, and the rest of the industries who profit from poisoning the well of identity. And now, here we are, accusing each other of engaging in genocidal racism because we've turned pixels into the inputs of a Skinner box of ideological signaling.