Embrace the Throwaway

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In case you missed it, this is Humor & Satire.

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My wife and I are both users of Ilitrit, the social media website we all know and love. It's like Jeers, where nobody knows your name. She is a "watcher," a voyeur who can see everything but not post or vote, and I have some "throwaway" accounts.

The concept of a throwaway is easily searched on the internet, so don't ask your kids. You want the straight dope, anyway, and kids lie about this sort of thing. For good reason-it's pretty much the only rule of throwaways. But I won't lie to you. I promise.

Throwaways are constantly referenced in certain areas of discussion on that site (called "circlejerks", for the uninitiated). It was an unfamiliar concept to us at first, but easily understood: It is sometimes of benefit to have an account (or more than one) that has no ties to anything else in your life other than an anonymous email address.

It is brainlessly easy to create one of these accounts, which is good; there are a lot of brainless people posting to Ilitrit: literal and metaphorical ones. Bots, artificially intelligent accounts without an actual person operating them, are as much, if not more of a problem on Ilitrit than on similar sites like Teabag and Facesit. The people who design bots are VERY good at getting you to interact with them, often by triggering you, especially about kids, money, and politics; their livelihoods, and often safety, depend on getting you to give away your money, personal info, or votes. But don't blame these barely-competent programmers living in Third World countries. Follow the money.

Bots are nasty little buggers. When endowed with enough randomization to hide the uncanny feeling you get interacting with them, these insipid sets of code are embarrassingly easy to reproduce.

Bot used [LOGICAL FALLACY].

It's super effective!

User is typing...

Imagine getting angry at a computer program! It sounds foolish, but you could be doing it right now. Always remember, I could be Botnet. Except Botnet wouldn't tell you that it's Botnet.

You'd think.

I'm writing today without the missus' input, because she couldn't care less about my fake internet points. Readers, I apologize in advance; she filters my shit better than a perfectly-W-shaped piece of rice paper.

But personally, I like getting kudos, the made-up points that show all who care to look in everyone's pants, just who exactly has the biggest e-peen. I don't actually know who that individual is. [Update: she checked. It's WhoGivesAFuck. Neat!]

I'm not a "kudo slut," willing to post and comment anything to get votes, thousands of actions per day. I've only double-posted on a few occasions, enough to alert me that this is a common problem-"You are doing that too often. Try again in 19 minutes."

This isn't just an Ilitrit thing, either. It's one of a million examples of websites that, afraid to "bounce" new users like a bad pickup artist, ask for the bare minimum of info to sign up. Here's why I personally find the throwaway account to be such a delight:

It's very cathartic to log in and go to various bigoted circlejerks, spewing my unthoughtful, garbagelike spur-of-the-moment thoughts like jizz on so many bukkake participants. On a really bad day, I can pick fights if I feel like it, wielding the keyboard to insult people whom I wrongly think have more dysfunctional home lives than me, or role play a misguided Christian Crusader that just wants to show TheShoplifters the error of their ways and starts sending links to "get them started." From several different throwaways.

Don't get mad at me, though, because it's okay: Ilitrit is democratic. If "people" don't think your post or comment "contributes to the discussion" (read: is parsed by the easily-manipulated AI reading your comment for racial slurs and links to non-Ilitrit sites), they can vote Nay. With enough Nays, your brilliant rebuttal to "go fuck urself nerd" won't appear to most people viewing the discussion. It's like you weren't even there! Neat.

Luckily, this system is brilliant and infallible and always works exactly as intended.

/s

(This means "I'm done being sarcastic now," a thing that started on Ilitrit. Both humans and bots use it to let you know they were manufactured after 1981. That's how you know for certain that we're really 27 and 32 and have the six-pack abs you see in our Ilitrit profile photo. I would've added fire emojis, but I ran out of room.)

One example of a throwaway: there is a slew of accounts called SENDMEYOUR______, where the blank is filled with every fetish you can imagine: from the vanilla SENDMEYOURBOOBIES to SENDMEYOURSOCIAL, an account with one post featuring a guy who looks suspiciously like my sister's baby daddy, and a gratuitous cat to soften you up for phishing. On an unrelated note, this will be my last post, as I am now the King of Naibori. I've got a perfectly-spelled certificate and everything. Bow down, subjects.

God bless the internet. I have a SENDME account, and it's the best thing since SENDMEURSLICEDBREAD (not a real account, not that anyone but fact checkers would actually do the effort to look). Real accounts like these, though, report receiving dozens of BMs, bothersome messages, with the pics or info they requested, just because they asked nicely. How about that?

Some people are really good at the throwaway "game," keeping several accounts on different websites that each have hundreds of thousands of votes, shares, screeches, or followers. I am not included in this elite group. As far as you know.

No one knows who they are, and that's the point. Lots of people have lots of throwaways on lots of websites. Because of the ease of creating an account and verifying the email address, I'll prove it.

Between typing that last sentence and this one, I created a new account, HilitRWhere, on a different website than Ilitrit. It was meant to read like, "Hi, Lit! RW here!" and instead sounds like a butt play account ("Awwww, can we keep it?"). The only two requirements were that I had an email address, and no one could be using the name already. Someone clearly missed a markert opening.

I did, however, have to check the box stating "I am not a robot" with no period at the end. Pssssh, like understanding poor punctuation and identifying crosswalks is too hard for m... I mean, Botnet!

I deleted the account, so don't bother looking for it. Can't have you finding my throwaways, now can I?

Don't worry-these websites claim to be anonymous. Except for those of you who've done something to make the government watch you. I stand corrected; only that one guy whose job is watching the forty monitors, but who's eye-fucking your hot neighbor instead, could possibly give a fuck. And he doesn't.

I suppose that HilitRWhere can no longer be called a true throwaway, since I'm posting this from our regular account, as far as you know. This breaks perhaps the only rule of throwaway accounts: You don't give away your throwaway's secret identity-your main account.

It's the same reason why there's between a 200:1 and 50:1 ratio between watchers and actual accounts, according to most research. Sometimes, I don't want people knowing what kind of shit I am capable of spewing at other human beings. Or... bots. It's uncertain; call it Schrodinger's scat. I must especially shield my wife, who has somehow held onto a shred of her humanity in this brave new world. I think. To be honest, she could be a fembot. Dammit, now I want a fembot.

It's the one in dozens, the one with the weakest filter, the HilitRWheres of the world, whose opinions, or whose bots' opinions, you're reading. If I've learned anything in my -38.9999999999999999 years on Earth, it's that most everyone IRL (in real life) is a watcher somewhere.

You'd think they were vanilla. Non-threatening. That they don't give a fuck about our politics, our kids' vaccine schedules, our terrible opinions, our smutty stories, or whatever. Well, they do, but it's become unfashionable, almost taboo to care about something, and most people don't have the language skills to express their deeply-held beliefs very well. Also, because of responses like "go fuck urself nerd". I originally used the word "your" repeatedly here, but I don't want you to think I'm immune to this (or some kind of heartless machine!)

Always remember that. Trust me, I'm definitely a real person.

The Social Media Age has removed some of the barriers to getting your work or opinions "out there," hence the piles of garbage in every online moderator's queue, this essay included. Sorry, volunteers. I appreciate what you do. What I hope you do.

If you read through this pile of garbage (notice I don't say which?), it becomes difficult to tell what was written by a person and what was written by a bot program. That is by design. It's called information overload, and it's important that we all recognize it. If I gave you 10,000 randomized SSNs, including the real one, and my really real name, Andrew Silicate Sophist, which is definitely, really real, you'd probably stop trying to steal my identity after about 10 tries. Even if I told you I had a billion dollars. Which I do. Definitely.

But not if you have a computer to do it for you while you watch internet porn in the GoneCrazy circlejerk. The power of AI programs has been the subject of national discussion (rife with bots and plenty of non-national interference) for years, but only now is Joe Normal starting to become aware of the dangers. We're living in a Post-Truth Society! Wake up, beeple!

I've given a lot of terrible examples for using a throwaway, but that's because I'm a terrible person, and I'm flying solo today. There's no condom on this red rocket.

Throwaways can be good, too, if you've got the stomach for it.

Go compliment-bomb people, help out some broke motherfucker in RandomActsOfLasagna, go into circlejerks like ShouldIDoIt and save lives (and aid masturbating narcissists, but that's what you get for helping someone these days), or even share hopefully-not-ripped-off works on erotic story websites.

You could make a throwaway right now. For whatever reason you'd like, of course, from chaotic evil to lawful good. I know the vast majority of people won't, but...

I'm using that fucking phrase despite how much it's been bastardized, because THAT'S HOW IT WORKS. Watch! Snoop, even! Blow a load on bigots! Support a crowdfunding project! Discover well-formatted data files! It's YOUR throwaway; use it like I use the characters in the misguided "erotic novels" I post from MY throwaways!

Forget the password? Make another. Get banned from too many circlejerks? Make another. Give away too many personal details? Make another. Oh shit, someone is using SENDMEYOURPUBLICDOMAINEROTICA already? Make another. Then maybe send them a polite BM, asking them to send you some of it, too. (Notice I didn't say which again? Hey, your thing's your thing.)

Honestly, after so many years of watching Ilitrit and other social media platforms devolve into the technology-fueled circlejerk sessions they are now, I think it's crucial to have a throwaway.

Maintaining a clear separation between the times when you are a non-despicable human being and when you let your freak flag fly is a really important skill, not just on Ilitrit. It was important for me as a teacher from 2.001 to 2.009, and it's just as important for you, dearest reader or web crawler.

Oh, and if it wasn't obvious,

/s