Sign Your Name

My Name Is Not Puzzleheaded_Party32

Every word I’ve published in the last few years has my name on it. The blog, the Substack, the satirical rag, the newsletters, the Facebook posts I probably shouldn’t have written after a second glass of tinto… all of it signed Dominus Owen Markham, a name that is neither common nor easy to hide behind, which I’ve come to regard as a feature rather than a bug. If you want to find me, disagree with me, or send me a stiff letter about my overuse of ellipses, you know exactly where to aim.

And then there’s Reddit. Reddit, in its infinite wisdom, took one look at a sixty-six-year-old retired RAF Police officer living in a cave in rural Spain and decided that what this man really needed was a disguise. On that platform, I am u/Puzzleheaded_Party32. I didn’t choose it, I can’t change it, and I have no idea who Party31 is or whether Party33 is having a better time of it. Somewhere in California, I suspect, an algorithm is still chuckling. It’s the only corner of the internet where I’m anonymous, and the irony is that I’m anonymous against my will, like a man who wandered into a masked ball looking for the toilets and now can’t find the door.

Which is, more or less, how I arrived at the argument this piece is about. A while back I wrote “Please Verify Your Age”, a long grumble about governments and platforms creeping towards a world where you show your papers before you’re allowed to open your mouth. I stand by every word of it. But I’ve noticed something uncomfortable since, and it’s this… I don’t actually like most of the anonymity I see online. Not the kind that keeps vulnerable people safe. The other kind. The kind that exists purely so someone can say something they’d never say with their name attached, and then wander off whistling.

So here’s my position, and I’ll warn you now that it doesn’t sit neatly in either camp. I don’t want a law forcing you to sign your name. I want you to want to.

A Career Spent Signing Things

I didn’t come to this view by accident. I spent over seven years in the RAF Police, and if the job taught me one thing it was that words carry weight in direct proportion to the name written underneath them. A statement nobody would sign was worth roughly nothing. A notebook entry counted as evidence only because a real person, with a real service number, had written it down and would stand up in front of people who didn’t like them and say so. Anonymous tip-offs had their uses, of course, but nobody ever built a case on one without first finding someone prepared to put their name to the facts.

Civilian life was much the same, only with worse coffee. When I moved into security management, I earned the nickname Mr Memo, because I had a habit of writing open memos and asking people to sign that they’d read them. It was not, I’ll admit, a habit that made me the life and soul of the Christmas party. But I noticed that the Directors who rolled their eyes at the time became remarkably fond of those signatures later, when something had gone wrong, and somebody needed to prove who knew what, and when. A signed memo turned an opinion into a record, and a record into accountability. Nobody could claim they hadn’t been told.

That’s the whole philosophy, really, and forty-odd years later I still haven’t shaken it. When you put your name to something, you make a quiet promise: I said this, I meant it, and if I’m wrong, you know where to find me. Take the name away, and the promise goes with it. What’s left might still be true, or clever, or even brave… but it weighs nothing, and you can’t hold something weightless to account.

A Field Guide to the Voluntarily Anonymous

Before we go any further, it’s worth getting to know the wildlife. What follows is not a scientific survey, but I’ve spent enough time watching the undergrowth of the internet to recognise the main species, and I’ve yet to see a nature documentary brave enough to cover them.

The Keyboard Colonel. Easily identified by the profile picture, which is always an eagle, a lion or a flag, and occasionally all three in some sort of heraldic pile-up. The bio reads “Ex-forces. Don’t tread on me.” The Colonel has strong opinions on military strategy, immigration and the spinelessness of everyone born after 1975, and delivers them with the confidence of a man who has commanded armies. Gently ask which regiment, and the Colonel goes very quiet, then blocks you. Having actually served, I find this species particularly fascinating, in the way you might be fascinated by a pigeon wearing a medal.

The Anonymous Participant. Native to local community Facebook groups, where the platform has helpfully invented a button that lets you post without your name. The Anonymous Participant uses this sacred privilege mainly to ask whether anyone else heard the helicopter last night, to suggest that a named local business is “not what it used to be”, and to hint darkly that “we all know who” left the bins out. Nobody does know who. That’s rather the point.

The One-Star Ghost. A single initial, no profile photo, and one review in its entire history: a scorched-earth demolition of a family tapas bar because the patatas bravas were “too brave”. The Ghost never returns, never clarifies and never eats anywhere else, as far as anyone can tell. It simply drifts through the world leaving small business owners staring at their phones at two in the morning.

The Choir of One. One person, eleven accounts, every one of them in passionate agreement with the other ten. The Choir can manufacture a groundswell of public opinion in an afternoon, and is quite often paid to. When it gets a corporate budget behind it, we call it “astroturfing”. When it’s a bloke in his spare room, we call it Tuesday.

The Brave Truth-Teller. This one is my favourite, because it genuinely believes it’s a hero. The Truth-Teller is “just asking questions” and “saying what everyone’s thinking”, usually under a name like TruthHammer4471, and regards its anonymity as proof of courage rather than the absence of it. It speaks truth to power from a position of total safety, which is a bit like claiming you swam the Channel because you once had a bath in Dover.

None of these creatures, you’ll notice, is in any danger. Nobody is coming for the Keyboard Colonel. The secret police aren’t remotely interested in the Anonymous Participant’s views on the bins. They’re anonymous for a much simpler reason… because it’s free, and because a name would make them answerable.

The People Who Actually Need the Mask

Now for the part where I stop being flippant, because this matters and I won’t pretend otherwise. Some people need anonymity the way a diver needs air. The woman who has finally got away from a violent partner and needs to find a support group without him finding her. The nurse who has watched corners being cut on a ward and wants to tell someone before a patient dies. The teenager in a household, or a country, where being honest about who they are could get them thrown out or locked up. The journalist’s source. The dissident blogging from somewhere the state reads everything. Even the UK government, not famous for its devotion to online privacy, conceded when it drew up the Online Safety Act that scrapping anonymity entirely would hurt domestic abuse victims and activists living under authoritarian regimes.

I’m not arguing with any of that. These people are the entire reason anonymity is worth defending, and if my argument ever made life harder for them I’d tear it up myself.

But here’s the uncomfortable bit, and it’s where I part company with the usual defenders of online anonymity. Every time somebody proposes making people more accountable for what they post, the response arrives within seconds: what about the abuse survivors, what about the whistleblowers? It’s a fair question, and it’s also the perfect shield. The Keyboard Colonel isn’t a whistleblower. The One-Star Ghost isn’t fleeing a regime. Yet they’ve been sheltering behind those genuinely vulnerable people for twenty years, borrowing moral cover that was built for someone else entirely. It’s a bit like parking in the disabled bay because you once sprained your ankle, then getting very indignant when anyone mentions it.

The Evidence Is Rude About My Argument

I’d love to tell you that the data backs me up completely. It doesn’t, and I’d be a hypocrite to sign my name to an article about honesty and then bury the bits I don’t like.

A few years ago, a team at the University of Zurich went through more than half a million comments left on around 1,600 online petitions on a German platform, where users could choose whether to post under their real name or not. You’d expect the anonymous lot to be the nasty ones. They weren’t. The commenters using their real names were more aggressive. The researchers’ explanation is the sort of thing that keeps a man awake in his cave at night: when people believe they’re defending a moral principle, they don’t feel any need to hide, and putting their name to the outrage actually makes them more persuasive to their friends. The modern troll, it turns out, is often perfectly happy to tell you exactly who he is. He’s proud of it.

Then there’s South Korea, which tried the real-name approach for real. From 2007, busy websites had to verify the identities of the people posting on them. Five years later, the Constitutional Court struck the law down unanimously, concluding that whatever the public had gained wasn’t worth the hit to free speech. Meanwhile, plenty of Koreans simply moved their arguments to foreign sites that didn’t ask questions. The malice didn’t vanish. It emigrated.

So names don’t make people nice. Fine. I’ve met plenty of men who signed their statements in block capitals and were still thoroughly unpleasant human beings. But my argument was never that a signature is a halo. It’s that a signature is an address. A named bully is still a bully, but at least he’s a bully you can identify, answer, ignore, sue, or warn other people about. An anonymous one is just weather.

Why I Don’t Want a Law

This is where anyone who read “Please Verify Your Age” starts sharpening their pencil, so let me save you the trouble. Yes, I’m the same man who spent several thousand words warning about verification creep. And no, I haven’t changed my mind.

The UK is already edging down this road, politely and on tiptoe, as it does everything. The Online Safety Act requires the biggest platforms to offer adults the option of verifying their identity, and Ofcom’s consultation on how that should work closed on 2 October this year. For now it’s opt-in, a little “verified” badge for those who want one. But I’ve lived long enough to know how optional things behave in Britain. First they’re optional, then they’re encouraged, then they’re expected, and eventually you’re filling in a form to explain why you haven’t got one.

Any law that forces people to sign their names needs someone to check the names, which means a database, which means a gatekeeper, which means that the moment a government decides who’s allowed to speak anonymously, it has also decided who’s allowed to speak. I’ve worked inside institutions long enough to know they never build a tool they don’t eventually find a second use for. South Korea already showed us the law doesn’t even work. I’d rather not hand the state a broken tool that happens to double as a register of everyone who’s ever disagreed with it.

So this isn’t a legal argument. It’s a manners argument. There’s no law that says you have to hold a door open for the person behind you, or look someone in the eye when you insult them, or own up when you’ve backed into a car in the Mercadona car park. We just used to think decent people did those things. I’m suggesting that signing your words belongs on the same list.

The Small Cowardice

Here’s the bit that’ll get me shouted at, so I’ll say it plainly. If nobody is going to hurt you for what you say, and you still choose to say it without your name, that’s a small act of cowardice.

Not a great big moral failing. Nobody’s going to hell for posting about the bins under “Anonymous Participant”. But it’s cowardice all the same, in the precise old-fashioned sense of the word: you want the satisfaction of saying the hard thing without paying what the hard thing costs. And everything worth saying costs something. It costs you the friend who disagrees, the awkward silence at the family barbecue, the neighbour who crosses the road. Every time I publish something like this, I know it might cost me a reader or two, and possibly a Christmas card. That cost isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system. It’s how a society works out which opinions people actually hold and which ones they merely enjoy lobbing over the fence.

The usual objection is that people need anonymity because their employer might sack them. Sometimes that’s true, and if it is, the mask makes sense… although it’s worth noticing that a country where you can lose your job for an opinion has a problem no username will fix. But be honest with yourself about how often that’s really the reason. Most voluntary anonymity isn’t fear of the sack. It’s fear of being disagreed with, by name, in front of people who know you. That isn’t persecution. That’s just what having an opinion feels like.

And there’s a wider cost too, one we’ve stopped noticing. An internet where a large share of the loudest voices belong to nobody in particular is an internet where you can never quite tell whether you’re arguing with a person, a Choir of One, a marketing department or a bot farm in a country you couldn’t find on a map. Every unsigned voice makes the signed ones a little harder to trust. The anonymous don’t just protect themselves. They spend everyone else’s credibility to do it.

Signed, Both of Us

I don’t know whether an internet full of signed words would be a kinder place. The Zurich lot suggest it might not be, and I’ve met enough named idiots to take their point. It might just be the same shouting with better labelling. But it would be honest about who’s doing the talking, and right now honesty about who’s talking feels like the scarcest commodity going, rarer than water in an Andalusian August.

What I do know is that I can’t make anyone sign anything, and I wouldn’t want a government doing it for me. All I can do is what I’ve always done: put my name at the bottom and accept whatever comes back. Up here, with the signal dropping in and out and the goats offering their own anonymous commentary from the hillside, that still feels like the only kind of writing worth doing.

As for Reddit, I’m stuck with it. I’ve asked, I’ve searched, I’ve muttered at the screen, and Puzzleheaded_Party32 I shall remain until the servers go dark. So let the record show, in the spirit of Mr Memo, that he and I are the same man. Only one of us chose the name. Draw your own conclusions about which one you’d trust.

Dominus Owen Markham

(also, apparently, u/Puzzleheaded_Party32)

Until Next Time