[giraffe_lady]

If you keep them distinct unification is a weapon to be used against you. You're writing your own blackmail someone just has to call you on it.

With prose fingerprinting, sophisticated tracking, now your identities are only separate by rapidly eroding social convention. Intentionally merging them allows you to have control over the process, and helps you maintain discipline about what you reveal where. If you don't do it it will be done to you.

[xyzzy_plugh]

Prose fingerprinting is indeed worrisome, but it's a solvable problem once you are aware it exists. For example, if you contribute here anonymously, but don't contribute elsewhere, there is no corpus that can produce an accurate match.

Many people communicate differently in different contexts. It's common to try and match the style of the community in which you participate.

I am not convinced that having your identities merged for you is inevitable.

[meowkit]

Its inevitable because of capital incentives.

Someone makes money identifying you and selling that data to advertisers.

If your pseudonym is famous/infamous someone makes money / cultivates attention if they identify you.

There is a basic instinct to uncover the unknown.

Unless the above systems are disabled then the drive to unify identity will be ceaseless.

[tjoff]

Parasitic advertisement is not a basic instinct.

[resters]

How is merging identities the solution?

The goal is not "how can I do blackmail-worthy activities without being blackmailed?" the goal is "how can I participate in a narrow way without, for example, having those reading my content biased by my LinkedIn profile or my corporate affiliation?"

We don't walk around wearing little badges that identify every organization we affiliate with, every group, etc. Why would anyone want their online participation burdened by all that extra (usually irrelevant) information?

In my case, I don't write content I would worry about some determined prose fingerprinter finding, and if I did I would sanitize the prose first :)