is stealth living an endagered species?
Aug. 20th, 2026 03:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kradeelavevery so often my name gets mentioned when helping & providing resources for kink artists, both publicly and privately. and very quickly, something that comes up in these conversations is how to (or should people) separate their IRL name/handle from their $nsfw/kink art handle for protection (imo yes).
for me, the majority of my life has been living stealth to some degree, especially with kink art. i compartmentalize easily; it's not something that everyone can do, but having a total separation of IRL/online handle(s) has been critical for me to enjoy both an unbothered life as well as doing the art I want to do since it cuts down on the harassment footprint risk to almost nothing (whether it be a troll doxxing or larger institutional harassment via payment processor targeting). my fondness for tech is in part rolled up with this style of living. and it's a tangent, but i really relate strongly to lived stories of older 80's gay/queer/leather individuals who always existed in that state, versus the more common out-of-the-closet story these days.
but this kind of mentality, i've noticed is... not always natural for people.
particularly younger. relatedly on a tech angle, i've noticed there's an oddly sharp difference between how phone-raised, ticktock-raised people (skews younger, under 35) versus laptop or desktop-raised people (skews older, 35+) interact with their devices, what expectations of privacy they have socially, and what they expect to be able to do.
and poking at this division more fully of stealth "natural" vs not stealth, i wonder if the reason is in part related with infrastructure - namely the surveillance degree and trained expectations of phones versus laptops (particularly linux or privacy-centric laptops).
my theory is that younger generations are being passively trained to have no expectations of being able to be stealth. really, it's much almost impossible when video platforms like ticktock are unusable if you don't show your face, and how the app itself tattletales on you in metadata. how the two main locked phone systems (google!android/iphone) are spyware from the hardware up, feeding big tech and a hostile government a constant stream of data, let alone potentially abusive family members or stalkers. frankly, even IOS and windows platforms are indistinguishable from spyware at this point.
while there were certinally surveillance issues 15 years ago, the, mm, friction to regain that privacy was not as immense. your desktop was still yours and mostly private. you could delete chunks of social media accounts and expect it to be truly deleted. and even then, text/images told less to potentially hostile authority than the endless streams of video now. there was no such thing as apps or ring cameras tracking your location and being a leak risk. (why oh why do people use banking apps. I'd rather be shot than use a banking app; to see it being cited as a reason for being unable to move away from a phone flabbergasts me when websites exist.)
these days, unless one's been consistently leaning into and intimately familiar with privacy centric systems like linux, grapheneOS, and consistently keeping one's info away from social media it's... a lot further of a mountain to climb to retain a similar level of privacy expectation.
for somebody young who wants to be private/have that stealth separation, that's a hell of a lot of friction to ask of them - and that i have sympathy for, if no immediate solution.
for me, the majority of my life has been living stealth to some degree, especially with kink art. i compartmentalize easily; it's not something that everyone can do, but having a total separation of IRL/online handle(s) has been critical for me to enjoy both an unbothered life as well as doing the art I want to do since it cuts down on the harassment footprint risk to almost nothing (whether it be a troll doxxing or larger institutional harassment via payment processor targeting). my fondness for tech is in part rolled up with this style of living. and it's a tangent, but i really relate strongly to lived stories of older 80's gay/queer/leather individuals who always existed in that state, versus the more common out-of-the-closet story these days.
but this kind of mentality, i've noticed is... not always natural for people.
particularly younger. relatedly on a tech angle, i've noticed there's an oddly sharp difference between how phone-raised, ticktock-raised people (skews younger, under 35) versus laptop or desktop-raised people (skews older, 35+) interact with their devices, what expectations of privacy they have socially, and what they expect to be able to do.
and poking at this division more fully of stealth "natural" vs not stealth, i wonder if the reason is in part related with infrastructure - namely the surveillance degree and trained expectations of phones versus laptops (particularly linux or privacy-centric laptops).
my theory is that younger generations are being passively trained to have no expectations of being able to be stealth. really, it's much almost impossible when video platforms like ticktock are unusable if you don't show your face, and how the app itself tattletales on you in metadata. how the two main locked phone systems (google!android/iphone) are spyware from the hardware up, feeding big tech and a hostile government a constant stream of data, let alone potentially abusive family members or stalkers. frankly, even IOS and windows platforms are indistinguishable from spyware at this point.
while there were certinally surveillance issues 15 years ago, the, mm, friction to regain that privacy was not as immense. your desktop was still yours and mostly private. you could delete chunks of social media accounts and expect it to be truly deleted. and even then, text/images told less to potentially hostile authority than the endless streams of video now. there was no such thing as apps or ring cameras tracking your location and being a leak risk. (why oh why do people use banking apps. I'd rather be shot than use a banking app; to see it being cited as a reason for being unable to move away from a phone flabbergasts me when websites exist.)
these days, unless one's been consistently leaning into and intimately familiar with privacy centric systems like linux, grapheneOS, and consistently keeping one's info away from social media it's... a lot further of a mountain to climb to retain a similar level of privacy expectation.
for somebody young who wants to be private/have that stealth separation, that's a hell of a lot of friction to ask of them - and that i have sympathy for, if no immediate solution.
(no subject)
Date: 2026-08-22 04:59 pm (UTC)It's fascinating to consider the concept of, "well, there's no privacy anyway," and people posting their faces and full names all over the Internet. You have options, kids! I used to be a lot more forthcoming with selfies and whatnot, but... eh, who needs it?
(Also distantly related, I wonder if it has to do with being older in these circles, and a kind of deep-set wariness about "old people on the internet." Even if we are the old people now...)
(no subject)
Date: 2026-08-22 09:54 pm (UTC)honestly really cool to see y'alls opinions! and absolutely, options abound -- it doesn't have to be a strict 0/100 thing, which doesn't realistically fit most people's needs. (sometimes having access to facebook marketplace comes in clutch lol).
(no subject)
Date: 2026-09-04 01:56 pm (UTC)