The internet has always let people become somebody else.
We just used to call it a username.
Before personal brands, before blue checks, before creators started talking about “positioning,” people were already picking names, avatars, signatures, bios and little pieces of identity that had almost nothing to do with what was printed on their driver's licence.
Nobody thought this was strange.
You logged onto a forum as xXShadowSniperXx, used a skull as your avatar, put a quote from Fight Club in your signature and spent three years becoming known as the guy who knew everything about overclocking Pentium 4s.
That was just the internet.
Nobody needed your real name.
Nobody asked for a professional headshot.
Nobody cared what your résumé said.
Your account became you.
And, whether people want to admit it or not, that is already a tiny form of LARPing.
Not necessarily lying.
Not necessarily pretending to have a Lamborghini.
Just deciding which version of yourself exists in that space.
Everybody had a costume
Old internet identities were weirdly visual for something that was mostly text.
Forum avatar.
Username.
Signature.
Rank.
Post count.
Custom title.
Maybe a little animated GIF under everything you wrote.
These were basically character sheets.
A person could be completely anonymous and still have a recognizable identity.
You knew the guy with the flaming skull avatar.
You knew the moderator who always typed in perfect grammar.
You knew the user with 30,000 posts who somehow replied to every thread within six minutes.
You knew the mysterious account that only appeared when something interesting happened.
None of this required a face.
The identity lived inside the interface.
That still happens now. The interfaces just got prettier.
A Crypto Twitter account with a frog PFP, a Telegram handle and a wallet address is not really that different from an old forum user with a custom avatar and an absurd reputation score.
Different costume.
Same basic instinct.
Pseudonyms make people weird in useful ways
Using a name that is not your real name changes how you behave.
Sometimes it makes people worse.
Obviously.
But it can also make people more interesting.
A pseudonym gives you permission to talk about things you would never attach to your government name. It lets people experiment with humour, opinions, aesthetics, communities, business ideas, art, sexuality, money, status, whatever.
Sometimes the fake name becomes more honest than the real one.
That sounds like fake-deep internet philosophy, but anyone who spent years on forums knows exactly what I mean.
The guy named DeathMetal420 might have been a quiet 15-year-old in school and an absolute encyclopedia of guitar equipment online.
Both versions were real.
One just had somewhere better to exist.
This is where the word LARP gets messy.
If every online identity is selective, when does curation become pretending?
Nobody uploads every version of themselves.
You don't post the boring parts.
You don't use every opinion you have in every room.
You talk differently in a Discord full of friends than you do on LinkedIn.
You probably talk differently on a burner account than you do on Instagram.
That does not automatically make any of those versions fake.
It means identity is contextual.
The internet made that obvious because it gave us buttons for it.
The platforms changed. The behaviour didn't.
Forums gave you avatars and signatures.
MSN gave you display names and status messages.
Myspace gave you music, layouts and a Top 8 that could cause actual diplomatic incidents.
Tumblr gave people entire aesthetic identities.
Reddit gave everyone disposable little pseudonyms.
Twitter turned the username into a public reputation graph.
Instagram pushed identity toward images.
TikTok turned personality itself into a content format.
Crypto made anonymous identities financially relevant.
Now you can have a person you have never seen, under a name that does not exist, using a JPEG they do not own, with thousands of people trusting their opinions about millions of dollars.
And somehow that feels normal after about three days online.
The basic machinery never changed much.
Pick a name.
Pick an image.
Start talking.
People begin associating certain things with you.
Do it long enough and the account develops a personality.
That personality becomes reputation.
The reputation becomes status.
Eventually people can feel like they know a person who technically has never told them who they are.
That's extremely weird when you describe it out loud.
The real-name internet was almost the strange part
For a while, platforms pushed hard toward real identity.
Real names.
Real photos.
Real schools.
Real employers.
The internet briefly started feeling less like a collection of weird little worlds and more like a giant searchable phone book where everybody's mother could find them.
But pseudonyms never disappeared.
They just moved.
Gaming kept them.
Reddit kept them.
Forums kept them.
Tumblr kept them.
Crypto practically worshipped them.
And now anonymous and semi-anonymous accounts are everywhere again.
Probably because playing with identity is one of the things people actually like about being online.
You can make an account for one obsession.
You can build a character around one sense of humour.
You can become known for one very specific thing.
You can start over.
You can separate parts of yourself.
You can be louder, quieter, stranger, more serious or more ridiculous than you are somewhere else.
Most of the time nobody calls that LARPing because the word usually gets saved for when the performance feels exaggerated or fake.
But the raw material is the same.
Username.
Avatar.
Voice.
Reputation.
Audience.
The internet did not invent pretending.
It just gave everybody a character creation screen.