Two dollars and your identity is out there

Two dollars per person. That’s what it costs now to link your anonymous account to your real name, your address, your employer. Used to be you’d need to hire a private investigator, shell out thousands of dollars, wait weeks. Now you just feed your Twitter posts and LinkedIn profile into an LLM and boom, done. And you actually thought a pseudonym still meant something. Adorable.

Everyone’s talking about what an AI breakthrough this is. Like machines suddenly got intelligent. Bullshit. This is just cheap automation of work that’s always been happening. Stalkers did this. Police did this. Companies hired people to build profiles on activists and journalists. The only difference? Facebook now sells access to all your posts. LinkedIn sells recruiter tools that make everything searchable. TikTok profits from your viewing pleasure while selling everything you ever watched. The infrastructure was already there, neatly built by platforms that let you post, read and watch for free in exchange for all your data.

Now along comes an LLM that stitches the whole mess together for the price of coffee. And there you are, completely unmasked, with all your opinions, doubts and that one stupid statement from three years ago that’s now haunting you. But here’s where it gets really ugly. It’s not even about what they do with that information. It’s about what happens in your head once you know they can. You become careful. Compliant. That critical question about your employer? Never mind. Those doubts about politics? Too risky. That struggle with who you are? Not where anyone’s watching.

Or not, of course. Because next week we’ll have forgotten all this and just post our entire soul online again. We’ve got the memory of a goldfish and the self-preservation instinct of a lemming crawling toward the cliff edge.