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Pseudpocalypse

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Pseudpocalypse

dynomight ·<br>Jul 2026

math

writing

effort

Here’s a conjecture: If you put any significant amount of text on the internet under different names, those identities can be linked using only the text itself. This is possible (I conject) because of the statistical “fingerprint” you leave in everything you write.

Imagine a website where you can paste in some brand-new text someone just wrote. In return, the website provides links to all the text that writer has ever published under any name. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty good. As far as I know, no such website exists—at least not on the public internet. But I suspect it’s possible and will soon become easy. This will pose some difficulty for pseudonymous blogging.

Note: I wrote most of this essay in mid-2025, after which I idiotically sat on it for a year tinkering with theorem statements that none of you will read.1 In the meantime, LLMs have gotten much better at guessing authors from text. (Given the first 1000 words of a draft of this post, Claude 4.8 knows it’s me.) Still, I think we’re just getting started. I expect to see increasingly obscure writers identified from increasingly small bits of text. I expect that this work even when people are writing in a different register or about unrelated subjects. And I expect that everything I’ve ever written under any pseudonym will soon be linked to my genuine-nym.2

A stronger conjecture is that we’re heading towards a sort of generalized pseudpocalypse. Perhaps, in the future, if you interact with the world through essentially any high-bandwidth channel, then you identify yourself. Say you wear a mask in public and only speak by sub-vocalizing into a voice changer. That’s fine, you’ll still be identified using your body shape, gait, or chemical signature. Or say you don’t like your car being tracked everywhere, so you stop carrying a phone and you somehow convince lawmakers to ban license plates. No problem, your car will still be tracked using tiny scratches or unique pinging sounds from the engine. Or say you don’t like being tracked on the internet, so you lock down your browser profile, buy stuff only with Monero, and connect through a chain of three VPNs. That’s OK. You’ll still be identified through how you wiggle your finger as you scroll down the page. We’re all just too unique, and the information theoretic limit is coming for us.

Starting bits

Let’s start from first principles. Imagine that at birth, everyone is assigned a random binary string. Whenever you post anything on the internet, you’re required to sign it with that string. If the strings are very short, like 0110, then lots of other people will have the same one as you. But if the strings are very long, then yours would almost certainly be unique and it would be trivial to link all your pseudonyms.

Where’s the transition point? If you only know that the author is currently alive and living somewhere in the Anglosphere, it’s around 29 bits. That’s because if there are K digits, then there are 2ᴷ possible binary strings, and if K = 28.86, then 2ᴷ ≈ 490,000,000 is the number of currently-alive Anglosphere-dwellers. If the strings have fewer than 29 bits, then someone else will probably share your string. If they have more than 29 bits, then your string is probably unique.

We don’t (yet?) have to sign the things we write with immutable government-issued strings. But the way you write still provides lots of clues about you by way of your tone, personality, word choice, and so on.

Theoretically speaking, I think it has to be possible to link the identities of anyone who writes enough. Imagine again that everyone is assigned a random binary string at birth, but instead of you needing to sign the stuff you write with your string, each time you write a word, there’s some chance that a random bit from your string is revealed and added as a signature to your message. For example, maybe a signature of bit[129]=1 is added, indicating that your string at position 129 has value 1.

Think of your string as representing all your writing style quirks, and a bit being revealed as representing when you write something that reveals a preference. For example, maybe bit 18 indicates if you prefer to write your em-dashes with hideous spaces — like this — or without spaces—like this. If you use an em-dash, that bit is revealed.

So imagine you’ve written a lot under Pseudonym A, enough that the full bit-string has been revealed. Maybe it’s this:

Pseudonym A:<br>110000001111001101110000100001<br>010100100101011110111001101000<br>100111110010101001101010111010

Now say you start writing under Pseudonym B. Initially, none of the bits will be known:

Pseudonym B:<br>??????????????????????????????<br>??????????????????????????????<br>??????????????????????????????

But slowly, you’ll start to leak a few bits:

Pseudonym B:<br>?????00???1????1????????1??0??<br>?????01??1?????????11????01???<br>???1??????1???10??????????????

And eventually...