I D.A.R.E. you to put your name on the internet

Or that time the French army scared 10-years-old me to death so i’d “just say no” to the internet’s pedo

You know that moment when your childhood programming crashes headfirst into modern reality? That's me, every time someone asks for my Instagram handle.

Let me paint you a picture: It's 2010, I'm nine years old, and the entire grown-up world has formed a unified front to drill one message into my developing brain: **DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, PUT ANY OF YOUR INFORMATION ON THE INTERNET.**

Not your name. Not your birthday. Not even your eye color. Because if you do? Well, the bad guys™ will personally track you down, send you a message, become your friend, and that will be the end of little old you. 

No pressure, right?

And when I say every adult, I mean *every* adult. My parents delivered their "internet safety sermon" with the regularity of software updates, even though my only internet access was through the family computer in the living room, screen positioned so precisely you'd think i were under surveillance. Which, I guess, i was– hi Mom, hi Dad!¹

Here's a fun trauma response I've developed: I physically cannot put my real name on the internet without hearing the screams of every adult from my childhood warning me about my impending doom. And no, this isn't your average childhood anxiety – this is *advanced* childhood anxiety, expertly cultivated by the French education system circa 2010.

You got a visit from the town cops? I got THE ARMY!

In France, we didn't just get parental paranoia – we got state-sanctioned digital trauma! This wasn't just casual advice – this was a full-blown national curriculum.²

Throughout the year, history teachers sprinkle in these "civic rights" classes where you learn all the boring-but-important stuff: how the government works, how elections function and the like. 

The best part? The parade of guest speakers who'd visit our school, each with their own flavor of “how not to die or destroy the nation”:
- Police: "Drugs are bad!"
- Planned Parenthood: "Let's talk about relationships and safe sex!"
- Children's tribunal: "Here's who to tell if daddy hurts you!"
- The school nurse: "Please for the love of Marianne³ brush your teeth and wash your belly button!"

And then, the absolute show-stoppers: three fully-armed military dudes, in action uniform, complete with the FAMAS⁴, a helmet with weird shit sticking out, and a reinforced, camouflaged car, rolling in to explain how putting your name online sends a personalized invitation to the mafia. Oh, they brought a banger PowerPoint.⁵

How to: Fill out a form – Who said they don’t teach useful stuff in school?

The message was delivered with the subtlety of a guillotine: the internet is full of bad people who want to find you and steal your life. Thankfully, the camo dudes brought you The Solution™! 

Here were the special super secret instructions for our online aliases, to use whenever a website asked for info. Honestly, whoever designed these was playing 4D chess (or hosting the witness protection program idk):

- First name? Use the Prime Minister's (fyi: i have been Jean-Marc, Manuel – that one was scandalous because it wasn’t French; Bernard⁶, and François⁷)
- Last name? The Senate President's (sneaky way to make us learn government officials)
- Gender? The President's (which meant perpetually male – sorry, Ségolène but you would have been awful anyways⁸)
- Birthday? July 14th, Bastille Day (nothing says "I'm definitely a real person" like being born on Bastille Day⁹)
- Address? Your school's or the town hall's (both equally useless for anyone trying to find you, but now you know where you’ll have to go to cast your vote)

Looking back, it's kinda adorable how thorough they were. In a way, it’s nice to know they had our best interests in mind, even if they were a bit misguided. They really thought this through, right down to using the school's phone number for forms – this was pre-2FA, when no one would ever actually call or text.¹⁰

And you want to know the most tragic part? I ACTUALLY FOLLOWED THESE RULES.¹¹ Like the pathetically obedient little nerd I was (am? Let's be honest, some things never change), I internalized this digital paranoia so deeply that I'm pretty sure it's now part of my DNA. Apologies to my future offspring, but you’ll have to deal with this inherited stress. 

Welcome to this brave new world!

And now? I watch people share their lives online with the casual ease of someone who wasn't traumatized by militant internet safety lectures. Their Instagram feeds are living documentaries: "Here's my morning coffee! Here's my face! Here's my exact GPS coordinates! Here’s my face again"

Maybe I'm overreacting (it's called ✨trauma✨), but I physically cannot join this brave new world of digital oversharing. My inner ten-year-old screams INTERNET STRANGER DANGER every time someone asks for my LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn! The platform literally designed for putting your name out there! Yet here I am, contemplating whether I should list myself as Emmanuel Macron just to be safe. And while I might be a touch dramatic, the risks of online exposure – especially for women – are still very real.¹²

So i’ve ended up right here, writing about my digital trust issues... on the internet... under a pseudonym... because apparently, I enjoy irony almost as much as I enjoy avoiding death threats – but at least the mafia hasn't found me yet.¹³

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Now i’m very curious to hear about your internet safety lessons from the 2015s. Were you taught about it? How was the general vibe from adults in your country? Do you have any interesting memories, traumatizing events? Or did they go all fellow kids on you?

1. Actually no, i write under a pseudonym mdrr (French for lol) because TRAUMA!

2. A decade later, they’ve calmed down quite a bit (thankfully!). But they do suffer from the “fellow kids” attitude, and are always 3 apps and 1000 trends behind so it’s hard to take their advice seriously

3. God isn’t welcome in French schools, so let’s promise on our very own naked woman to uphold democracy!

4. Big guns – French-made! Idgaf about guns, but half of you are americans and i refuse to miss an occasion to dunk on y’all

5.  It was actually a LibreOffice Presentation because free software ROCKS! But that doesn’t sound as cool – and they were so fucking cool i’d have joined the army. Dad had to recall his entire military service to disgust me.

6. Bernard Caseneuve, My favorite because his nickname was the Lizard – not in an illuminati way, just for his efficient and cold-blooded response as Interior Minister during the terrorism attacks mid-2010s

7. Fançois Fillion, an actual mafia-like crook, with tax evasion, stealing public money, preferential treatment of local mafia for public work, …

8. Ségolène Royal, socialist party candidate in 2007, lost to Sarkozy (another crook, but named Nicolas so it’s all ok); has been on a downward spiral since then :/

9. We don’t actually call it Bastille Day. We just call that July 14th (or 14 juillet in the text). Sorry for interrupting your glorious read (isn’t it so good? – i wrote each word myself 😊), but it makes me tick every time i have to write it down!

10. The good old days of getting scammed, but hey, at least we were consistently paranoid!

11.  Not everyone did – as you can see by the myriad of French influencers around. My type-A goody-two-shoes personality didn’t do me any favors here! It didn’t help that i had a free-software, anti-surveillance, kinda-communist pair of parents lol

12. And more and more so, as AI develops and can be used by any random dude to find your whereabouts or generate sexual content from a single selfie

13. And neither has my grandma - which is at least half as important!