"Ginevra Davis studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford and now works in art and design. She writes about technology and youth culture."
One step would be to stop using your state-issued name on the internet. "Cr4zyBoy4eva" is a bit better than the Facebook/LinkedIn-mandated "real name", but rather childish, hence why an arbitrary UUID string might be a better fit. "There are no girls on the internet" and "on the internet men are men, women are also men, and children are FBI agents" point to a deeper truth, which will only be amplified by the post-Turing test chatbots, beyond ChatGPT: the internet is not for humans, there are no humans on the internet, don't be a human on the internet.
While you're technically correct that the state does not pick the specific name you are given, in many cases they restrict which names you can register. Germany has restrictions on both given names and surnames. State-given name is a misnomer for the concept though, they should have said state-registered name.
And how did your parents became Mr. and Mrs. Smith? In all the countries the "family" name for the hoi polloi was mandated once the state consolidated. Before, your father's grand^x-father, who was a blacksmith, was simply known, for the Dunbar's number of people who knew him, as 'John, the blacksmith', maybe 'John, Mary's son' if there were two Johns around. Look at how most of the Scandinavian "family" names end in "sen" or "datter" meaning, well, son and daughter.
This may come as a surprise, but in most western countries, to a first approximation, people can change the name they use when interacting with the state to whatever they want, whenever they want. The process does involve a small bit of tedium, but really isn't particularly onerous or expensive.
I've had multiple names over the course of my life (and notes linking them together in various documents should I ever need to prove to someone that the person with name A is the same as the person with name B; to date, I never have). It's pretty common.
Moreover, people can use whatever name they want in whatever places they want on the internet, and don't have to be obvious about it when it's not the same name they use in other places online or offline. If I tell someone my name is John Smith, 99.9% of the time all they need that information for is to know that I am the same person they interacted with previously; they don't need to know or care what my bank or my family call me, nor is there any reason for me to tell them.
There's an amusing anecdote that does the rounds about Napoleon mandating a national register in the Netherlands, and the Dutch not taking kindly to that by registering using all kinds of silly names. Unfortunately for them the register stuck and centuries later there's people going through life being called "John Big Buttocks" and such.
Amusing but alas, from when I looked into it it seemed like it was made up.
Not amusing, but true, is the story of Willem Arondeus [1], who in 1943 destroyed 800,000 identity cards from the Municipal Office for Population Registration in Nazi-occupied Netherlands in order to increase the efficiency of forged documents. The state power, murderous or not, is the sole beneficiary of the "family" name.
"Ginevra Davis studied Symbolic Systems at Stanford and now works in art and design. She writes about technology and youth culture."
One step would be to stop using your state-issued name on the internet. "Cr4zyBoy4eva" is a bit better than the Facebook/LinkedIn-mandated "real name", but rather childish, hence why an arbitrary UUID string might be a better fit. "There are no girls on the internet" and "on the internet men are men, women are also men, and children are FBI agents" point to a deeper truth, which will only be amplified by the post-Turing test chatbots, beyond ChatGPT: the internet is not for humans, there are no humans on the internet, don't be a human on the internet.