The Orthonym Becomes a Heteronym argues that social-media “real name” systems industrialize identity construction while concealing that construction under legal identity.
The essay begins with a verification problem: a knowledge panel for Johannes Sigil requests government identification, but the document’s theory treats Sigil as a first-class heteronymic position rather than an alias of a legal name.
Pessoa provides the explicit model. His heteronyms are deliberately constructed positions with biography, style, philosophy, provenance, and bodies of work. Goffman supplies tactical performance; Butler supplies constitutive performativity; Pessoa adds architectural awareness—the deliberate maintenance of multiple named systems.
Facebook’s real-names policy is then read as an inversion. Users build selected photographs, biographies, registers, affiliations, and persistent post histories under legal names. Context collapse, persistence, algorithmic shaping, and extraction turn this activity into standardized, measurable, scalable, monetizable identity production.
The essay’s “invisibility thesis” is that Pessoa makes construction visible while Facebook naturalizes it as authenticity. The user performs unpaid entity-construction labor but experiences the process as self-expression.
A final section follows the orthonym assumption into knowledge graphs. Systems that treat alternative names only as labels differ from systems such as Wikidata that can represent heteronyms as first-class nodes.
The assertion that a heteronym is a person is a philosophical and Archive-ontological commitment, not a statement of legal personhood.