I write under the name ThresholdHuman. This choice is not accidental: it condenses, in a few letters, both what I attempt to explore and what I live myself—the condition of a human placed on a threshold, at the moment of a civilizational shift. We are leaving behind the era of the printed book, patiently built since Gutenberg, to enter the digital age, made of flows, of code, of immediacy. I belong to this in-between: no longer entirely of the old world, not yet fully of the new.
Publishing under a pseudonym is, for me, both a discipline and a protection. A discipline, because it compels my texts to stand on their own, without relying on a biography, a social status, or a public identity. A protection, because the themes I address—governance, collective narratives, upheavals, truth and fiction—can easily be twisted, caricatured, or reduced to simplistic categories. Anonymity grants me the freedom to speak, and grants you, the readers, the possibility of receiving my texts without prejudice.
For we all carry filters: a person’s profession, age, gender, or social class is enough to trigger projections, anticipatory judgments, sympathies or rejections. By publishing under a pseudonym, I seek to reduce that noise: that you might judge my writings for their coherence, their strength, or their shortcomings, without associating them with a face, a status, or a career. What matters here is not “who I am”, but what is offered, and the way it resonates within you.
I chose an Anglo-Saxon pseudonym not out of cultural preference—French is my native language, and it is in French that I write first—but out of pragmatism. The themes I explore—distributed governance, distributed computing, universal basic income, new modes of community—are more widely discussed in the Anglo-Saxon world than in the francophone sphere. For my texts to circulate easily, I always publish them in two languages: an original version in French, and a translated version in English. To have a single pseudonym, immediately legible everywhere, is a way to ensure this simplicity and efficiency.
This choice is also coherent with what I defend. In distributed governance, it is necessary that contributions be visible, traceable, accessible to all—but equally necessary that they may be made under a pseudonym, so that the evaluation of ideas is not biased by the identity of the one who brings them forth. Anonymity, in this context, is not a mask, but a condition of freedom and fairness. What I attempt here is to put this logic into practice: to make my contributions visible under a name that is coherent and stable, yet sheltered from social exposure.
ThresholdHuman, literally “the human of the threshold,” is therefore more than a pseudonym. It is a stance in writing, a way of inhabiting this passage from one civilization to another, of attempting to name the transformations we are undergoing. To write from this threshold is to accept being doubly exposed: still inhabited by the world of paper, and already traversed by the digital world. It is to accept exploring what is changing in our ways of thinking, of living together, of governing, of believing, and of creating meaning.