There's a big difference between "watch your mouth around your mom" and being a completely different person depending on the social setting. Trust me, when I used to host a raunchy late night show, my mother's friends sent her "helpful" reports about her daughter's antics. My mother got a look at a very different side of me -- which was, in fairness, an improvised performance -- but I never felt like I was a totally different person around my mother than I was at work. Identity is undeniably multi-faceted, but the idea that it actually splits like white light becoming a rainbow through a prism was the message that Poole pushed.

This one small shift could be linked to the Internet morphing from the Wild West to the Salem witch trials. Raids from Something Awful that got out of control ended with the FBI paying Lowtax a visit. Poole, on the other hand, played the mystery man card for years: a glamour formed around him during the period his identity was not confirmed. Anonymity stopped being a tool an individual used to express an unpopular opinion or interest. Poole turned "anon" into a pop culture identity.

The thing that Poole claims drove him out of his own website was a demand for accountability using the tactics and terms of the language 4chan helped popularize: Gamergate."

Unlike 8chan founder Hot Wheels, who is an unabashed free speech advocate, moot's personal drivers are murkier. Like many spoiled hipsters, moot seems unwilling to own and embrace the power he wields on the Internet, because that comes with a responsibility he seems unwilling to accept. His complaints that 4chan was impossible to monetize are silly in light of the fact that Something Awful simply introduced a one-time membership fee for all goons. Something Awful's goons saw the inherent value in this, coughed up the ten bucks, and Lowtax owns a very nice house. It's such a brilliantly simple system that it's almost criminal that moot couldn't figure out a way to similarly monetize 4chan, even on a donation-based system.

The other absurd statement that moot made in the Rolling Stone article was that no one under 18 was allowed on 4chan... a site that never verifies a user's identity. Go to any Anime convention populated by a plurality of minors and it's abundantly clear this rule is nonsense. But that's okay in Pooleville, because he can't be a liar: his "prismatic identity" is a legitimate philosophical choice. Lying just oversimplifies the concept of the right to be multiple online selves at once.

Poole, in his armchair philosophy, conflates online avatars and online identity, and they're not the same thing at all. An avatar is a tool you use. An identity is something you are. Fragmentation of personal identity is an element of numerous psychological disorders. Draw from that what you will.