Namedropping &#8220;ESR&#8221;
<p>For at least fifteen years my name and its tri-letterization has been something with which you could conjure up a lot of attention among hackers and other sorts of geek. This fact presented the more clueful of my personal friends with a delicate problem: under what circumstances would it be proper for them to invoke this instrument?</p>
<p>I have actually been asked for guidance about this more than once.  I developed some guidelines more than a decade ago.  To the best my knowledge my friends have been pretty good about applying them.  I present them here for your amusement.</p>
<p><span id="more-5266"></span></p>
<p>1. Please do not drop my name to score cheap social-status points.  That&#8217;s crass and I don&#8217;t like it.</p>
<p>2. Do drop my name if by doing so you can achieve some mission objective of which I would approve.  Examples that have come up: encouraging people to design in accordance with the Unix philosophy, or settling a dispute about hacker slang, or explaining why it&#8217;s important for everyone&#8217;s freedom for the hacker community to hang together and not get bogged down in internal doctrinal disputes.</p>
<p>3. Do drop my name if by doing it you can rock someone&#8217;s world in a positive way. A case of this that comes up fairly often is encouraging a young proto-hacker.</p>
<p>4. Do drop my name if doing so would be <em>funny</em>.  Funny is even an acceptable excuse for scoring social-status points with it &#8211; if you think I&#8217;ll laugh when I hear the story, go right ahead.</p>
<p>And yes, I apply these rules (or obvious analogs thereof) to myself.  I think it&#8217;s vulgar to wave my fame around in contexts where it&#8217;s irrelevant.  It can be very amusing, if you&#8217;re clued in, to watch what happens when somebody in a group of programmers (or gamers or SF fans or any other population that oversamples programmers) that hasn&#8217;t met me before twigs to The Presence.</p>
<p>If this attitude seems odd to you, understand that fame is exhausting and psychologically dangerous (I have a lot more sympathy for rock stars who fuck themselves up with drugs than before I felt the pressure myself). Ironic detachment from one&#8217;s own celebrity is, I have found, an effective coping strategy.</p>
