I’ve been thinking this week about the strange case of Craig Barth. Craig Barth is (was?) the CEO of a company named Devil Mountain Software that supposedly made benchmarking software for Windows programs and computers — when companies want to know how much time it should take their employees to work with certain programs, they’d run Barth’s program and find out. Barth was used as a source often by the bloggers and writers at a site called InfoWorld (as well as other outlets, including Fox News, and even Gizmodo at one point), usually claiming that Windows Vista was bloated and slow, and that anyone who used it was probably a fool.

There’s only one problem (and no, it’s not that Vista isn’t bloated and slow). Craig Barth doesn’t actually exist. Turns out he was an alias of one Randall C. Kennedy, a pretty well-known guy who also works for InfoWorld as a commentator and columnist (usually also, probably not coincidentally, spouting off various controversial opinions about operating systems). Kennedy actually does own a company called Devil Mountain Software, and he claims that he started the alias simply to separate his blogging and his working personas. Which in and of itself might not have been a problem, except that he was blogging and working on the same things. Using a pen name is one thing, but actually hiding your identity while posing as a source for the exact same publication you’re writing for is really another. He never directly quoted “Barth” for his own stories, but he apparently did talk about the company in third-person without revealing the tie, and he was more than happy to be quoted elsewhere, including on the very site he worked for, under a fake name.

There is some confusion here — Kennedy actually claims that his editors and the writer who sourced him knew all about the dual identity, while they claim that they had no idea (and the publication has subsequently fired him). He also says that it was totally fine for him to use two identities — when he started up the company, “Craig Barth” was an alias that he came up with to keep his public and company personas separate, and it’s only when “Craig Barth” started getting quoted that trouble arose.

Whatever the truth (and Kennedy doesn’t actually seem to care anyway — he claims the whole identity reveal is an attack on him by Microsoft, and that he’s living out the rest of his days on the beach), this whole episode has me thinking about fake identities online. They’re so easy to create — signing up for a Gmail address, a domain with hosting, and a Paypal account is almost enough to make a company out of whole HTML these days — and they seem so easy to keep anonymous that when a situation presents itself where you might want to keep one reputation separate from another, why not be “Craig Barth” instead of Randall Kennedy?

But that’s the key here — your identity is your reputation, and while a fake identity may allow you to escape some of your own actions or words some of the time, I’d like to think that even on the Internet, you’ll eventually be held responsible. I can think of quite a few manufactured online identities — this kid who created an airline, Fake Steve, Ferrarro the WoW paladin, EA spouse, Belle du Jour, and so on — and in every single case, we eventually found out who was who. Sometimes, the revealed party was punished, sometimes rewarded with a book deal, but even online, the person hiding eventually had to face the light.

When I tweeted something to that effect yesterday, my colleague Eliah Hecht pointed out that we just haven’t heard about the ones who are still keeping their secrets, which is definitely true. But on a long enough scale, and especially when the identity really is used to circumvent ethical or legal constraints, I believe most major secrets come to light. We eventually found out who Deep Throat was — if a guy who can bring down the President anonymously can eventually be revealed, Joe Blogger who pretends to be as Jane Blogger doesn’t have a chance in the larger scheme of things.

That won’t stop guys like Randall Kennedy from thinking they can still get away with it. Your identity, even in this virtual age, is your reputation, and your reputation is everything. Can you keep your word? Can you be who you say that you are? Can you represent yourself in a worthwhile way, and do and post things online in a way that you’d want to be proud of, rather than hiding behind a secret identity and hoping no one finds out?

I know I’m moralizing here, and I know this could come back around in my face. Maybe someday in the future, I’ll be put in just such a situation where I think it’s easier to hide behind a fake name rather than live up to what I say and do, and I’ll eventually get caught, and someone will come back to this post and call me a hypocrite. I’d deserve it.

And so, while I hope that doesn’t ever happen, I will agree that sometimes, you need a fake identity. To use my examples from before, Fake Steve made his fortune with his, and EA Spouse and Belle du Jour probably would have never written what they’d written if not for anonymity. Brooke Magnanti, a.k.a. Belle, said that the anonymity she used “will always have a reason to exist, for writers whose work is too damaging or too controversial to put their names on.” I can’t argue with that — there are exceptions to every rule, and certainly there are times when names have to be left out if it, if not changed completely.

But I do think it’s best to try and avoid that situation if possible. Even Magnanti admits that once she came clean, it felt much better “not to have to tell lies, hide things from the people I care about.” That’s what should keep guys like Kennedy from doing what they do — not the fear of being caught or the punishment of revelation, but the gnawing feeling that you’re failing your job as a writer to tell the truth whenever you put words down. Even the people who have to hide behind a fake name shouldn’t want to. And if you’re using a fake name to hide something you’re simply not proud of (or that you can get in trouble for doing or saying), you’ve got no excuse at all.

So Mike Schramm is my name, and hopefully everything I do and say, even online, will appear under it in the future. I’ve got enough trouble keeping this reputation going — hopefully the time won’t ever arise when I need to start up a whole new one.