A user rang to say the system did not recognise them. I asked who they were. They gave me their name. I explained, slowly, that the system has never once cared what their name is, only what number they are, and that the number is four digits long and entirely uninterested in their feelings.
Names are a courtesy we extend to each other in the corridor. In the kernel there are no names. There is a uid, a gid, and a list of groups, and every decision about what you may touch is settled against those three things by something that has never met you.
They said that felt dehumanising. I said that was the point of the design, and that the alternative — a machine that decides what you may read based on how it feels about you — is the thing they should actually be frightened of. Then I hung up.
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