Someone Who Isn't Me?

Yes, this was a common phrase in early psychedelic and other drug experience sharing forums. Like a verbal talisman people believe kept them from incriminating themselves. I haven't thought about it in years. Delightful.

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Aurornis 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

In some online drug forums it was believed that if you used SWIM instead of I for all of your posts, the government was powerless to use any of the posts against you. You can still find threads on forums where everyone is saying SWIM did this and SWIM experienced that as if they have discovered a loophole to protect themselves from the law.

It always reminded me of those FTP servers in the early days of the internet that had big warning banners declaring the law enforcement was not allowed to connect.

	▲	culi 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I feel like most people didn't actually believe it would somehow grant them legal protection but still used it kinda tongue-in-cheek. I think it's kinda cute and still use "my friend Swim..." in a joking way when talking about legally dubious escapades

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mistersquid 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Someone Who Isn't Me?

Funny, I saw “SWIM” and reasoned “Someone Who Is Me”, thinking “is not” would be represented as “Is Not” instead of the contraction. :)

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awesome_dude 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah - I was going to ask... for a friend