Yesterday, eating lunch in the cafeteria, I ran into a small incident dripping with workplace irony.
Someone walked toward me — an utterly familiar face, yet I couldn’t for the life of me recall his name. Back at my desk, I flipped through the contact list and checked the org chart until it finally clicked: an old colleague from my previous company, from the data-warehouse team, someone I’d crossed paths with plenty on business.
I messaged him first: “Bro, just ran into you in the cafeteria.”
He replied politely: “I’m getting a bit old, didn’t recognize you. Who is this?”
I gave my alias from the old company. He got it instantly: “Oh, right, hello bro xx. Your real name — I really can’t remember it.”
That brief exchange says everything about the most honest reality of the internet workplace: we remember each other’s code names but have forgotten each other’s real names. Once you leave the company, even if you recognize the face, you can’t necessarily produce the person’s real name.
Aliases: Standard Issue at Internet Companies
In the internet workplace ecosystem, the “huaming” — the work alias — has long been standard issue.
Alibaba’s wuxia flavor, Pinduoduo’s fruits-and-vegetables flavor, Three Squirrels’ squirrel flavor — all kinds of alias systems, packaged by companies as cultural badges of flatness, youthfulness, no hierarchy, and sentiment. Externally, it’s the trendy symbol that sets internet companies apart from traditional enterprises; internally, it’s a warm-hearted design for closing the distance between colleagues and dissolving workplace formality.
But strip away the romantic jianghu filter, and the alias was never a simple workplace-nickname game.
It is a meticulously engineered soft management tool — zero cost, high yield — hiding the enterprise’s multiple layers of calculation over employees, commerce, and risk.
Most Core: Severing the Private Self, Building Standardized “Workplace Tools”
A name is each person’s legal, unique identity marker, carrying private identity, social relationships, and personal emotions. An alias, by contrast, is a company-owned, functional virtual code name.
By mandating alias use across every scenario, internet companies complete a clean severance between the private self and the workplace self.
Office software, meeting notes, performance tickets, project archives, cross-department collaboration — every workplace scenario retains only traces of the alias, while the real name is hidden away in back-end systems that almost nobody looks at. Immersed in this environment long enough, employees form a powerful psychological suggestion:
The alias is a tool that serves work only; the real name is the true self.
This identity split gradually dulls a person’s emotional perception, leading employees to actively downplay the influence of private life and personal needs on work, and to more obediently accept high-intensity labor, harsh reviews, and workplace rules.
At the same time, aliases achieve “atomized isolation” of employees. Colleagues know only each other’s virtual code names, with no way to learn the other’s real identity, social resources, or private background — making stable offline connections hard to build. This cuts off at the root any possibility of employees banding together to defend their rights, forming private cliques, or collectively resisting policies, dramatically lowering the company’s personnel-management costs.
Most Insidious: Faking Equality, Masking the Real Hierarchy
“Aliases for everyone, everyone is equal” is the companies’ favorite pitch. But this equality is only a symbolic disguise on the surface.
Traditional companies distinguish hierarchy bluntly through job titles; employees can clearly sense the gaps in salary and rank, which easily breeds comparison, resentment, and thoughts of quitting. The all-hands alias model smooths over surface-level status differences — newcomers and outsiders can hardly judge someone’s rank, equity, or pay from what they’re called — greatly reducing the internal friction caused by benefit gaps.
What’s more, big-tech aliases hide implicit grade rules. Some veteran companies keep the unwritten rule that “three-character aliases are for mid-to-senior management, two-character aliases for rank-and-file employees”; the same business line shares an exclusive prefix to form faction circles; old-timers occupy scarce aliases with superb connotations, while newcomers are left with obscure characters and offbeat code names.
Seemingly free naming rules in fact quietly solidify seniority tiers and spawn a brand-new kind of workplace rat race.
Most Pragmatic: Building Commercial Walls Against Information and Talent Risk
The alias system doesn’t just serve internal management; it’s also a key barrier guarding the enterprise’s commercial interests.
In external business dealings, industry summits, and public project announcements, aliases always replace real names, so competitors can’t precisely match an employee’s code name to their actual résumé, core permissions, or job responsibilities. This design neatly dodges the risk of core talent being targeted by headhunters, and protects the company’s core business architecture, strategic layout, and data secrets.
Even when internal information leaks or business-related PR storms arise, outside opinion and competitors struggle to trace things back to specific individuals — preserving the company’s reputation while avoiding the secondary risk of commercial information exposure.
For the enterprise, the alias is a zero-cost, high-efficiency commercial-secrecy barrier.
Final Thoughts: Stay Clear-Headed, Refuse Identity Alienation
From a warm cultural filter to precise managerial discipline, the alienation of the internet alias system is essentially the ultimate expression of capital’s management logic: achieving four management goals — identity reshaping, hierarchy hiding, commercial secrecy, and risk transfer — at the lightest possible symbolic cost.
It imposes no rigid institutional constraints, yet it domesticates employees around the clock and imperceptibly, weaving workplace discipline into every detail of daily communication.
For us workers, there’s no need to resist alias culture itself — but we must keep a clear-headed sense of boundaries. Always distinguish the tool-like code name the company assigns from your one-and-only true self; don’t let the alias bind your identity, and don’t let the jianghu narrative shape your mindset.
Only by seeing through the underlying logic behind workplace symbols can you hold on to yourself — and protect your rights — within the regimented workplace order.
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