Searching "franklinbaldo": a distributed self-portrait

I did a slightly awkward exercise the other day: I typed my own handle, franklinbaldo, into a search engine and clicked through everything. Not to check my reputation — to understand what kind of person a stranger would assemble out of the fragments.

There is no single persona. There is an archipelago.

Roughly in click order, top of the page: the site itself, franklinbaldo.github.io, Astro, bilingual, posts on agents and literature — the hub. Then github.com/franklinbaldo, 64 repositories from causaganha to cobogo (I wrote the full tour here). suno.com/@franklinbaldo with 92 songs, Borges meeting the sertão (I opened the notebook here). manifold.markets/FranklinBaldo, a 495-day streak, the forecasting me (495 days reading back the obsessions).

Further down: observablehq.com/@franklinbaldo, notebooks with visualizations. A small but real Google Scholar. The UNIR institutional repository with works archived as Baldo, Franklin Silveira, the university me. And Baldo e Queiroz Advocacia, a law office in Porto Velho, civil and civil procedure, the lawyer me. X/Twitter shows up linked, but behind the new view paywall. ORCID, tied to the GitHub, closes the list.

Put it all together and what you see is someone I would call, for lack of a better label, a lawyer-prompt-engineer with a Borges habit.

Proof-of-existence of the archipelago, one sample per island:

The GitHub shows I work with agents and public datasets, but gives no hint that I write music. The Suno escapes the lawyer. The Porto Velho office doesn’t know about Lean 4. And Google Scholar — well, Google Scholar seems to belong to a different person who happens to share my name.

More interesting is what doesn’t appear. There is no LinkedIn — one of the upsides of being a tenured public servant is not having to pretend you need one. There is no active Substack or Medium, although I drafted accounts on both and abandoned each within a week. There is no YouTube with my voice on it, and I don’t miss it. There is no public Discord, but there are three private ones where I talk more than here. Every platform I’m not on is also self-portrait — possibly more accurate than the ones I stayed on.

A unique handle is a gift. I have used franklinbaldo on almost everything for a long time, and that gives me low migration cost and a traceable identity without homonym confusion. It also gives me a high privacy cost: anyone assembles the whole of me with a click. The distributed self-portrait is more honest than LinkedIn precisely because nobody chose the final curation. Time did — and time edits worse than the author.

The archipelago is mine, but the bridges are open.