"The thing about alternative people," a coworker once said to me, many jobs ago, "is that they act like the mainstream isn't good enough for them. It's like they're saying they're better than us." He was talking about a receptionist at our office, who was kind of off-kilter, but not at all unprofessional. He didn't like her.

I think about this conversation a lot.

I like "alternative people". With all due respect to everyone else, they're my favorites. For me, the people who are off at an angle to the rest of the world are the most interesting. People who think differently and see things differently are more likely to arrive at solutions and ideas that everyone else can't. They're opinionated. They make more interesting art. They're better engineers. They find new ways to live. They don't give a shit about fashion or traditional success, or whether challenging the status quo is offensive. They are, by definition, more creative, because they're not following the herd.

I look up to them. For one thing, I do kind of think that mainstream culture isn't good enough. It shouldn't be good enough for any of us. Traditional ideas around things like gender roles and sexuality have a potent power to oppress; correspondingly, choosing not to adhere to them, or to give them respect solely for being incumbent, is a kind of empowerment.

As Winnie Lim wrote in a wonderful piece recently:

It takes courage to be ourselves, it takes a lot of hard work and self-awareness. But we are continually building a world that other people live in, that means at every step of the road, we need to continually ask ourselves, what kind of world do we want our kids to live in? Do we want a world where they have to disown their beautiful personalities just to fit in our idea of what it takes to succeed? That it is celebrated that we spend our formative years disowning who we are?

The thing that bugged me most of all about my colleague's comment is that we are all "alternative people". at least to some extent, with individual desires, histories, interests, skills and contexts, which bind together to help us become who we are. Our lives are unique tapestries woven from those threads. For everything we have in common as humans, there is so much variation between us, too, and I don't think there should ever be pressure to present as "normal". None of us are normal; we all reveal our true selves to different degrees. That's awesome.

People are amazing. The only reason to try and homogenize them is so you can dehumanize them: make neat little demographic groups that allow you to sell to them, or count them, or process them, or some combination of all three. It's an abstracted model of the world for marketing purposes, and it shouldn't be how we interact with each other in real life.

Facebook is, in many ways, like my old coworker. By insisting on legal names, they are saying that we all should present ourselves using one set of rules, regarless of our desires and contexts. What's good enough for upper middle class white kids from Palo Alto, the thinking goes, should be good enough for everyone else. The same goes for the kinds of content you can post, or how you want your profile to look.

But look: if you want the page that represents you to the world to spin around and have pink sparkles with a Carly Rae Jepson song that autoplays on load, why shouldn't you have that? It's your profile. Here's a hint: your social profile design is optimized for advertising and site engagement, not your own self-representation. Here's a follow-on question: why can't you post breastfeeding photos on Facebook? Could it be that advertisers object?

The world is much richer than the things that sell ads, but this isn't just a post about why an independent web is a good idea (although it is).

I'm lucky to have friends who very much are themselves, and who believe in diversity and not just tolerance, but proactive kindness. I'm lucky that I was raised by people who shun traditional norms and have spent their lives thinking about better, fairer ways to live. Collectively, they're my role models and my inspirations. And more than anything, I hate the idea that it might be acceptable to judge someone who - like so many of the people that I love - has chosen to present themselves as different to you.

Being different is, in my world, something to be celebrated. Cherished, even. It's what makes us human. Correspondingly, to force someone to deny their identity is to deny them a piece of their humanity. As entrepreneurs, as citizens, engineers, designers, businesspeople, whatever we are - let's maybe try not to do that.