> I tried talking to my children about leaving as clean of a footprint on the internet as one can in anticipation of future people/systems taking that into consideration.
I don’t think you’re wrong, but the fact that people consider it inevitable we’ll all have an immutable social acceptance grade that includes everything from teenage shitposts to things you said after a loved one died, or getting diagnosed with cancer, makes me regret putting even a moment of my professional energies towards advancing tech in the US.
I think he's wrong and I'm willing to say that. The ability for people to move beyond the fundamental attribution error is well known and takes major resources to correct that. For anyone that posts a comment, assuming you want to have easy attribution later is that you must future proof your words. That is not possible and it is extremely suppressive to express yourself.
For example: "Ellen Page is fantastic in the Umbrella Academy TV show" Innocent, accurate, support, and positive in 2019.
Same comment read after 1 Dec 2020 (Transition coming out): Insensitive, demeaning, in accurate.
> That is not possible and it is extremely suppressive to express yourself.
Also for the fact that you cannot predict how future powers will view past comments - for instance, certain benign political views 20 years ago could become "terroristic speech" tomorrow.
I operate by a simple, general rule - I don't often say anything online I wouldn't say directly to someone's face in real life.
> I operate by a simple, general rule - I don't often say anything online I wouldn't say directly to someone's face in real life.
More people should keep this same energy. I try to stress this to my kids and it feels like it's falling on deaf ears in regards to my teen. Alas.
I can be a rude prick online sometimes, but I can be in real life too - basically though the reason I do this is I never want it to be some huge surprise IRL if someone sees what I write online and be like, "wow, I didn't know that about him." I'm pretty much what I am online and IRL the same. For some reason this seems to matter for me, at least in the past when people have tried to like, send employers stuff I may have written online. The reaction is like "oh, yea, we knew that already about him."
Nothing terrible, maybe slightly embarrassing, but you know how online spaces can be. just be yourself basically, at least I try to be.
Your framing is interesting. You may feel that you can’t change who you are in real life, but people have a choice on how they behave online (or choose not to engage at all). So you could choose to be nice (or at least not a jerk); I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t get people writing to your employer complaining. I’d argue that if you know you’re sometimes a jerk, it’d be less stressful for you and others if you didn’t bring that energy online.
Sure, there is a choice. it’s rarely/never been stressful for me though, and I value being who I am for my own reasons as a strength and not a weakness. I always try to play by the moderation rules as I can possibly and realistically do. some of what I’ve written online has gotten me opportunities it wouldn’t have if i’d been more hesitant.
My point is if you have a good track record what you maintain online vs irl doesn’t matter as much to people as you’d maybe think as long as you are being true to yourself. I’m an elder millennial though, so that’s always been the case online for me and i dont think i often get out of pocket online anyway.
maybe that won’t be the case in the future. I could write a lot more than I’d care to publicly about personal and implied threats I’ve received based on my writings, but caving to that to me would betray my own values and I choose to consume the web how i choose knowing possible consequences - plus the fact moderation standards and what is “rude” drastically differs amongst platforms.
As someone who gets dopamine hits from downvotes on HN, I approve of your behavior!
>just be yourself basically
Yea, it is boring when everyone is the same. I would like a rude but interesting world (even if I might not survive long in one), than a nice, boring one.
This is very import: you don't know how the cancelation culture will be in 20 years.
I like to use the example of a guy who did a blackface in a party back in 2000's. Although reprehensible, was not commom-sense racism back then. Today society sees it as completely unacceptable.
Eventually that guy became prime minister of Canada and things went pretty bad when that photo surfaced decades later.
Is it far to judge someone's actions by the lens of a different culture? When the popular opinion comes, they won't care about historical context.
I think the problem with this, especially amongst younger people, is having spent so much time online, they don't know where to draw this line anymore.
Interesting. You could probably get into trouble in those two places for extremely different things you said.
of course, and it has happened, but I think authenticity is usually appreciated
what two places?
I think it’s naive to assume the private companies selling these services will know, let alone care, let alone disclose when their black box models botch things like this. The companies currently purporting to provide this exact service to HR departments for hiring decisions clearly didn’t let that stop them.
> Same comment read after 1 Dec 2020 (Transition coming out): Insensitive, demeaning, in accurate.
I genuinely don't understand this. Are you sure you're not imagining possible offenses against some non-existent standard?
well, how about "abortion legal" to "abortion murder"... possible to see this coming, but I know doctors in NY who are now afraid to travel to Texas.
How about DEI initiatives as good things in 2024 and a mark of evil in 2025? Lots of people were fired because in 2024 their boss told them to work on DEI and they did what their boss told them to do. Turns out this was a capital offense.
> because in 2024 their boss told them
I am not commenting on your specific example of DEI but I want to make the general point that you are always responsible for what you do, irregardless of whether you were told to do it by your boss, or commanding officer, or whatever.
So again, I don't care about the specific example you used but if something is 'in fashion' and you go along with it, including at work, then you are ultimately responsible for that choice. Because it is always a choice, including being a hard choice that results in you losing your job.
standards change over time. Grandfather clauses are a courtesy, not a right.
Society's legally double standard:
- people can create new standards that will be applied retroactively
- lawmakers can create new laws which can not be applied retroactively
>lawmakers can create new laws which can not be applied retroactively Still a courtesy:
The Incident: In 1988, during a quarrel over a man, Gehris pulled another woman's hair. She was charged with misdemeanor battery. No witnesses appeared in court, and on the advice of a public defender, she pleaded guilty. She received a one-year suspended sentence with one year of probation. Outcome: Gehris avoided deportation when the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles granted her a pardon in March 2000, which removed the immigration ground for her removal.Source Coverage: The story was detailed in Anthony Lewis's New York Times columns:
https://www.nytimes.com/2000/01/08/opinion/abroad-at-home-th...These columns highlighted how IIRIRA's broad definition of "aggravated felony" swept up many long-term permanent residents with minor, often decades-old convictions, separating families and deporting people who had lived nearly their entire lives in the United States.
The Gehris case became a frequently cited example in immigration advocacy and legal scholarship about the harsh consequences of mandatory deportation provisions for lawful permanent residents. If you'd like, I can search for the original NYT articles or additional reporting on her case.
This is easy. Have your own standards based on your own reason and navigate any arbitrary standards LCD majority of the society cooks up from time to time.
That we identify social media as "tech" is very strange.
Yes, they have a lot of servers. But that isn't their core innovation. Their core innovations are the constant expansion of unpermissioned surveillance, the integration of dossiers, correlating people's circumstances, behavior and psychology. And incentivizing the creation of addictive content (good, bad, and dreck) with the massive profits they obtain when they can use that as the delivery vector for intrusively "personalized" manipulation, on behest of the highest bidder, no matter how sketchy, grifty or dishonest.
Unpremissioned (or dark patterned, deceptive, surreptitious, or coercive permissioned) surveillance should be illegal. It is digital stalking. Used as leverage against us, and to manipulate us, via major systems spread across the internet.
And the fact that this funds infinite pages of addicting (as an extremely convenient substitute for boredom) content, not doing anyone or society any good, is a mental health, and society health concern.
Tech scaling up conflicts of interest, is not really tech. Its personal information warfare.
I didn’t say I hated technology, generally— I said I hate what the industry has morphed into in the US. What is or isn’t tech is immaterial. All of the odious things you listed are things that the ‘tech industry’ does, largely unquestioned, these days. Frankly, it’s sickening.