Hey, everybody's doing it, right?

Why would I have this up?

When I was younger, I made this website as an expression of all the things I liked and was proud of. Creative work, collaborations, things to share among my friends. I put it online to amuse like-minded people, or in some cases share useful information.

Now it's become more of a liability than an asset. I'm an adult now; in fact I've been an adult for way longer than I was ever a child, and now when I look back at these things I find them mostly disposable. That's not actually a bad outcome relatively, since there are much worse things I could find them as an adult. I could find them sexist or racist or homophobic, I could find them degrading or sickening, or worst of all I could find them totally lacking in any artistic worth even as museum pieces for the way I used to think. Instead they're just curiosities to me, like old toys on a dusty shelf. They're around for me and others to glance at occasionally as a reminder of where I came from ... and a check against my judgement of younger people. These things say: "Look, you were a buffoon once, even when you thought you weren't, even though you tried your hardest not to be, you still were, especially in the eyes of adults. Now it's your turn to be the adult and make a charitable and kind interpretation of the frivolous or backward things that young people are obsessed with."

But the liability part is what stings. I could leave these online, unexplained, as the kind of examples I mean. But then I invite attention from another group. This group has emerged slowly in about the last ten years of the internet and become absurdly powerful. To put it simply, it's the modern-day version of the thought police.

For example, someone could go to this part of the website, unchanged since I was a teenager, called "the porn section", glance at the gallery of nakedness that I put there, and my lascivious commentary (unedited since I was 17 or so), and decide that I needed to be "made an example of" for my behavior. No matter that I placed it there about a quarter of a century ago, no matter that I only even remember that gallery exists maybe once every few years. The point (they might say) is that I'm turning "The Internet" into an "unsafe place".

My Liberal-minded sensibilities recognize the point these people would be trying to make. As I write this, it was just yesterday that I walked through the breakroom of my office and discovered that the company apparently had a subscription to "Rolling Stone" magazine and left the latest copy in the kitchen for people to read. Nothing wrong with that generally, except this issue had a couple of near-naked female musicians on the cover, arranged provocatively - you know the style, mouths open, legs apart, more skin than clothing, expressions almost as if someone offscreen was about to hit them with a club - and I decided that this image didn't really have any place in the lunchroom of a modern mixed-gender scientific research facility. So I casually slid it into the recycling bin and left the room. That was my choice, made simply, and in general I don't think the local fans of "Rolling Stone" will miss it enough for there to be a problem before the next issue arrives in a few weeks.

But here's the thing. "The Internet" is not my workplace. "The Internet" is not even a place. For just about everyone, it is a highly-filtered and extremely balkanized environment. Perhaps it didn't start that way and maybe people still believe it isn't, but now it is. You might as well call the solar system "one place", even though for all practical purposes it's a scattering of planets that we mostly just gaze at through telescopes. This situation changes - for the internet just as for the solar system - only when a small, highly motivated group of people decide to pay a lot of attention to something that's usually outside their purview.

So here's the point: It's quite possible that my putting pictures of naked people online could offend a stranger. But the likelihood of that happening is not just a factor of whether I put the pictures online. Sure, I could take them down and eliminate all possibility. But if I leave them up, the amount of "damage" they could do is actually relative to the amount of negative attention people decide to pay to them. As my father always responds, when people hassle him a little too much about his clothing style or the grumpy expressions he makes: "If you don't like the way I look, don't look." That advice is now advice from a generation apparently long lost, because these days the common response people make to something they don't like the look of is this:

They reproduce it, comment on it, and call attention to it. They turn their sense of disgust into a call-to-arms and spread the offending material far and wide, with name attached of course, in pursuit of "justice".

Internet shaming is now a means of entertainment, for a large enough group of people that has become dangerous. Not just dangerous to people you might think deserve it, but dangerous to people who simply appear to deserve it, through accidental - or deliberate - interpretation of what they did or said, by someone else. For example, there is absolutely no way I would ever take the "porn section" of my teenage website, print it out, and hang it on my workplace wall. There is no way I would even link to it, or to this website in general, from anything I post on my corporate pages, internal or external, or from any of my corporate accounts. That would be inappropriate. I don't want anyone to stumble randomly across that when they're interacting with me at work. It would not be fair to them.

They could always dump my name into Google and find this page, in a matter of seconds, from anywhere in the world where their smartphone gets a signal. But then they would be leaving the sphere of the workplace that I have helped to maintain. They are pursuing information about me personally, in an area that I have personal dominion over. The good thing about adults in my workplace and my neighborhood is that they've basically seen everything already (and those that haven't yet will probably go to Burning Man some year and see it all then) so there is a lot less judgement about what they might find. Plus, I have a highly-employable skill and the first page of my Google search results is pretty respectable even with 17-year-old me jockeying around in it.

That makes me one of the lucky ones. There are plenty of other people who are less able to defend themselves. The biggest example I can think of right now is schoolteachers, who not only live in fear of what their friends and family might say that could be taken out of context, but what their students might say to each other. A woman teaching gradeschool could dress like a catholic nun every day and still be the subject of prurient online gossip from teenage boys that might spin up into a rumor about inappropriate conduct and tank her entire career. That is terrifying. If someone decided to take exception to something I said years ago lingering online (it would have to be years ago, since these days I am quite careful) they could go on a huge tirade but the chances of it ruining my career are pretty low. (Unless it was something totally fabricated that somehow caught on anyway. But what can anyone do about that?)

I suspect that this modern form of entertainment has roots in "reality tv" shows, where the participants were goaded into making all their worst qualities public, to invite the viewer to feel either sympathy, or much more often, moral superiority. Feeling morally superior, and demonstrating that to others publicly, is now a national pastime. And a kind of self-defense. What better way to prove that you are a good citizen, than by making a grand "public" rejection of someone who is clearly wrong? You place yourself on the safe side of the line, and become anonymous in a crowd of the righteous. Good for you. Bad for your target - but they deserve it, right? Or - who cares? They appeared to deserve it, and that's enough for you to be safe. Better not dig too deeply or you might lose those feelings.

So that's my disclaimer. If you want to dig this up and make a stink about this, then it's you with the problem. I've placed this here as an example of how my mind worked when I was young, and I think it serves that purpose. If you want to make it the subject of a Twitter war or a Facebook tirade to impress your virtual social circle, leave me out of it.

Or as my Dad says, "If you don't like the way I look, don't look."

July 29, 2015