Most of us would be familiar with George Orwell’s 1984 invention of the memory-hole, that infamous censorship device that Big Brother used to make things that had happened, un-happen.
We try to use memory-holes all the time. Many of our social interactions depend upon them. When we ring our friends the day after the night before and apologise for what we said after the second bottle of merlot, that’s a memory-hole. When we pass on gossip, “you didn’t hear it from me, but…”, that’s a memory-hole.
Except not. Those friends don’t really forget what you said. You just do the adult thing and apologise, and they just do the adult thing and forgive you (you hope). Your gossip partner doesn’t forget who told them the juicy tale, and they’ll just as likely return the favour some day.
The memory-hole that Winston Smith fed was a newspaper, cutting and pasting away the past. Now many of us who write, comment, administer or otherwise participate in blogging have a memory-hole of our own – the ability to make that rash comment, that flame-war, or that terribly tedious post about what we had for lunch, disappear.
Except not. Anything that ever happened online is probably retrievable by a determined cyber-sleuth. And it’s quite likely that anything galactically stupid we might have said has lodged in someone’s memory, or even been printed for posterity, and no “delete” key will change that.
In the days before print-media, people went to extraordinary lengths to crawl into a memory-hole – joining the foreign legion, changing towns, countries, names or continents. But it has always been nigh-on impossible to escape one’s reputation, whether it is a scarlet letter or John Proctor’s name.
The East-German Stasi tried to make their past disappear into a memory-hole, and the discovery of those shredded documents has driven the development of new computer software that will now match the scanned edges of millions of fragments. Rescued from the memory-hole will be the secrets the Stasi didn’t want known.
Whether it’s a memory-hole, a shredder, or a “delete” button, our past isn’t so easily disposed of as in the pages of 1984. And that’s probably a good thing.
But let’s assume there was a perfect memory-hole into which you could place all the public comments that you now regret. Would you use it? Should you? What would you put in there? What are the ethics of making the once-public, private again?
How will future generations of political and business leaders cope when their flame-wars as a spotty 19-year old are dredged up by a hideously re-animated Piers Akerman cyborg? What is a future Prime Minister to do when his sweaty LJ confessions are revealed? Personally, I think these things matter not. The prurience of public interest has always dogged public figures, and the blogosphere changes nothing in this regard.
Perhaps the most ethical way to deal with a public comment you’ve come to regret is to own up, apologise, and move on. To try to hide one’s public comments seems to me an act of shame, or guilt, or existential bad-faith that Satre would describe as death, or more accurately suicide. Those who seek to sanitise their online persona seem to me like latter-day Dorian Grays, furtively hiding their true face in a password-protected attic.
However, what if the public record is being used to hound people? What if there’s a witch-hunt on? Can there be a valid ethical case for memory-holes? If ever a suitably authoritarian government wanted to proscribe liberal thought, I daresay the writers of LP would be, as the French say, rooted.
So Winston, will you snip the past away, or save that scrap in your jacket pocket?
Heh, then I’m totally rooted Mercurius, but I dipped my toes into blogging four years ago with my eyes wide open and made the early decision to post and comment under my own name or more recently the Spinopsys moniker which is easily identified across all my online presences.
Do I step away from what I’ve said online? Nope. Do I regret some of the stuff I’ve posted and commented on, yup! But just a little bit.
Can it hurt me long term. Naah and maybe, but social media has been a big win for me personally and it’s been my best resume for some stuff and written work coming through it.
More importantly it’s allowed me to interact with like minded folk and if I get into trouble for hanging out with those people than I’m happy to do the time breaking rocks on our Christmas Island gulag or pulling coffee. at the local Cafe.
Oh, and there is no memory hole when it comes to online stuff, search and cache know and see all.
But saying that, I will still hold all those Young Liberals to their spotty Facebook comments as they move into public life, just ’cause it’s fun.
When You and I behind the Veil are past,
Oh, but the long, long while the World shall last,
Which of our Coming and Departure heeds
As the Sea’s self should heed a pebble-cast.
The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.
http://classics.mit.edu/Khayyam/rubaiyat.html
This is a timely post as the Totalitarian Information Agency has set up in Singapore and ASIO now officially has STASI like powers. ( The Vic police always had them)
I think the clear and present danger is obvious.
( See ‘ Homeland Security – A modest proposal)
After the last 90 years only an imbecile would trust the state. So how do we leverage the new power of the net in order to provide a measured response to this grotesque and fascist attack on our environment?
Crypto-anarchy provides some clues and some practical tools/weapons.
I won’t mention my favorite that is pro-active prediction markets but another more speculative prophylactic measure.
We encrypt all our personal details and send them into massive remailer motion via a vastly ramped up Freenet system. Then whenever yr files are accessed you are notified. Actually you have to be notified in order to get the hashed password for that level of access you wish to grant, say, yr Doctor.
Now in a case where some criminals file needs to be accessed then a quorum of say, 12 netizens in good standing ( ie with good reputation capital such as most of us) would be permitted the over-ride in order to examine the file and pass on whats relevant to the investigating authorities.
I admit such a model looks flawed at the moment because of all the traffic through NSA surveilled space. But not even the NSA can crack modern PGP crypto and the more the net spreads out and around the last evil empire the better the proposition looks.
This is not an original idea as I heard it on the cypherpunks list years ago but it sure looks like whats required now to deal – not just with the neocon threat but also the Chinese Marxist threat.
Thanks fro yr time.
LP is my first and only venture into comment on the net, apart from e-mails and a very brief foray into On-Line Opinion. (I got too disgusted with some of the right waing crap that came up to stay on it.
In the real worlde, whether its letters to editors, books, articles, poems etc etc., I al;way write under my own name and I don’t see any reason to stop because of being on a blog where I express political opinions I’m well-known for locally.
If the State wants to gto me, stuff ‘em!
You could write your own history on Wikipedia. Like Peter Foster did. He created a rose coloured image of himself. He was not really as bad as the convictions made out.
But now on Wikipedia we have the full ‘Revision history of Peter Foster’ available. There we have the full historic tracked changing interpretations of a man.