Sunday, December 27, 2020

Unintended Consequences

There will come a day when our society will adjust to the fact that there's a permanent record of almost every dumb, unkind, and assholish thing people say and do*. 

When that happens, it will have two effects: People will stop saying and doing so many dumb, unkind, and assholish things, and more slack will be cut for the times when people do do those things, providing that there's a clear absence of malice. 

In the meantime, we're going to have ugly Gordian knots like this one.

*Whether there should be such a record or not is moot. The technological genie is out of the bottle, and wanting tiny cameras and storage too cheap to meter to go away is as unrealistic as wanting to ban semiautomatic weapons in the US.