Things used to be a lot easier. You could say anything you wanted to your friends, on the phone or in a letter, and if your outburst was particularly egregious, the worst thing that could happen is that an unconfirmed rumor might circulate. Perhaps if you were unlucky—or lucky, depending on how you look at it—a memoir or book would publish your letters years later and the public would feast on your breaches of decorum. Yet if you were important enough for that to happen, odds are that you would be a venerable member of society or already dead. In either case, such revelations would hardly be disastrous.
These days, we have it a lot harder. Throughout society, transparency abounds. That Facebook post you made about wanting to do terrible things to Paul LePage can be seen by hundreds of your nearest and dearest friends—not to mention hundreds, even thousands, of others if your privacy settings are too loose. And seeing as nothing on Google or Facebook is—as far as we know—really ever deleted, that crude snippet of text could be there for years to come, lurking deep inside the "Older Posts" on your wall or in your friends' e-mail inboxes. If anyone ever wants to find your dirty secrets or embarrassing opinions, there they are, plastered across the Internet. The Data Storage Society ensures that our electronic utterances will haunt us forever.
This is of particular importance when it comes to governance. Although claiming to be a witch doesn't disqualify a person from running for political office as the candidate of a major party, as was the case in Delaware this year, there are plenty of more hideous claims that can brand someone as a heretic.
Take, for example, someone who claims to be a full-blown Marxist or Libertarian while at college. It's likely that such a person will post torrents of messages berating our current governmental system, along with photos of themselves waving a mint-condition copy of "The Communist Manifesto" or "The Conscience of a Conservative." Even when these radical tendencies mellow with age, those posts will likely still be there, lurking in the background. And if this person decides to run for office on a moderate platform, just imagine the attack ads that would appear.
When the demons of our past—from the tiniest tweet to the most embarrassing drunken party photo—can pop up to haunt us at any time, is it any wonder that successful people tend to be rather bland? It is common to berate politicians for not saying anything and for being unoriginal, but is it really surprising? The public demands perfection, and the discovery of transgressions often causes a politician to crash and burn at the polls—just ask Gary Hart.
The effects of the Data Storage Society are not just limited to the upper echelons of society, however. At Bowdoin, the effects of an ill-planned act can be just as calamitous. Relationships are ruined by online spats and, filed away forever in Facebook inboxes, remain impossible to forget. We've all heard tales of people who had landed a job until their potential employer saw that Facebook album from Epicuria. Many a career has been damaged through the discovery that a plagiarized paper was turned in decades ago. This very newspaper refuses to remove or edit any completely factual or opinion articles that have been published, a policy that has stopped me from writing a few rather provocative pieces. It is perfectly possible that in 20 years I will regret writing and publishing some or all of the Foreign Exchange, but I will have no recourse if I want to have my writings disassociated from my name.
This article is full of doom and gloom about the modern persistence of information, but I must make a note about its benefits. It is easier to look up facts, and we've all been on the other side of data storage—Facebook stalking is now an honorable pastime. However, the true issue with the Data Storage Society is that it precludes the possibility for forgiveness. You can never be truly forgiven for a statement if you can never delete it. You may apologize in person to those whom the remarks may have insulted, but there will still be that halo of "friends" who won't let you live your comments down. It's impossible to explain yourself to the world when the world already has a negative preconception of you.
Can we claim to have justice in a society where the infrastructure of knowledge won't let you repent and move on with your life? Is it possible to be an interesting person when you have to keep the permanence of your utterances in the back of your mind? Let us hope that answer to both of these questions is yes, since we can hardly tell Facebook and Google to start deleting everything mildly embarrassing.
There are only a few responses to this situation: we as a society can loosen up and stop caring about minimal transgressions, the march of our dignitaries and lives into the realm of boredom could continue relentlessly, or we can roll back the Data Storage Society. The first is the most desirable, but the last may end up being our only option. Perhaps in 20 years the Orient will find itself debating about whether or not to delete parts of its records. This would horrify me when speaking as a disinterested observer, but such a policy has a certain allure when viewed from the perspective of a writer. The battle lines are being drawn, and we will live through the conflict that decides which of the three outcomes will be the victor.