The internet and privacy: stop taking the easy way out

[by JSC5]

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Jonathan Bernstein may be (is!) a brilliant analyst of the structure of American politics in the modern era, but I really hope people don’t start taking his words of wisdom on other major life issues seriously:

Kids: never, ever, ever, write something anywhere that you don’t want to see on the front page of the newspaper.  Forget the WaPo; the universe is going to make you suffer, and it’s just brutal.

Let’s imagine I’m an impressionable kid and I take Jonathan’s advice seriously. What effect does it have on me? I’ll give just two of many examples:

1. I’m going to have a hell of a time maintaining long distance relationships of any kind (friendship, family, romantic). The phone only really works if you pre-plan a meeting time that works for both of your schedules, a challenge that becomes especially thorny if you’re calling across time zones. Written communication opens up the possibility of regular, spontaneous contact — the kind of contact that social relations thrive on — by letting the sender write when she has the opportunity and the receiver read it when he’s got a free minute. But would I really want the New York Times to run with the hyperlinked headline: “So-and-So Calls Shake Weight Ad ‘Funny as Shit’ ‘” ? Like an inmate or an astronaut, I guess I better restrict my long distance relationships to a once-a-week phone call from now on.
2. I will never go on the record with an opinion stronger than “I guess it could be defensible to conclude X, but proponents of !X make some good points, too.” This one’s a no-brainer. It’s really hard to know what the big issues of the day will be 10, 20, or 50 years from now when people might be digging through my written record for a quote to exploit. No one’s ever been impeached for saying they love America, apple pie, and grandma — or for omitting their opinion entirely. If I want to have a successful career, clearly I’m going to have to turn into either a blithering idiot of a stereotypical politician on the one hand, or Elena Kagan on the other.

Whether we’re talking about private missives or public pronouncements, Jonathan Bernstein’s advice to keep yourself out of the written record is just terrible. When so much of who we are is mediated by writing, it’s detrimental to humanity to tell young people that the tyranny and whim of public standards of acceptability should determine who they are and what they write.* And unfortunately, Bernstein’s advice seems to be pretty common. The popular reaction to the Weigel affair, which Bernstein is writing about, seems to be: hey, he shouldn’t have written those emails with the expectation of privacy, and he should have known what was coming to him if they got out. That’s the typical advice to young people regarding internet privacy, and privacy in general.

Maybe it’s good strategic advice for an individual — but, given the developmental and experiential importance of putting yourself in your writing, maybe it’s not. Either way, it is a terrible standard to be advocating to the public. We desperately need to move away from a society that invests zero effort in understanding what someone is really trying to say and instead focuses on the ‘controversy’ surrounding the statement itself. We desperately need to move away from a society that doesn’t give a damn about context, presumptions of privacy, or the complicated inner world of all human beings.

I think most people realize we need to end this culture of public tyranny. And yet very few people seem to be willing to argue against it when it matters. Telling someone you’ll keep your trap shut if ya know what’s good for ya may help him avoid getting whacked by the mob, but it won’t do much to end the reign of terror of La Cosa Nostra. And that is, after all, what we need to do.

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*This may seem at odds with my previous post on Elena Kagan, in which I defended her for making sacrifices and structuring her life to maximize her odds of ascending to the Supreme Court. I’d separate these two posts by noting that Kagan is an individual who should be free to choose the life she wants, which apparently involved neutering her public, written opinions in order to have success in her profession. That’s a legitimate choice for an individual to make, and far be it from me to start criticizing her work-life balance. People are allowed to prefer work. Jonathan Bernstein’s advice, however, applies more broadly to just about everyone, and affirms the principle that we all ought to judge others and expect to be judged by whatever the prevailing standards of middle-of-the-road, vanilla opinions are these days. As a standard that would apply to everyone, I find this very disagreeable and worthy of ridicule.