Have you guys read this?  It’s interesting.  Brings me back to a point that I’ve been thinking about for a while, which could quite possibly cause the downfall of society as we know it.

Here it is.  Ready?

If humans aren’t able to figure out a way to socially keep up with the pace of technology, we are going to destroy ourselves.

The past five years have seen a whirlwind of change on the Internet.  Social media has totally upended basic ideas of what the internet is for, what privacy means, and what it means to be a public figure.

But the biggest change?  Everything is recorded.  For the first time in history, events aren’t being recorded by the winners.  They’re being recorded by everyone.  All the time.  And then posted on the internet, where anyone with a router can theoretically see them.

Yesterday Amy was cleaning out her email, and she sent me something she found: a link to a Flickr account for someone we don’t know.  I opened it, and lo and behold, there we were.  In Florence.  Eating gelato.

To be honest, it kind of scared the bejeezus out of me, because any time there are pictures of me on the internet that I don’t know about, I get a little alarmed.  But there’s a perfectly rational explanation for why there were there: Amy and I met this guy and girl at our hostel in Florence, we all went out for dinner one night, and he took pictures.  Then we parted ways and I totally forgot about the guy.

But documentation of our night is right there on the Internet.  Forever.  Some guy in Slovakia could download those pictures and jack off every night to Amy and I licking ice cream cones.

And you know what?  That’s fucking weird.

There is no evolutionary preparation for something like that.  Humans just aren’t built to deal with concepts like that.  

But it’s not going away, so there’s no sense fighting it.

Okay, so let’s jump ahead to the destroying each other part.

Something I find increasingly irritating is that whenever celebrity infidelity surfaces, everyone acts shocked and appalled.  They “had no idea” that Tiger Woods/Jesse James/Kobe Bryant/Jim McGreevey/Alex Rodriguez/David Letterman/Hugh Grant/Eliot Spitzer/Jude Law/Mark Sanford/Ethan Hawke/Larry Craig/Antonio Villariagosa etc. etc. could be such a person.  NO IDEA!

Apparently, the moral fiber this country was founded upon is crumbling right under our feet.

But I’m calling BS on this.  I have no proof, but I’m guessing that over the course of human history, the rate of societal infidelity has stayed pretty much the same.  In fact, it seems more likely it’s declined a bit.  Are we really going to sit here and pretend that George Washington didn’t have affairs?  He was like a superhero back then.  Women probably lined up around the block to see what other parts of his body had been replaced with wood.

What’s the difference between then and now?  The Internet.  Nobody knows jack shit about ol’ George.  I bet I could spend 10 minutes on Google and learn more about Scott Baio than any living person knows about George Washington.

We are living in a world where everything everyone does is recorded and can be eventually brought back to haunt them.  How is this going to play out when the Facebook generation is running for president?  It’s going to be a mud slinging contest like the world’s never seen.  Everyone looks like an asshole when every mistake they have ever made is aggregated and replayed, over and over and over and over for public review.

This is not good.  Unless we get over our preconceived notions of how “public figures” are supposed to behave, we’re not going to have anyone to look up to anymore.  Anyone at all.  It’s the end of role models, and I’m afraid it’s already happened.

So what do we do?  Well, if there’s one thing I can tell you it’s that the Internet isn’t going away.  If anything, this problem will get worse as more of the world is connected and connections become more mobile.

We need to adjust our perception of reality in order to pull through.  People are people.  They make mistakes.  And now, we’re all going to know about them.  If anything, it should open up a dialogue, and allow people to talk openly and honestly about aspects of society that have previously stayed buried.  To discuss the decisions that led to mistakes that they’ve now come to regret, and how our public figures have grown and are now more qualified as a result of those mistakes.

As a society, we need to mature.  The information age is here, so lets get the communication flowing.