4 ms·
> We've also been factually wrong in the past, and some people do their best to remind us of it as often as possible THAT dynamic is toxic and we need to someh
by glenra 8y ago
> We've also been factually wrong in the past, and some people do their best to remind us of it as often as possible
THAT dynamic is toxic and we need to somehow evolve a social rule against it. Something like Godwin's Rule, back when that worked.
Everybody has at some point said something factually incorrect and everybody has at some point said something that sounds wrong or mean when taken out of context today.
If forever bringing up "Remember, this is the person who said (worst thing ever)!" is a valid move, it's an attack on identity continuity. The existing defenses against that attack seem to be:
(a) completely abandoning identity continuity (eg: 4chan)
(b) trying to appear perfectly accurate and inoffensive at all times by retroactively deleting any posts that might make one look inconsistent or mean and hoping nobody notices or keeps an archive.
There really ought to be more options than those. For instance, one could adopt a statute-of-limitations approach:
Anything said more than two years ago is off-limits as an attack on that person/blog/institution today.
Once the right rule is documented, those who break it are demonstrating they are too dumb or ill-informed to engage with what is being said now and thus have lost the argument.
- currymj 8y agoThere’s an evolving social norm against this, I think. Increasingly, I’ve noticed the people who trawl through years-old posts looking for controversy are seen as deranged.
- foobarchu 8y agoThat only applies when the target was relatively anonymous to begin with. It's frowned upon to crawl back in time to look for ammunition against someone, but if that ammunition is something that went viral and is part of public consciousness, then you're good. One example is Bredan Eich. Because he chose to donate to a Prop 8 fund and it got out, his opinion on all subjects is automatically null and void for many people. Another case is that of reddit user 'Unidan', who became an immediate pariah overnight because he was a dick to someone online, so he abandoned the entire identity. If any of his alternate identities were somehow linked back, it would likely become useless as well. I'd be willing to be his professional career suffered greatly because of that rant, too. There's also Joy Reid, who has been in hot water lately because people found old tweets and blog posts that were offensive. In that case, people actively went back to look for things she said in the past. None of these would have been possible pre-internet.