7 ms·

'The Internet is for Porn' – Blackmail in 2033

64 points by chmars 14y ago

derleth 14y ago
> I suspect that sexting will be redefined as non-criminal behaviour or as a minor offense, within the next couple of decades, simply because the alternative is to eventually criminalize a very large chunk of the population. People were saying precisely the same thing about marijuana having to be legalized by now because so many people in the 1970s were using it. What happened? Ultimately, having laws most people are guilty of breaking is a valuable tool of social control. As long as selective enforcement is practical, having something on nearly everyone can be a huge tool. So the future of blackmail will be like what we have now: Some people get away with things that utterly end others, based on a combination of gender, social class, and who they're trying to appeal to. I doubt the laws surrounding this will meaningfully change.
- jorleif 14y ago
  > having laws most people are guilty of breaking is a valuable tool of social control Not to dispute anything you are saying, this seems to be a preferred tool n some authoritarian countries. The downside is that it places a huge drain on economic activity, since one has to "keep up a good relation" with the government officials at all times. Needless to say, policy more in line with democratic ideals should be more efficient in the long run.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- objclxt 14y ago
  I think Charles is probably wrong on this point, although not necessarily for the reasons you state. Simply because a law is violated by the majority of the population doesn't ipso facto make it a bad law (although in some cases this is certainly true). For example, many people break speeding limits, but we also accept that in some cases speed limits are justified. It's a matter of degrees. 'Sexting' laws are similar to age of consent laws. For example, a 13 year old girl (or boy) sending indecent images of themselves to someone many years older than them is clearly a problem. Two 13 year olds sending indecent pictures to each other may be morally concerning to some, but it's not going to bother the law.
  - GFischer 14y ago
    "in some cases speed limits are justified". But many believe they're not. In my case, I believe most speed limits were set for a prior age, and modern cars can safely handle more than the obsolete speed limits now. There are endless discussions here on speed limits, and they are mostly negative about their effects: http://www.google.com/#q=speed+limits+site:news.ycombinator.com http://www.google.com/#q=speed+limits+site:news.ycombinator.... fleitz - "Interestingly, most accidents occur below the speed limit and increasing speed limits decrease accidents" "in Montana after a Judge invalidated their speeding laws as unconstitutional the number of accidents dropped" http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana.htm http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana.htm "Speed limits on roads are almost always political decisions, not engineering ones. How else do you explain the straight as an arrow, flat as a pane of glass, brand-spanking-new, 60mph limit roads crisscrossing the american midwest" The best speed limits I've seen were on German highways - they were variable speed limits based on road conditions (that actually made sense !!! ).
    - eru 14y ago
      > The best speed limits I've seen were on German highways - they were variable speed limits based on road conditions (that actually made sense !!! ). And people are still breaking them.
  - Symmetry 14y ago
    You're wrong about that last as a matter of law (at least in the US). Anyone creating a sexual image of a subject who is 17 or younger is guilty of creating child pornography, no matter what the circumstances are. I'm sure that if Congress had considered the case of 17-year-olds taking pictures of themselves they would have written the law differently, but they didn't. One would also hope that prosecutors would exercise discretion about prosecuting these cases, but while some might others certainly don't.
    - randallsquared 14y ago
      One would also hope that prosecutors would exercise discretion about prosecuting these cases, but while some might others certainly don't. Draconian enforcement might be better in the long run, since the laws would get changed.
- SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
  > People were saying precisely the same thing about marijuana having to be legalized by now because so many people in the 1970s were using it. What happened? It's being legalised, slowly. That's what's happening.
- GFischer 14y ago
  "marijuana having to be legalized by now" At least in my country, bad example :) http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/09/world/americas/uruguay-marijuana-proposal/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/09/world/americas/uruguay-mar... it's also approved for medical use in California, not prosecuted in Portugal, and legalized in the Netherlands (with some caveats). These laws are still a hard sell, but not unthinkable as they might have been in the 70's. Lawmakers are slower than we'd like, but eventually I believe they will be redefined. More likely, it will just not be prosecuted (much like I believe marijuana use is nowadays).
- lifeisstillgood 14y ago
  >> As long as selective enforcement is practical This is I think the key. Technology gives us the ability to catch everyone. Speeding is the obvious example, but Facebook, lifeloggers, mobile GPS will help us auto-catch far wider ranges of crimes. So if we can catch everyone, and log that data, but only prosecute, for sake of argument, those of Hispanic or Afro-Caribbean descent, will the democratic process choose: 1. prosecute everyone 2. decriminalise 3. keep the status quo, deal with the rioting severely, send a large proportion of your populace to prison. None of those are great choices, and vary depending on the crime. But I suspect 3. is always going to be a socially unacceptable - but it is the status quo now (5% of US Blacks in prison vs 0.7% Whites - what happens when that equalises ? Which way will it go - 5% of the whole of USA?) Interesting.
  - pessimizer 14y ago
    If logging everyone reduces the powerful to those choices, they'll just figure out a way not to have themselves logged. Fast-track lines at the airport? Super PACs? Setting the price point really high for tracking-free versions of services through regulation or selective investment, and leaving the rest to advertising-supported life-quantization vendors for those same services? Trying to trap people who have leverage in a bind is a losing proposition. You can't trap people in a bind unless you have leverage.
    - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
      Surely the difference between a functioning democracy and a totalitarian regime is trapping people in a bind (otherwise called one law for all). I am just saying that yet another threat to functioning democracies is coming round the corner, and weirdly, speeding cameras are the canary in the mine. Wait till the iris scanner that lets you in the office building also does blood alcohol / cannabis testing.
      - pessimizer 14y ago
        I'm just predicting that the executives will enter through a different door.
- gizmo686 14y ago
  "People were saying precisely the same thing about marijuana having to be legalized by now because so many people in the 1970s were using it. What happened?" We elected a criminal into the presidency.
- jhcoaps2 14y ago
  > People were saying precisely the same thing about marijuana having to be legalized by now because so many people in the 1970s were using it. What happened? Republicans realized that if they continued vilifying the living hell out of anybody who talked about drug law reform, they could continue stripping minorities of their rights. And because they were good at it, the Democrats can't get elected unless they agree to continue the drug war. The drug war is a disenfranchisement campaign that happens to line a lot of people's pockets, nothing more.
- rdtsc 14y ago
  > Ultimately, having laws most people are guilty of breaking is a valuable tool of social control. And that is another good benchmark of an oppressive regime. A system that makes sure there are so many laws or they are so ambiguous that anyone is always guilty of something. Then they just record it all. All the times you sped by the speed camera, all the little discrepancies in your tax record, all the times you bought out of state but didn't pay sales tax to your state, all the websites you visited, everything you possibly posted online. One day you become dissatisfied with something and choose to exercise your freedom to protest. Then someone approaches and invites you to have a a chit chat. They show you all your files and all the laws you broke and suggest that if anyone starts looking into it, it could be years of jail time, stiff penalties, or perpetual court dates and then ask the question "are you sure you want to exercise your freedom?" With current technologies, and current set of laws, and government disposition towards recording everything (see NSA's new data center) this becomes reality right here right now in US.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- chimeracoder 14y ago
  > As long as selective enforcement is practical, having something on nearly everyone can be a huge tool. Which is why the biggest enemy of an unfair law is total enforcement. The reason marijuana was quickly exempted from the Rockefeller drug laws of the 1970s is that too many rich white kids ended up with long prison sentences, so the PTAs of all organizations lobbied to change the mandatory minimums. I wrote about this a while back[1], because this same principle is what alarmed me the most about SOPA: if you really think this [child porn/filesharing/etc.] is a problem, then that means the law should apply to Google, Youtube, and even the White House petition website as much as it applies to indie blogs and torrent trackers. http://varnull.adityamukerjee.net/post/17216925880/online-piracy-the-new-war-on-drugs http://varnull.adityamukerjee.net/post/17216925880/online-pi...
dageshi 14y ago
"Are we going to see candidates for the highest posts raised from toddler-dom in hermetically sealed media bubbles by their dynastic political parents" In the UK I'd say this is pretty much the case now. Ed Miliband the current leader of the labour party was a SPAD (Special Adviser) and so I'm pretty sure was David Cameron (Prime Minister). These people are very obviously taking a predefined career path destined for high political office and avoiding any incriminating evidence of having a past will be part and parcel of that.
- rms 14y ago
  The UK's well defined path to democratically elected leadership is somewhat unique though. http://80000hours.org/blog/22-how-hard-is-it-to-become-prime-minister-of-the-united-kingdom http://80000hours.org/blog/22-how-hard-is-it-to-become-prime...
- arethuza 14y ago
  "predefined career path destined for high political office" At least the Romans and with their cursus honorum actually required things like military service: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursus_honorum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursus_honorum
  - stephengillie 14y ago
    The US required it too, out of tradition, until Clinton's term. Why did we stop?
    - DougWebb 14y ago
      Military services was never required for Congress or the President of the US: "No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen." "No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen." "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States." Besides, as soon as the President is sworn into office, he's the Commander In Chief of the armed forces, so if he wasn't already in the military he is at that point.
scotty79 14y ago
I think most embarrassing thing someone will be able to dig up on you on 2033 will be some record of you violating one atheist commandment: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HfSXLXtVnOI/SUEdIwEEDnI/AAAAAAAACCI/oN3f2lnBYs8/s320/atheist+commandment.gif http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HfSXLXtVnOI/SUEdIwEEDnI/AAAAAAAACC... This could bury your political career.
- arethuza 14y ago
  I would hope that, in the UK at least, that by 2033 violating the atheist commandment about not believing in strange superstitions would be a cause for burying a political career.
  - gizmo686 14y ago
    There us no commandment about believing in strange superstitions, there is only a commandment about calling said superstitions God.
    - pavel_lishin 14y ago
      I thought the commandment meant that you're not allowed to push your goofy superstitions on others through coersion.
      - scotty79 14y ago
        Not being an asshole is acommandment we can all agree on.
halts 14y ago
I think Facebook and other such sharing services are going to make candidates' lives much more visible...for the presidency, everything is open to fair game and things such as personal privacy mean less...because this person is vying to be the most powerful person in the world. It's common for medical and financial records to be released to the public...so how can a candidate justify not releasing FB history? we might be so used to/numb to social-sharing that it'll seem strange NOT to have it open (i.e. "what do you have to hide?")
- activepeanut 14y ago
  Can you imagine the pendulum swinging the other way 20 years from now? <picture a presidential debate> "Mr Candidate, we found no inappropriate behavior in your Facebook history, nor porn in your browser history, how do you defend yourself from accusations of not being a man-of-the-people?"
  - slurgfest 14y ago
    That wouldn't be the charge, the charge would be 'what are you hiding?'
peteretep 14y ago
20 years ago, Clinton "didn't inhale" at college. Obama did coke, and it wasn't a big deal. Also he's black. Acceptability changes based on what voters consider to be normal.
- clarkmoody 14y ago
  I think you meant to say that "acceptability changes based upon the agenda of the media reporting on these candidates."
  - rprasad 14y ago
    Peteretep said that public perceptions on drug use have changed substantially over the past 2 decade, and I think he meant to say what he actually did say. It was not a matter of how the media reports it. The media gleefully reported on all of the presidential candidates' drug use (or lack thereof). Voters simply do not care any more.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  GWB did coke, and it wasn't a big deal. I think it's important to point out that this change wasn't as slow as you make out.
btrautsc 14y ago
i think we're already seeing a notable shift with our recent Presidents re: drug use - from 'not inhaling', to smoking 'pot' and snorting a 'little' cocaine... those politicians grew up in the 60's/70's when that was common with teens & young adults, and their voter peers did much of the same... i think (maybe hope) we can expect in 30 years, when politicians rising into their 40s/50s are "outted" on sexting or lewd party photos - we the people (their peers) will look and say, "sure I did that stuff and have dozens of similar pictures, this must be a decent, normal human being"
- roc 14y ago
  And, as with otherwise normalized marijuana and cocaine, we'll probably still be looking the other way as kids in 2033 continue to get prosecuted, and futures continue to be ruined, for the grand crime of having been caught doing something that almost everyone has been doing for decades.
king_jester 14y ago
"But it's also a side-effect of the web making it easy to construct social networks among people with minority interests; suddenly all sorts of stuff that was hidden back when it was just one person per 10,000 population town emerges as a 30,000-strong continental community. The 0.01% are no longer hidden, can no longer be marginalized. Never mind the 1% or the LGBT 10%." This is completely off. We have seen first hand that knowledge of different types of people existing hasn't stopped marginalization and oppression, both on a personal and institutional basis. Just because groups of people can come together online for various subjects doesn't mean that society as a whole is more tolerant of those people. Legal prosecution and personal attacks continue for people regardless of how many others like them they can communicate with online. What people will want to hide will remain of function of society at large, including the internet and how it affects perceptions.
- pavel_lishin 14y ago
  But the internet does allow these people to at least feel like they're not alone. It also allows them to organize and fight back. There are still people trying to marginalize and harass them, but it's getting harder every day.
swalsh 14y ago
Eh, while the web is amazing at publicly exposing everything. It also has a ridiculously short lifespan. I would guess these kinds of things will be far less of a factor then we imagine them to be.
- eru 14y ago
  You mean short attention span? The lifespan of things on the net can be quite long, thanks to various archives and caches.
  - gwern 14y ago
    The lifespan can be quite long, but that doesn't mean it will be for any particular item. Many things from just a few years ago have vanished (as I discover every time I run a linkchecker utility on my website looking for broken links...). I think of it as a Poisson distribution. What will happen is most people's histories will be mostly gone, and some will be largely intact.
andrewflnr 14y ago
Familiarity frequently breeds tolerance (at least, when the subject matter is consensual and, within its own framework, non-transgressive) FWIW, the qualification in parentheses is superfluous. Familiarity breeds tolerance even when the subject matter is utterly immoral. I suspect this will be painfully clear by 2033, if we're not too tolerant to notice.
- jhuckestein 14y ago
  I agree. Always remember morality isn't absolute though. Morality is defined by your peers/culture just as much as tolerance is. For example, some people think same-sex marriages are immoral and others think it's immoral NOT to allow them.
  - andrewflnr 14y ago
    Actually, I do believe morality is absolute. This would be more painfully clear by 2033, but it looks like we're already too tolerant to notice so I don't have much hope.

64 points by chmars 14y ago

> I suspect that sexting will be redefined as non-criminal behaviour or as a minor offense, within the next couple of decades, simply because the alternative is to eventually criminalize a very large chunk of the population. People were saying precisely the same thing about marijuana having to be legalized by now because so many people in the 1970s were using it. What happened? Ultimately, having laws most people are guilty of breaking is a valuable tool of social control. As long as selective enforcement is practical, having something on nearly everyone can be a huge tool. So the future of blackmail will be like what we have now: Some people get away with things that utterly end others, based on a combination of gender, social class, and who they're trying to appeal to. I doubt the laws surrounding this will meaningfully change.

jorleif 14y ago
> having laws most people are guilty of breaking is a valuable tool of social control Not to dispute anything you are saying, this seems to be a preferred tool n some authoritarian countries. The downside is that it places a huge drain on economic activity, since one has to "keep up a good relation" with the government officials at all times. Needless to say, policy more in line with democratic ideals should be more efficient in the long run.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
objclxt 14y ago
I think Charles is probably wrong on this point, although not necessarily for the reasons you state. Simply because a law is violated by the majority of the population doesn't ipso facto make it a bad law (although in some cases this is certainly true). For example, many people break speeding limits, but we also accept that in some cases speed limits are justified. It's a matter of degrees. 'Sexting' laws are similar to age of consent laws. For example, a 13 year old girl (or boy) sending indecent images of themselves to someone many years older than them is clearly a problem. Two 13 year olds sending indecent pictures to each other may be morally concerning to some, but it's not going to bother the law.
- GFischer 14y ago
  "in some cases speed limits are justified". But many believe they're not. In my case, I believe most speed limits were set for a prior age, and modern cars can safely handle more than the obsolete speed limits now. There are endless discussions here on speed limits, and they are mostly negative about their effects: http://www.google.com/#q=speed+limits+site:news.ycombinator.com http://www.google.com/#q=speed+limits+site:news.ycombinator.... fleitz - "Interestingly, most accidents occur below the speed limit and increasing speed limits decrease accidents" "in Montana after a Judge invalidated their speeding laws as unconstitutional the number of accidents dropped" http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana.htm http://www.hwysafety.com/hwy_montana.htm "Speed limits on roads are almost always political decisions, not engineering ones. How else do you explain the straight as an arrow, flat as a pane of glass, brand-spanking-new, 60mph limit roads crisscrossing the american midwest" The best speed limits I've seen were on German highways - they were variable speed limits based on road conditions (that actually made sense !!! ).
  - eru 14y ago
    > The best speed limits I've seen were on German highways - they were variable speed limits based on road conditions (that actually made sense !!! ). And people are still breaking them.
- Symmetry 14y ago
  You're wrong about that last as a matter of law (at least in the US). Anyone creating a sexual image of a subject who is 17 or younger is guilty of creating child pornography, no matter what the circumstances are. I'm sure that if Congress had considered the case of 17-year-olds taking pictures of themselves they would have written the law differently, but they didn't. One would also hope that prosecutors would exercise discretion about prosecuting these cases, but while some might others certainly don't.
  - randallsquared 14y ago
    One would also hope that prosecutors would exercise discretion about prosecuting these cases, but while some might others certainly don't. Draconian enforcement might be better in the long run, since the laws would get changed.
SideburnsOfDoom 14y ago
> People were saying precisely the same thing about marijuana having to be legalized by now because so many people in the 1970s were using it. What happened? It's being legalised, slowly. That's what's happening.
GFischer 14y ago
"marijuana having to be legalized by now" At least in my country, bad example :) http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/09/world/americas/uruguay-marijuana-proposal/index.html http://edition.cnn.com/2012/08/09/world/americas/uruguay-mar... it's also approved for medical use in California, not prosecuted in Portugal, and legalized in the Netherlands (with some caveats). These laws are still a hard sell, but not unthinkable as they might have been in the 70's. Lawmakers are slower than we'd like, but eventually I believe they will be redefined. More likely, it will just not be prosecuted (much like I believe marijuana use is nowadays).
lifeisstillgood 14y ago
>> As long as selective enforcement is practical This is I think the key. Technology gives us the ability to catch everyone. Speeding is the obvious example, but Facebook, lifeloggers, mobile GPS will help us auto-catch far wider ranges of crimes. So if we can catch everyone, and log that data, but only prosecute, for sake of argument, those of Hispanic or Afro-Caribbean descent, will the democratic process choose: 1. prosecute everyone 2. decriminalise 3. keep the status quo, deal with the rioting severely, send a large proportion of your populace to prison. None of those are great choices, and vary depending on the crime. But I suspect 3. is always going to be a socially unacceptable - but it is the status quo now (5% of US Blacks in prison vs 0.7% Whites - what happens when that equalises ? Which way will it go - 5% of the whole of USA?) Interesting.
- pessimizer 14y ago
  If logging everyone reduces the powerful to those choices, they'll just figure out a way not to have themselves logged. Fast-track lines at the airport? Super PACs? Setting the price point really high for tracking-free versions of services through regulation or selective investment, and leaving the rest to advertising-supported life-quantization vendors for those same services? Trying to trap people who have leverage in a bind is a losing proposition. You can't trap people in a bind unless you have leverage.
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    Surely the difference between a functioning democracy and a totalitarian regime is trapping people in a bind (otherwise called one law for all). I am just saying that yet another threat to functioning democracies is coming round the corner, and weirdly, speeding cameras are the canary in the mine. Wait till the iris scanner that lets you in the office building also does blood alcohol / cannabis testing.
    - pessimizer 14y ago
      I'm just predicting that the executives will enter through a different door.
gizmo686 14y ago
"People were saying precisely the same thing about marijuana having to be legalized by now because so many people in the 1970s were using it. What happened?" We elected a criminal into the presidency.
jhcoaps2 14y ago
> People were saying precisely the same thing about marijuana having to be legalized by now because so many people in the 1970s were using it. What happened? Republicans realized that if they continued vilifying the living hell out of anybody who talked about drug law reform, they could continue stripping minorities of their rights. And because they were good at it, the Democrats can't get elected unless they agree to continue the drug war. The drug war is a disenfranchisement campaign that happens to line a lot of people's pockets, nothing more.
rdtsc 14y ago
> Ultimately, having laws most people are guilty of breaking is a valuable tool of social control. And that is another good benchmark of an oppressive regime. A system that makes sure there are so many laws or they are so ambiguous that anyone is always guilty of something. Then they just record it all. All the times you sped by the speed camera, all the little discrepancies in your tax record, all the times you bought out of state but didn't pay sales tax to your state, all the websites you visited, everything you possibly posted online. One day you become dissatisfied with something and choose to exercise your freedom to protest. Then someone approaches and invites you to have a a chit chat. They show you all your files and all the laws you broke and suggest that if anyone starts looking into it, it could be years of jail time, stiff penalties, or perpetual court dates and then ask the question "are you sure you want to exercise your freedom?" With current technologies, and current set of laws, and government disposition towards recording everything (see NSA's new data center) this becomes reality right here right now in US.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
chimeracoder 14y ago
> As long as selective enforcement is practical, having something on nearly everyone can be a huge tool. Which is why the biggest enemy of an unfair law is total enforcement. The reason marijuana was quickly exempted from the Rockefeller drug laws of the 1970s is that too many rich white kids ended up with long prison sentences, so the PTAs of all organizations lobbied to change the mandatory minimums. I wrote about this a while back[1], because this same principle is what alarmed me the most about SOPA: if you really think this [child porn/filesharing/etc.] is a problem, then that means the law should apply to Google, Youtube, and even the White House petition website as much as it applies to indie blogs and torrent trackers. http://varnull.adityamukerjee.net/post/17216925880/online-piracy-the-new-war-on-drugs http://varnull.adityamukerjee.net/post/17216925880/online-pi...

dageshi 14y ago

"Are we going to see candidates for the highest posts raised from toddler-dom in hermetically sealed media bubbles by their dynastic political parents" In the UK I'd say this is pretty much the case now. Ed Miliband the current leader of the labour party was a SPAD (Special Adviser) and so I'm pretty sure was David Cameron (Prime Minister). These people are very obviously taking a predefined career path destined for high political office and avoiding any incriminating evidence of having a past will be part and parcel of that.

rms 14y ago
The UK's well defined path to democratically elected leadership is somewhat unique though. http://80000hours.org/blog/22-how-hard-is-it-to-become-prime-minister-of-the-united-kingdom http://80000hours.org/blog/22-how-hard-is-it-to-become-prime...
arethuza 14y ago
"predefined career path destined for high political office" At least the Romans and with their cursus honorum actually required things like military service: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursus_honorum http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursus_honorum
- stephengillie 14y ago
  The US required it too, out of tradition, until Clinton's term. Why did we stop?
  - DougWebb 14y ago
    Military services was never required for Congress or the President of the US: "No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen." "No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen." "No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States." Besides, as soon as the President is sworn into office, he's the Commander In Chief of the armed forces, so if he wasn't already in the military he is at that point.

scotty79 14y ago

I think most embarrassing thing someone will be able to dig up on you on 2033 will be some record of you violating one atheist commandment: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HfSXLXtVnOI/SUEdIwEEDnI/AAAAAAAACCI/oN3f2lnBYs8/s320/atheist+commandment.gif http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_HfSXLXtVnOI/SUEdIwEEDnI/AAAAAAAACC... This could bury your political career.

arethuza 14y ago
I would hope that, in the UK at least, that by 2033 violating the atheist commandment about not believing in strange superstitions would be a cause for burying a political career.
- gizmo686 14y ago
  There us no commandment about believing in strange superstitions, there is only a commandment about calling said superstitions God.
  - pavel_lishin 14y ago
    I thought the commandment meant that you're not allowed to push your goofy superstitions on others through coersion.
    - scotty79 14y ago
      Not being an asshole is acommandment we can all agree on.

halts 14y ago

I think Facebook and other such sharing services are going to make candidates' lives much more visible...for the presidency, everything is open to fair game and things such as personal privacy mean less...because this person is vying to be the most powerful person in the world. It's common for medical and financial records to be released to the public...so how can a candidate justify not releasing FB history? we might be so used to/numb to social-sharing that it'll seem strange NOT to have it open (i.e. "what do you have to hide?")

activepeanut 14y ago
Can you imagine the pendulum swinging the other way 20 years from now? <picture a presidential debate> "Mr Candidate, we found no inappropriate behavior in your Facebook history, nor porn in your browser history, how do you defend yourself from accusations of not being a man-of-the-people?"
- slurgfest 14y ago
  That wouldn't be the charge, the charge would be 'what are you hiding?'

peteretep 14y ago

20 years ago, Clinton "didn't inhale" at college. Obama did coke, and it wasn't a big deal. Also he's black. Acceptability changes based on what voters consider to be normal.

clarkmoody 14y ago
I think you meant to say that "acceptability changes based upon the agenda of the media reporting on these candidates."
- rprasad 14y ago
  Peteretep said that public perceptions on drug use have changed substantially over the past 2 decade, and I think he meant to say what he actually did say. It was not a matter of how the media reports it. The media gleefully reported on all of the presidential candidates' drug use (or lack thereof). Voters simply do not care any more.
slurgfest 14y ago
GWB did coke, and it wasn't a big deal. I think it's important to point out that this change wasn't as slow as you make out.

btrautsc 14y ago

i think we're already seeing a notable shift with our recent Presidents re: drug use - from 'not inhaling', to smoking 'pot' and snorting a 'little' cocaine... those politicians grew up in the 60's/70's when that was common with teens & young adults, and their voter peers did much of the same... i think (maybe hope) we can expect in 30 years, when politicians rising into their 40s/50s are "outted" on sexting or lewd party photos - we the people (their peers) will look and say, "sure I did that stuff and have dozens of similar pictures, this must be a decent, normal human being"

roc 14y ago
And, as with otherwise normalized marijuana and cocaine, we'll probably still be looking the other way as kids in 2033 continue to get prosecuted, and futures continue to be ruined, for the grand crime of having been caught doing something that almost everyone has been doing for decades.

king_jester 14y ago

"But it's also a side-effect of the web making it easy to construct social networks among people with minority interests; suddenly all sorts of stuff that was hidden back when it was just one person per 10,000 population town emerges as a 30,000-strong continental community. The 0.01% are no longer hidden, can no longer be marginalized. Never mind the 1% or the LGBT 10%." This is completely off. We have seen first hand that knowledge of different types of people existing hasn't stopped marginalization and oppression, both on a personal and institutional basis. Just because groups of people can come together online for various subjects doesn't mean that society as a whole is more tolerant of those people. Legal prosecution and personal attacks continue for people regardless of how many others like them they can communicate with online. What people will want to hide will remain of function of society at large, including the internet and how it affects perceptions.

pavel_lishin 14y ago
But the internet does allow these people to at least feel like they're not alone. It also allows them to organize and fight back. There are still people trying to marginalize and harass them, but it's getting harder every day.

swalsh 14y ago

Eh, while the web is amazing at publicly exposing everything. It also has a ridiculously short lifespan. I would guess these kinds of things will be far less of a factor then we imagine them to be.

eru 14y ago
You mean short attention span? The lifespan of things on the net can be quite long, thanks to various archives and caches.
- gwern 14y ago
  The lifespan can be quite long, but that doesn't mean it will be for any particular item. Many things from just a few years ago have vanished (as I discover every time I run a linkchecker utility on my website looking for broken links...). I think of it as a Poisson distribution. What will happen is most people's histories will be mostly gone, and some will be largely intact.

andrewflnr 14y ago

Familiarity frequently breeds tolerance (at least, when the subject matter is consensual and, within its own framework, non-transgressive) FWIW, the qualification in parentheses is superfluous. Familiarity breeds tolerance even when the subject matter is utterly immoral. I suspect this will be painfully clear by 2033, if we're not too tolerant to notice.

jhuckestein 14y ago
I agree. Always remember morality isn't absolute though. Morality is defined by your peers/culture just as much as tolerance is. For example, some people think same-sex marriages are immoral and others think it's immoral NOT to allow them.
- andrewflnr 14y ago
  Actually, I do believe morality is absolute. This would be more painfully clear by 2033, but it looks like we're already too tolerant to notice so I don't have much hope.