I would be just as happy if you didn’t go searching for some of my earliest public emails. I know they’re out there, and while I’m sure many of them are fine, I also have clear, visceral memories of being embroiled in any number of flame wars. I’m not even going to try to suggest that I didn’t know better at the time—I did, and I’m not proud of my behavior, and I try to do better today. And still sometimes I fail.
Ultimately, though, those were arguments on technical mailing lists, with at least a genesis in technical questions: whatever I dished out, I got right back, and it was all, ultimately, retail abuse.
What Jon Ronson chronicles in his book—the fascination with destroying people that social media platorms seem to be enabling, with the spectacular lack of empathy that demonstrated by those involved, and the enormous destructive potential it presents—is strictly wholesale.
As others have said—and I can’t find a specific source on Google—we should not be defined by the worst thing we ever did. Especially if the worst thing we ever did was to, say, make a joke (crude, dumb, perhaps insensitive, but not aimed at anyone) to a friend. But there are people whose lives the denizens of social media have chosen to destroy who are guilty of nothing more than that.
Is this really the civilization we’re creating?
