Thread by @Wavinator

James Gunn being fired over old tweets reminds me that we're blithely building a society where:

You can never make a mistake.
Your past will forever haunt you.
Your job holds sway over private life because you're a 24/7 representative of the company.

Is this the future we want?

Here's something ugly to consider: Every time we ok this, every time we cheer when it happens to someone we DON'T like, we strengthen the construction of this cage around ALL of us.

Take someone like Brendan Eich, the Mozilla CEO who was dismissed when it was discovered that he donated to an anti-gay marriage initiative in California. Set aside whether you agree or disagree & look at the fact that we are setting up norms here.

How much control should your employer have over your own personal views? At what point do you get to have a level of sanctity over your own thoughts, your own feelings, your own experience of being in this life?

What right does the company have to make you a 24/7 representative?

Views change and evolve, as well. Sometimes we see even people who have the WORST views go through an evolution that might not be possible without time, life input and contemplation.

But being a 24/7 representative of your company means you better tow the line at all times.

Consider the firing of people like Justine Sacco. Or this rash of jerks calling the cops on people for nothing more than holding a BBQ or selling water.

As much as we might think they deserve it, we had better think VERY CAREFULLY about erasing this link b/t work & private life

We are building a tool for social monitoring and control for ALL OF US. Maybe Big Brother won't be instantiated by the government after all, but rather by the everyday consumer, all for a perfectly good intentions.

We'll have our video doorbells to deter crime, our mobile devices to record our every mistake in public, our social media accounts with permanent records of everything we say (and blocklists to consign us forever to ideological ghettos for the crime of wrongthink)

Each and every one of us will be a watcher, a monitor-- Big Brother won't have to hire us, we'll do it all for social media cred, each of us happily weaving a cage for all of us for reasons that seemed very good at the time.

Is this the kind of society we want? Because it's the kind of society we're building. Do we have a right to be forgotten? Do we have a right to make mistakes? Are we allowed to learn and grow?

I can imagine a society whose citizens are so used to giving up their right to privacy, so used to being surveilled at work, in public, maybe even (with always on devices) at home that we fail to even blink when yet another abrogation of our rights is made by those in power.

This is the Panopticon, named for the British prison where guards could watch prisoners at all times without the prisoners knowing. Those prisoners began to lose their sense of self, began to censor themselves at all times.

Do we want to live in a Panopticon society?

(Related: The Hawthorne Effect, where subjects of a study begin to change their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed.)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawthorne…

If we don't want this kind of society, we're going to have to reject the incidents where it benefits us-- we are going to have to defend the rights of people (some of them very detestable) to live a private life away from work and even make mistakes.

But now that we are so habituated (maybe even addicted?) to the POWER that comes from exerting our will on each other, of whipping each other into shape when one of us steps out of line, can we?

Social media is emerging as one weapon among many for us to control each other. Now that we see how effective it is, now that we see what it does to those we don't like, will we be able to lay it down so as to spare ALL of us?

I'm not sure we can.
/FIN