The Happy Moron

Talk is Cheap

Hackers have a saying, “Information wants to be free.”

This is really just a way of saying what people have known for generations – that you can never take back a word once spoken. It’s not a new or a controversial statement – it’s a well known and accepted proverb.  (Being a proverb, it should be taken as a useful generalization, a statement that has sacrificed being explicit for the sake of being short and pithy. )

If it’s impossible to retract a spoken word, which vanishes into the air, which has no lasting record except the memory of the listeners… How much harder is it to retract a word which has a record in addition to human memory?

This is the internet world, where speaking is free and retraction impossible.  We have the power to publish to the entire world, but absolutely no ability to prevent any other person from doing the same.

This is why audit is so powerful.  This is why our social rules are going to have to evolve. Eventually, your boss will never dream of creating a fake Facebook account to trap you and fire you. Not because Facebook no longer exists, but because if they do, you will let the world know exactly what kind of company they are. We used to say that as an empty threat, but now we can actually carry through.

“You’ll never work for anyone in this town again.” used to be a threat reserved for use by the influential.

Guess what? Everyone’s influential, these days. We’re playing with bigger guns and soon we’re going to have to learn that we can’t use them with the reckless abandon that we’re used to.

I guess that should scare me. But… It doesn’t really scare me. Something else scares me.

The Real Scary Thing

I’m afraid of living in a world without grace.

Everything I’ve mentioned so far can be traced back to a people problem. What does that mean?

Currently the Ruby on Rails community is suffering because a member gave a presentation that was grossly unprofessional, and many people reacted. Some people are calling it a storm in a teacup. This is a people problem, pure and simple.

It stems from differences in opinion over what is professional and what is exclusionary and what is acceptable for a technical presentation. It stems from people being offended and not being apologized to nicely… and from people offending and not apologizing nicely. There’s a lack of grace permeating the atmosphere.

But if there’s a storm in this teacup, it’s because someone had a spoon powerful enough to whip up a real storm. In a good old-fashioned shouting match, you only disturb the neighbors. In a modern one, you still only disturb the neighbors, but there are a lot more of them. (Everyone lives right next to everyone else on the internet, but not everyone is a neighbor in the “we stop by to visit once in a while” sense).

Power makes grace harder. As our social guns get bigger and bigger, it gets more and more tempting to abandon grace and trust our bullets.

Grace means not firing back.

If our social tools are geared to reaction and preemption, with no plausible means of genuine defense, not firing back will be a tricky prospect.