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Comment by underseacables | Hacker News Reader

Based on current behavior of cancel culture, I don’t think generation Z truly appreciates the nightmare they are headed for. 20 years from now someone is going to come out of the woodwork with a tweet, text message, social media post, or heaven for bid only fans, and completely destroy someone’s life. The Internet is forever, and private companies are making that so.

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I feel very, hopeless for lack of a better word, about this kind of thing lately. I feel strongly that we're sliding by popular demand into this kind of thing, that I'm well in the minority (not on this site but in the population at large) for thinking that it will end terribly, and that instead of putting up my own meager resistence to it, I'd rather egg it on because I believe everyone who genuinely believes it to be a good thing deserves every single repurcussion of it that will inevitably come to them.

I realize this headspace is neither productive nor healthy, but honestly other than burying my head in the sand about the world today, I don't have any bright ideas for how to not be perpetually, distressed?

If you egg it on, what makes you better than the "others" you distinguish yourself from?

I think it's pretty clear that doing things that I truly believe lead to society at large becoming worse would make me a bad person, that's at least partially why I don't actually do them.

Simultaneously, when looking at other people who take actions that I believe will make society worse, I don't wish them eternal peace and happiness as much as I wish they'd stub their toe, spill their coffee, and have a seagull poop on their back. That might make me a bad person, honestly I think it just makes me an average, if not slightly below average, person.

The thing that scares me the most about it is that twenty years is a long time. I'm not at all confident that I can predict the direction society will take over the next two decades. By extensions, I'm also not at all confident that I can judge, today, what will be considered abhorrent in the future.

That’s a good point. I was listening to a podcast of a comedy historian explain how comedy is very generational. If you go back and listen to the comedians of our parents generation, it’s very different than what we hear today, it’s very rare to see comedians cross generations. Twenty years ago what did we have? No Twitter, Facebook, nascent digital photos, mostly VHS and DVD. Today a digital image, video, or screenshot could be saved by someone who genuinely wants to cause someone harm in the future. It’s already been done and when it happens to some random kid applying for college it’s truly terrifying.

I’ve got 15 years to retirement and I’m very fortunate to have not done anything to get myself canceled. I really hope I can make it to retirement without a an overblown dongle-gate situation crushing my career. I still think about those guys…

Edit: Grammar, as always.

The men involved in the PyCon dongle incident found other jobs quickly. The woman did not.

She lied and made false accusations that got two people fired. When the facts came out it became clear that she was the bully.

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