Last up, a philosophical diversion. Anonymous (as you will see in a moment) writes:
Hello Gary,
So recently I’ve been trying to get under control the large (for me) amount of hits one would get when they google my name, for a couple of reasons, mostly being the fact that they were created during an adolescent time of my life (my adolescence) and would like them to be kind of, well, removed. With the internet being like an infinite attic that everyone can shuffle through I would like my presence to be something more conscious, if you know what I mean. Could you please take a few seconds out of your day and just delete my last name ([redacted] from [redacted]) from the post copied below? I would be most grateful!
[link redacted]
Thank you!
-[redacted]
This is actually a bit of a dilemma for me — while it would be trivially easy to remove one word from one post, we at Fleen have had a long history of not retroactively de-publishing content. No matter how stupid, abusive, or misinformed the content (and that’s from us; the comment threads can get downright evil), it stays up because it’s a record of what actually took place. Corrections have been logged, of course (very minor things like typos and bad punctuation without notice; more weighty things like rewordings or retractions via strikethrough), but no comment or posting has ever been taken down.
There is one caveat to that last statement, actually. At the height of the Todd Goldman Shitstorm of Aught-Seven, with lawsuit threats a-flying, one poster contacted me with a request that a comment be deleted because he’d submitted it from work, and was afraid if the lawyerin’ got out of hand, his employer might terminate him. I did so, and he resubmitted the same comment from his home computer, so the net effect was zero (aside from the chill in the air that expressing an opinion can be dealt with so harshly).
Anonymous’s request reminds me a lolt of the story of “Peter”, who legally changed his identity to get away from Google searches; I take it as a given that the words and works that we craft should be things we are willing to stand behind, but must we be tagged with associations forever? I also take it as a given that everybody — every. body. — was an idiot as a teenage for instance (you really can’t help it, what with the hormones and the brain not being all the way cooked). Anybody with a smidge of self-awareness looks back on those years and slowly shakes their head with a muttered comment thanking [insert thankable entity] that they aren’t like that anymore. Heck, I find the process of growing, changing, and maturing (kicking and screaming all the way) means that any random interval of the past, from last week to third grade, is likely to leave me wondering how I could be such a dick back then and I hope I’m not like that now. So the line about an adolescent time of my life rings true for me.
Ultimately, the full identity of Anonymous isn’t part of the story — not like a more prominent figure would be. And while the no-depublishing rule was something I set in stone for myself when Fleen started in 2005, if we are to grow, change, and mature, then we must be willing to revisit our ironclad beliefs as situations and circumstances warrant. Request granted, and we’ll take such considerations under advisement in the future.
