We now have a life where everything you said, wrote, photographed, or liked does not disappear. It lies somewhere in the cloud, waiting for its time. And this time almost always comes. I believe that at first glance, there is nothing special, but this is a deceptive feeling.
I call this WALRUS for myself because now we all live under retrospective surveillance. And the scariest thing is not that someone is watching you right now. The scariest thing is that in 5, 10, 15 years, someone may open your tweet/post/story from 2017 and say, look, 'Oh, he/she wrote such things! And how are we even communicating with such a person?'
Once people could make mistakes and forget about them. The mistake would dissolve over time, like smoke. Now the mistake does not dissolve. It lies in high resolution and waits for someone to find it.
So judging has become much harsher.
Because it is possible.
Because there is evidence.
And because society is now changing the rules very quickly; what was a normal joke yesterday is today a reason for public execution.
Cancel culture is just the tip of the iceberg. Underneath lies fear. A constant, quiet, but very strong fear that your past will one day return and tell you: 'You have no right to change. You are forever who you were at 22 years old.'
People are already writing shorter, more cautiously, and more boringly. Many have simply stopped writing altogether. Because it's easier to remain silent than to explain later why you thought that way. I don’t want to delve into this, as it’s already a separate conversation.
And the saddest thing is that we are slowly losing the ability to forgive, or simply not to pay attention to some minor offense.
Not only others but also ourselves.
Because if a mistake is recorded forever, then you seem to be fixed in that mistake too. Like a fly in amber.
I am not against people being held accountable for bad deeds.
I am against us stopping to believe that a person can change.
Because if we stop believing in this, then why even try at all?
The past should be a teacher, not an eternal prosecutor.
But for now, it seems we are leaning more towards the second.
And I don’t know how to fix it.
Maybe we need to learn to delete old things without feeling guilty.
Maybe we should agree that a 10-year-old tweet is not a life sentence.
Maybe we should just remember more often that we all were once dumber than we are now.
Otherwise, it will turn out that living will become frightening.
Not because you are doing something bad now.
And because you once could have done something bad then.
And this is a completely different kind of prison. For me, this is the case where it’s worth just observing.@Walrus 🦭/acc #walrus $WAL
