Wading through myriad verbalized nouns such as foreground, as well as a bounty of illogical comparative sentences, became worthwhile when I stumbled on some intriguing thoughts about Internet privacy in Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression. She starts by recounting the stories of a number of young women who worked in the quaintly-named adult entertainment industry to generate income for various virtuous goals, the most exalted being to pay tuition at Duke. Year later, these women lose their jobs when those films surface on the Internet.

This sort of situation exposes my conservative side: I don’t think a degree from Duke is worth becoming a porn actor, or that youth excuses such a genuinely bad decision. Many of those who lost their jobs were teachers. As a former teacher, I feel certain that once your naked self has been viewed online, you’ll never truly control that class again, not to mention their parents. This applies of course to similarly-compromised men.

Any person can avoid this phenomenon by not taking or permitting naked pictures of yourself.

The next story was of a woman who lost her job when her ex-husband outed photos of them having sex together, private photos they had made consensually. Ah, revenge porn. Naturally, the man was not fired. That is another case of bad judgment, but in this case the bad judgment of trusting your spouse, who later turned into the worst kind of jerk, which is pretty hard to predict.

I feel more conflicted about this person, though the no-nude-pictures rule would have worked in this case, possibly exposing the jerk tendency earlier.

Finally there is the case of the lesbian porn book On Our Backs, a collection of photos from the women’s erotic magazine of the same name, itself a spoof-rebuke of the feminist publication Off Our Backs. In Algorithms of Oppression this is  portrayed as a limited-run book distributed within a small sub-population of a harried minority years before the Internet. Librarians tasked with digitizing previously published books were hesitant to scan this one, since it would morph from hard-to-find printed versions to images instantaneously available worldwide, something the women involved could not have predicted.*

What a shock it would be to find Episodes from my Past popping up on the Internet decades later, uncurated by me! So glad I’m not famous. Should we be able to control our online exposure? More generally, are all the things we have ever done salient parts of who we are now, or can we truly change?

Again we see the US falling on the full exposure side, including continuing to publish felons who have served their time, and erasing the accomplishments of men guilty of a single unwanted touch even on the back of a disinterested woman, while Europe seems more likely to believe in redemption, and has adjudicated some rights for individuals over their online appearances.

The whole country is the opposite of the wild, wild West.  No Fresh Starts. Just Baggage.

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* Though the book was published in 1996, five years after the WWW went public, it was based on photographs taken up to twelve years previously.