This morning Slashdot linked to a piece over at Ars Technica quoting Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of Harvard's Kennedy School (whew!) on the subject of digital forgetfulness. The problem, he says, is that anyone participating in online society will accumulate an ever-larger tail of embarrassing cruft. It'll be trivially easy for us to confront one another with beer-belt pictures and Inuyasha fanfic written at age fourteen. "Gotcha!" will move out of the realm of politics and into the office.

I can already see my friends' concern over this manifesting itself. I think that their (partial) blogospheric exodus toward Facebook is motivated, to some extent, by these sorts of worries. Clients and coworkers read their sites, and they don't like the constraints that imposes. No offense to the clients and coworkers reading this, but I don't always like it either — it's disappointing to feel like there are limits on your personal writing. I'm unwilling to flee to Facebook, but that's just my own hangup — if your online creative output includes technology, it feels like a straightjacket (and, of course, its founder is a thief, which makes my web-developer self loathe to endorse it in any way). But I can understand why others would want to.

Still, fleeing to proprietary communities is just a stopgap measure. My completely-neglected Facebook profile currently has at least one friend request from a client waiting. Of course I could decline to approve it, or grant limited access to my profile (so I'm told, anyway). But what are the social implications of doing that? Is it considered a snub? If it isn't, how long until it will be? No, it seems inevitable that your activity in any given online community will eventually become part of your publicly-known personal history, limiting the sorts of ways that you can comfortably express yourself.

Admittedly, all of this is sort of peripheral to Mayer-Schönberger's point. Social circles will no doubt continue to flee across the internet as the grown-ups (so to speak) encroach on them. Staying one step ahead of your professional contacts is, by and large, a viable strategy for not poisoning your work relationships by exposing your horrible true self.

Mayer-Schönberger doesn't seem concerned with these ongoing public/private struggles. Rather, he's worried about the potential for finding embarrassing information about a person's history at a single given point in the future. It's bound to happen: there's real utility to be had by, say, exposing Facebook information to a search engine. If Google refuses to do it, someone else will. And of course there are plenty of other sources of potentially embarrassing information out there (http://www.flickr.com/photos/YOUR-NAME-HERE/tags/drunk). If anyone dug up digitized copies of the short stories I wrote for my high school literary journal, I'd fully expect to be penniless and living on the streets by nightfall (it would be well-deserved, I assure you).

M-S (if I can call him that) suggests a legally mandated technological system that would, by default, cause data to be deleted after a period of time. I'm sure his heart is in the right place, but this is dumb for all the same reasons that DRM is dumb. You really, really can't control the spread or persistence of publicly available digital information. Efforts to do so are a waste of everyone's time.

But it's a real problem nonetheless. I see two likely solutions: first, increased adoption of Darknets, invite-only communities and largely-anonymous forums like Unfogged (although the protective namelessness of that community is pretty much gone). But that's not a complete solution, for the reasons listed above.

The real answer is just for us, as a society, to get over ourselves: to stop pretending that no one ever gets drunk in college, ever says things they don't mean, or has a sex drive. It's wildly optimistic, I know. But we've gotten over needing our politicians to be undivorced teetotalers who never say anything dumb (and how!). Maybe the generations that have been online their entire adult lives will have a diminished capacity for puritanical self-deception. I hope so, anyway.