Think back to college or high school, and, if you have reached your forties or fifties, there are some memories that will make you cringe. Whether these were your earnest stabs at artistic creation, philosophy (deadly earnest), or simply creative debauchery, they seemed like great ideas at the time. Now you are simply grateful that you can cringe in private, and that any faint memory of these youthful adventures lives only in those who, if still known to you, would probably be inclined to pretend not to remember such things at all (and naturally expect reciprocal kindness).

Imagine being young now: the effortless recording of every moment by multiple onlookers means that any hideous display of bad judgment can be disseminated on YouTube (and the more extreme the badness, the more likely it is to find an enthusiastic following there). Every idiotic poem will be preserved without decay on the web and, despite your best desperate efforts at erasure, will live on in the Google archive and the Wayback Machine. There is no escape, no blissfully shriveling memory to save you.

The most, along these lines, that our generation needs to worry about is the occasional ill-advised usenet posting made during graduate school. And this probably amounts to some bad advice about Fortran common blocks (how embarrassing).

But, perhaps, the young do not need our pity. Perhaps, although the digital echoes of deeds they would rather forget will follow them forever, from school to their first job interviews, to prospective mates cautiously Googling their pasts, the impact will be blunted by the very nature of the problem: the ubiquity of these memories that refuse to fade means that all their peers drag these same chains behind them. The entire generation lives in a glass house, and nobody is foolhardy enough to toss the first stone. Or so they can hope.

And maybe they’re right. Maybe the earnest young applicant need not fear that a potential employer might find that video of him dancing naked in the street with a bong duct-taped to his head. Maybe that employer is most likely to just let out a nervous chuckle, thinking about the worse records of his own youthful indiscretions that periodically make the rounds through intra-office email.

I’m not sure about this. And I don’t blame the technology, which I certainly enjoy. But I consider myself fortunate that this technology of pitiless, permanent memory reached is current state of effortless deployment after I reached an age when one becomes reflexively aware of unintended consequences, and of the fragility of reputations, and when something can not look cool and shiny without also looking at least a little .... dangerous.

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