The Intimidating Immortality Of The Internet

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Since the advent of social media, a new phenomenon has arisen in our society. I’ve watched with interest in recent years as celebrities and sometimes everyday people have had to deal with media crises precipitated by the resurfacing of years-old comments made on the internet. 

I have always thought this was stupid and destructive that we drag up random posts for ten years ago and make people answer for it as if an internet post is equivalent to a real-world action. I absolutely understand that words can be hurtful, and I always make an effort to be appropriately considerate in my speech, written or verbal, but a general internet post is in no way equal to direct personal communication or actions. Words in a casual private conversation are not the same as a public statement, though it is still fair to draw appropriate conclusions from it. 

While of course we should own the things we say, making too much of real-time internet comments ignores the fundamental nature of the internet. We shouldn’t treat a Twitter or blog post the same way you would treat something published in a book. But then, it is a quandary because the internet is accessible far more widely than almost any book. But yet, part of both the positive and negative impact of the internet is that it is real-time.  If we destroy that real-time character by requiring people to treat internet posts like they are going into the Library of Congress, then we might as well not have social media. 

Today, I took the truly horrifying step of telling someone about this blog for the first time. Though I write it as if I’m talking to a global audience, that is done with the assumption (or perhaps just the distant hope) that it might be widely read in the future. But up until now, it was like a work-in-progress awaiting publication, until, with great trepidation, I revealed it to one person today. 

As you might expect, the person I told was a Jewish girl. It was frightening to do. This not only because, though I still don’t know why I feel this way, I am sheepishly embarrassed of Jewish girls knowing I like them. Fear of rejection, perhaps?  It is also because of my legal status. I had to trust this girl, having no idea what she might do. When this girl reads that I’ve been to prison, and what for, and that I’m currently technically a fugitive, though not really, how will she react? I decided to do it, the primary reason being that I trust the judgment of Jewish girls in general and this girl in particular. But I’m scared...

But as I was reading through the blog this afternoon in the hours after telling her about it, I noticed two things, one that irritated me and one that alarmed and panicked me. First, I noticed a lot of typographical errors. I really thought I’d done a better job editing than that. It’s a blog, not a book, but I’m a perfectionist and find myself thinking, “What if someone circulates this and it goes viral with typos in it??!??”. A reasonable person says, “So what?”. But I am a perfectionist, so it bothers me a lot, not only that the errors are there, but that I thought I’d done a thorough job of editing. 

But then the panic: I noticed that one post appeared not to be what a remembered publishing, and contained fragments of a post I had written some months ago in a fit of emotion last year and quickly removed. But even some of those fragments seemed not to be exactly what I had remembered writing, and another post seemed to be the same.  I truly freaked out. 

I thought, “Wait a minute, nobody would hack a blog nobody is reading, would they??This must have just been sloppy inattentive work by me”. 

But it shows what the danger of the internet is, and why the process that something goes through to get published in traditional media is important. The particular fragments in question were from something that I had written one day whilst in a highly emotional state while contemplating the twin realities of all that Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein had gotten away with, combined with the fact that none of the Jewish people that I knew nor any of the Jews in public life that are known as advocates for justice had helped me with my recent struggles. 

These fragments that I swiftly deleted, unfortunately along with a very important post, “Who Is Jane Galt?”, that I need to put back up after I edit it, could be interpreted, without the context of the long-deleted post from which they came, as actually being antisemitic. Now, given the overall content of this blog, I would think that any reasonable person would find that laughable. But in the current times, it isn’t. It caused me concern and I would have expected anyone who saw it to be concerned. 

It concerned me because I had just publicized the blog for the first time and something like that could totally undermine what I’m trying to do. The Jewish community, like all communities, has some people who live on the dark side (a smaller percentage than other communities, I believe), and what I had written was something directed to those people, before I thought better of it as not belonging on this blog, and took it down. It was something that I never should have tried to begin to address in a blog post, especially one on a blog that, though sincere, is fundamentally intended to be light-hearted in nature. It had to do with how antisemitism has historically and presently put the Jewish community in a position where it has had to protect some unsavory members of the community in order to protect the community as a whole, and the effect this has. There are similar issues in the Black community, though it isn’t the same because antisemitism is, in several meaningful ways, worse than anti-Black racism in recent decades at least. 

I feel like I’m doing spin-doctoring now in case anyone saw those posts before I took them down, but that really isn’t what I’m doing. I know the nature of the internet, and in fact the reason I published this blog rather than just holding the content on my computer was that I didn’t know what my future held (I still don’t) and I wanted to make sure how I felt was documented. It’s not like I intentionally said something publicly and am now trying to disown it. It was never meant for public or even private consumption and was more akin to a fragment from an emotional passage in a journal. There is nothing wrong in hoping no one saw something that you didn’t intend to be seen. 

I could have gambled that nobody saw it, deleted it and pretended it never existed, but that’s what gets people in trouble. I believe in transparency, and I’m not going to take the risk that someone screenshotted those pages and will trot them out later to accuse me of trying to bury it. So I dashed off this piece, probably itself riddled with typos, to explain, taking the risk that the explanation will expose something that nobody knew about. But I decided a long time ago observing people in public life: never try to hide anything. You’re actually trying to evade the basic rules of reality. If any Jewish girls want to know what I said, I’ll gladly tell them, or show it to them when I get my computer back. 

The other problem that I have—and I recognize it as a problem and am trying to control it—is that I am a screenwriter, but I also write social and political commentary. If I don’t watch myself, I’l sometimes write serious commentary in the incendiary, melodramatic style of good movie dialogue, and that was what I had done in the stuff I deleted. 

But life sometimes plays funny tricks on you, and this was one of them. I would swear I had been reading what was up here more carefully than that, both the typos and the stuff I had intended to delete, but I don’t know. The intended-to-be-deleted stuff seemed to not be exactly what I remembered writing, in ways that made it sound worse. Some of the typos seemed like errors that I would never make but I couldn’t imagine me or my unread blog being important enough to anyone to take the time to do such an involved hack. But I changed my password just in case...

Now my OCD has kicked in and I want to go check everything. I’m going to, but I shouldn’t be panicky about it. If anybody, Jewish girls especially, can’t read what is up here and see clearly where my mind and heart are, then I picked the wrong girls to line up with!

I believe it is important that we own the things we say, but I also think it is important that society is reasonable about what it asks us to own. Although, yes, it is on the internet, I had not yet publicized this blog for a reason, and at least according to Google, until today nearly all the pages had never been viewed.  It was not ready for public consumption, and its probably still not. As I’ve been saying for years, I need a volunteer editor—badly!

Often when people have claimed their accounts were hacked, I didn’t believe them. It’s just the most convenient excuse. But perhaps it was often what happened to me just now, where they aren’t sure, but it is easier to disown it, especially if it was something you didn’t intend to say and don’t feel. But unless I see something I’m certain I didn’t write, I won’t do that.  But I will ask for, and I think people should always be afforded, a chance to explain. 

I am a child of the internet, and I’ve written tons of stuff on my old website, on Twitter, on Facebook, on message boards and in emails that I knew I might be challenged about if I ever entered public life, and it was part of my personal stance in life to not let this make me censor myself. Unlike so many people, I’ve always been prepared to own the stuff I’ve said, so long as I was permitted the opportunity to explain the context in which I said it and be heard. 

But this is one of the thorny things about the internet we have to figure out. In an environment where off-the-cuff comments live forever, do you then ban off-the-cuff comments? I don’t think so. 

Sensitivity goes both ways. I’ve always thought Black people were too sensitive about stuff other people say that we find offensive. Like I’ve been saying about sexual assault cases, you have to consider who a person is and what their record of behavior has been. If there are a couple of wacky, error-ridden paragraphs that could be taken as antisemitic on a blog dedicated to the talent, beauty and general awesomeness of Jewish girls, wouldn’t it make the most sense to assume that was an error of some kind?  We all need to be sensitive about what we say. Not politically correct—sensitive. But we as a society need to be sensitive enough to give people the benefit of the doubt for things said or written in an emotional or impulsive state. 

I panicked this afternoon because I’ve always had this deep dark fear that after all I’ve done to avoid fame, my introduction to it would be a negative media circus surrounding something bad I did, or was reputed to have done. But I keep hearing in my mind a line from a clip in this movie I love—“You’re worryin’ too much!”. I do. 

One of my all-time favorite albums is a jazz record, by a girl from New York who plays the piano, Rachel Z. It’s called Trust The Universe. I’ve been listening to it for about twenty years, but I’m still working on how to do that. I really shouldn’t be worried, but when you care about someone, you always worry about anything you’ve done that might hurt their feelings. The fear that made me panic was that this Jewish girl I told would come here and that stuff I didn’t intend to be up would be the first thing she would read. But if Jewish girls are as smart as I think they are, they know that I’m not antisemitic, and probably knew it before I started this blog.  I’m sure even Jewish girls get mad at Jews sometimes just like I get mad at Black people sometimes. 

I just need to stop being neurotic, and get back to work...if you can call this work. It’s all I feel I can do right now anyway. It feels weird writing this now knowing that I might have an audience. Scary. I don’t know what’s scarier: an audience of many or an audience of the one Jewish girl I told. But there’s no way she’d be able to resist telling the other Jewish girls she knows, right?  I need to spend all day tomorrow editing...that is if I don’t get arrested. Oh wait, I was going to stop worrying. 

The funny thing is, after I had told her about this blog, I felt so much better.  Almost ecstatic. It was kind of the moment I had been waiting for, to have a reason to feel like it was the right time to share it. I started thinking and hoping that this might be the point that things will start to turn around for me, and I’ll find some Jewish girl allies and be able to get my life back on track. I just felt like such a dumbass when I noticed how unready for prime time it was and that it included some erroneously published “hot mike” outtakes. But I gotta get back to writing. I’m not bipolar, but I’m so sensitive that worries and problems can really knock me on my heels. 

Now its going to get really embarrassing, because the next thing I was going to publish is about...porn. 

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