Mutually Assured Facebook Destruction
Thursday, November 6, 2008
In honor of our new President, I present you with a rejected New York Times Op-Ed Piece. I'm 0-3 on submitting things to them. This is the most recent. Since the election was a big deal (regardless of how you voted), time to learn about Mutually Assured Facebook Destruction.
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If you're under 30 there's something on your Facebook page that would probably disqualify you from being elected President. Aside, that is, from the Constitutionally mandated age of 35. That's because Facebook profiles would be fertile territory in an age when the politics of personal destruction remain a fixture of our electoral politics. From what your profile says, to what friends write on your wall, from your pictures to the groups you join, inevitably something you've done is offensive to someone, something, or some interest group. In an age of tepid themes and political blandness, Facebook and other social networking sites of their ilk are a digital thumb in the electoral eye—a vibrant, diverse, and motley collection of supported causes, off-color photos, and off-color language; all of which provide a more vivid portrait of their tens of millions of users than have ever existed in a public arena before. Chances are a future President of the United States will log onto Facebook in the time it takes you to read this newspaper.
In doing so he or she will inevitably be connected to something, someone, or some place that you or I may find offensive. His or her profile will provide evidence of a personal failing that could provide fertile ground for a political attack ad of the future. Only it won't. Why? Because I believe the flourishing nature and very ubiquity of digital profiles in an internet age is already providing a roadmap to the end of the politics of personal destruction. I call it Mutually Assured Facebook Destruction. ("MAFD") It's the digital age's own evolution of the Cold War nuclear arms theory. Like its predecessor the theory is simple, a personal attack in a world where everyone has a readily accessible digital past will destroy both sides. You'll keep your mouth shut and the other side will too.
Already minor Facebook scandals have flared in the past two election cycles—from Rudolph Guiliani's daughter belonging to a group that supported Obama for president to Tennessee's Republican Senator, Bob Corker, downplaying pictures of his college-age daughter kissing another girl after the images circulated online. If you're a parent you've probably worried about what your children make available of their private lives online for fear of how it might impact their future, if you're past the age to be interested in online social networking you're concerned about the breakdown of private life in the modern era. Both are wasted concerns. The genie's profile is out of the bottle.
But so too, among the younger electoral age, is the value of personal attack based upon these profiles. It's not just that the two combating candidates will both have something to lose in exposing their own online pasts, it's that voters of the future are going to shrug their shoulders at any evidence of these failings. Everyone's failures, successes, triumphs and travails will have been visible for a very long time. The politics of the past half-century have been about pretending to be better than you actually are, the politics of the future will be about not hiding from who you are or what you've been. Why? Because you won't be able to. Google will know, Facebook will know, anyone with a search bar will know what you've already done, both good and bad.
Rather than being terrifying in its scope, this breadth of knowledge is ultimately liberating to the individual and society as a whole. If everyone's flaws are readily apparent in the digital world, indeed if we're often providing them ourselves, then we can focus on what really divides us in the political arena, not lame attempts to personally attack past actions or associations, but true differences of thought, opinion, and belief.
As we come down the home stretch of yet another election that has focused, all too often on both sides, on the personal associations and connections of the candidates, it's refreshing to know that the internet age is going to bring the politics of personal destruction to an end. It's not that in the future, we won't all be pictured with our own personal William Ayers. It's just that Mutually Assured Facebook Destruction will ensure that no one ever pays attention to them. There will be so much personal information available that its very ubiquity will have, ironically, made it worthless as a source of attack. So the next time you find out that your underage son or daughter has put up pictures featuring underage drinking in a pimps and hos themed college party, give them a call and say, "I always knew you were going to be President one day." Labels: Mutually Assured Facebook Destruction MAFD
Posted by Clay Travis at 12:19 AM
 
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