The Internet poisons public service.
Say you’re a third-grade teacher. You got into this work because you like helping kids and you’re not greedy for lucre or glory. Modest paycheck and benefits aside, your compensation is the reward of serving.
One day you offend a student. (Eight-year-olds are easy to offend.) The offense may be a failing grade or merited reprimand. The students’ parents – irascible, irrational, insecure, and easily misled by angelic Junior – vow revenge. They take to social media with anonymous scurrilities, distortions, fabrications, or hoary indiscretions lost to human if not digital memory. (That DUI after the frat party – will the Internet never forget!) You brush off the insinuations as piffle, only they inspissate, gathering force from your denials. Our legal system may presume innocence, but ordinary onlookers presume guilt. Whispering commences in the school parking lot. Concerned parents want answers. The principal, eager to retain her job, wants to appear “responsive.” School board members get curious, maybe the mayor. Your kid comes home asking about this rumor, if it is a rumor…
Your calumniators can’t be traced or, if they can be, who’d want to – touch pitch and be defiled. Suddenly the reward of your work no longer repays its cost, so you quit, your equanimity shattered – career prospects – maybe your sanity. For having acted professionally, you’ve been ruined – who needs that! Sensible newcomers eschew the profession, which corrodes the quality of teaching, which results in less capable students, all because of the Internet’s unbounded and unlicensed power to make mischief.
This doesn’t just happen to nominees for Presidential appointment; it happens to all public servants – teachers, clerks, ministers, medical workers, anyone in our democracy who serves their fellow citizens. And even if it doesn’t happen to you, it might, so you tiptoe on eggshells and keep your head down. Trepidation is no fun as a steady diet. Let me be a mechanic, programmer, day-trader, any job where I don’t have to court random folks’ favor. Better safe than sorry.
Policing the Internet is among the thorniest of contemporary perplexities. There’s no gainsaying the Internet’s beneficial might – it brought you these words for free in an eyeblink, bless it! It exposes evildoers and frustrates tyrants. It immeasurably expands the quantity and availability of information. But power to do good is also a power to harm. If the Internet hounds good teachers from the classroom or able volunteers from city hall, is it civilization’s friend?
Freedom of speech cannot mean freedom to destroy. The Internet is our information superhighway, and we must demand neighborly behavior there as we do on our concrete roads. Reckless tweeters must be prosecuted, banned, punished. The details of those rules will be tricky to specify and hell to enforce, but where there’s a will there’s a way. Maybe, for starters, social media users, like gun owners, should be registered – good luck with either!
Our Internet disease is no secret. Any half-awake observer recognizes the threat. But the Internet is so useful and entertaining to its users and remunerative to its manipulators, we’re loath to act to save ourselves. “It is what it is,” we exonerate ourselves with a shrug.
Everything baleful about modernity “is what it is.” Eventually humanity will be “what we were,” if we don’t get busy facing the problems we’re compounding daily. How many evil genies our genius has unbottled! Mind pollution, climate pollution, deadly arsenals, wholesale mendacity… whose heart does not hurt at the Criminality of Humanity! Yet heigh-ho, here’s Santa, with his latest nifty gadget or painkiller or lame excuse. Woe are we.