Generally speaking, I've always considered myself a "techno-optimist," sometimes perhaps to the point of Panglossianism. As a teen, I embraced those new-fangled "microcomputers," and as a 20-something the World Wide Web, with enthusiasm.
The Information Age, like the Industrial Revolution before it, was a rising tide that lifted all boats: More things, more cheaply, for more people. In general, anyway. In the specifics, we've lost a few things as well, and it's not always obvious whether those losses are good things, bad things, a mixed bag, or a price worth paying.
Lately, the loss I have in mind is the suffocating "no backsies" environment we've created via global social media and its seeming permanence.
As humans, we've always found ourselves haunted by our past mistakes, both as a personal matter of guilt, shame, or embarrassment and as a communal matter of reputation (up to and including potential ostracism).
On the latter front, I'm old enough -- and I'm not THAT old -- to remember a time when anyone but the most public of public figures could mitigate, or at least hope to mitigate, the latter phenomenon.
People with earned reputations for abusing alcohol and loved ones could give up booze, get divorces, move to another county and start over, among new neighbors who neither knew of, nor had any reason to suspect, their prior violations of social norms. Clean slates, and if they nailed the "sin no more" part of "go and sin no more," new and better lives.
Even people who'd done REALLY bad things, perhaps things deserving of severe punishment, could get that fresh start if they moved fast and were able to keep their heads down for the rest of their lives.
How many Nazi murderers died decades later, of old age and "surrounded by loved ones" as low-profile pillars of communities far from the scenes of their crimes?
For that matter, how many "average Germans" who adored and actively supported Hitler between 1933 and 1945 spent the rest of their lives lying to their kids and grandkids about their attitudes back when?
That kind of thing can't really happen today ... and for the last 20 years or so we've been watching what happens instead.
Say you're a musician, an actor, or politician just on the cusp of prominence and success.
If you posted a racist tweet when you were 13 years old and lived in Memphis, or got a DUI when you were 19 years old and lived in Boston, everyone's going to know about it, even if that was long ago and you're living and working in Hollywood or Dallas now.
And that increase in both the archiving and flow of information seems to come coupled with a decrease in the tendency toward commiseration and/or forgiveness. There but for the grace of god I might have gone? You're sorry? So what? Pile on!
We've removed "flight" from the "fight or flight" menu.
If a mistake must inevitably follow you no matter where you go, and if admitting that mistake is just an invitation to kick you when you're already down, the incentive becomes clear:
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