I remember, long ago, when you could do something stupid or silly in public and not have to worry about it. Your friends had a good laugh at your expense, and it might even have been scandalous for a week, but the stories were all told out loud.
I miss that more than I can easily say. A stupid moment used to have a shelf life. The story got retold at a few parties, it got funnier and less accurate every time, and then it faded, and the person it happened to got to keep living.
Once in a while somebody had a camera. The photo was on film, took days to develop and was a pain to copy, and by the time anybody saw it, everybody had moved on. People got to be young and dumb and then grow out of it.
I needed that grace more than once. Most of us did.
A camera in every pocket
That world is gone. Now nearly everyone carries at least one camera at all times. That camera is wired straight to the internet, the place that enshrines stupidity forever. Forever is the word that sticks in my throat. Once someone posts something, people copy, screenshot and repost it faster than anybody can ask for it to come down, and one dumb Saturday night can still be sitting in a search result years later, waiting for a future boss or a future partner to find it.
It’s worse than that. There are surveillance cameras almost everywhere. In any American city you can’t walk a block without landing on somebody’s video, and every business records everything that happens inside it, all day, every day. If you live in a city, you’re on camera dozens of times a day whether you like it or not.
In some countries you need permission to publish somebody’s picture. Not here. Outside a few exceptions, like a place where you had a reasonable expectation of privacy, if somebody snaps your picture in public, they can post it, and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.
And they do post it. Spend a week on Facebook and you’ll watch a stranger’s surveillance clip go viral, or a drunken photo land on the wall of everyone who knows somebody’s ex. Thousands of people laugh at a person they’ll never meet, and then they scroll on. The person in the picture doesn’t get to scroll on.
I’ve watched those pile-ons happen in real time, and the speed of it is brutal. A few hours is all it takes for a stranger’s face to become the joke of the week in thousands of feeds, and hardly any of the people laughing will remember it a month from now.
How a bad thirty seconds used to fade, and why it now follows people for years.
What happens to the person in the picture?
It makes me angry, how we talk about viral moments like weather, like nobody did it to anybody. Somebody did. Would you want strangers laughing at your worst night while you sat at home unable to stop it?
A single silly photo has cost people job offers they never found out they’d lost. People get fired over thirty seconds of video, sometimes deserved, often not. And the cruelest version of all, the private video somebody made for one other person that turns up online the week after the breakup, is an attack, pure and simple, and it can follow the victim for the rest of their life. I have no patience at all for anybody who posts that kind of thing and calls it a joke.
| Harm | How it happens |
|---|---|
| Lost job offers | A single silly photo, and they never find out why |
| Firings | Thirty seconds of video, sometimes deserved, often not |
| Lifelong attack | A private video posted the week after a breakup |
| Public ridicule | A surveillance clip or drunken photo goes viral on Facebook |
| Lasting search results | One dumb night found years later by a boss or partner |
I spent eight years photographing people, and I learned early that a camera is power. You decide which moment of somebody’s life gets kept. I’ve got pictures in my archive I’ll never post, because the moment wasn’t mine to give away. I wish more people with phones in their hands felt that weight.
How should you live when everything is recorded?
So what do we do about it? Part of the answer is personal, and it’s simple. Act in public like the camera is always on, because it probably is. Behave the way you’d be comfortable seeing on the news, and you won’t have to lie awake about what’s out there. That’s the easy half. The hard half is how we treat everybody else.
Every one of us has a worst thirty seconds. Most of ours happened before there was a camera in every pocket. That’s luck, and nobody earned it. So when somebody else’s worst moment shows up in your feed, don’t share it.
Don’t pile on. Don’t be one more voice in the dogpile. The person in that clip is a human being, and they’re going to wake up tomorrow still being the person in that clip.
I miss the world that let people forget. We’re not getting it back, so the least we can do is extend each other the grace the old one gave us for free.
This started as a random thought from someone who woke up way too early on a Sunday morning.
It turned into something I care about more than I expected. Every time a stranger gets torn apart over a bad thirty seconds, I think about all the bad thirty seconds of mine that nobody ever filmed. The people hitting share got lucky with their own worst moments, and the least they owe for that luck is to keep their thumbs still.