There’s public and then there’s public. There’s a difference between picking your nose in the car and someone filming you picking your nose and then broadcasting it on every channel. And there’s a difference between the internet now and how it was before the spiders came along and ruined everything.

Everything I post is now indexed and easily found with very little digging. Imagine a library with books in heaps and piles. To find one book, sometimes you have to look for a scrap of paper in another book. Sure, this library is open to the public, but it’s a very different type of public than an organized library. Now imagine putting a diary in this public library. Sure, random people can find it and your close friends can find it if you tell them where it is, but there are all sorts of people who couldn’t find it. Then, these giant spiders came along and put everything in order. Now, anyone can find everything. I’d imagine one would write with a little less honesty after that.

An indexed world is not necessarily the world I want to live in. The spiders are real. They crawl the web. Organize it. Make everything easy to search. I remember long ago when searching wasn’t so easy. In fact, the way we use the internet has changed. No one knows what a browser is. URLs are too complicated for ordinary users. More and more, the internet is mediated by search, rather than by URL. It’s a different kind of experience.

And who can look up my writing? Potential employers! As an employee, or wage-slave, I must not appear to out of line. (Even that gibe can get me in trouble.) The government! Considering how they treat dissent these days, I’d rather keep my mouth shut. Oops, I mean, the US is the greatest country in the world and can never do wrong. Big companies! Selling anything I say to advertisers. Ick. Delivering that data to the government without warrants.

Thus, what I can say here is considerably neutered. What do I do? Update robots.txt to kill all the spiders? Unindex myself? Or do I take all my writing offline? Or do I password protect what I have? I don’t know.

I do need a space to philosophize honestly.