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KPGv2today at 7:20 PM1 replyview on HN

Fifteen years or so ago I read an article arguing that by the time Millennials are nearing retirement and have more political power, people will give less of a shit about what you did online in your twenties because we will have, out of necessity, learned that asshattery in your twenties is largely irrelevant to your trustworthiness in your sixties.

When I was that age, you could tell the kids who had political ambitions self-censored online. But now every is buck wild so you have to ignore that when looking at people.

For example, a MASSIVE portion of Millennials and younger looking at the Main election are pretty chill about the leading Democratic candidate having a Nazi tattoo because of this very thing. Basically, "dumb, drunk, deployed Marines will get cool skull and crossbones tattoos in their early twenties, and so what if he said a couple ill-worded somewhat misogynistic things in his twenties, that was decades ago, and he's obviously a different person."

Contrast with Bill Clinton, where he literally had to explain away university marijuana usage TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE FACT.

Point is, I think we're witnessing this evolution happening right now.


Replies

AtlasBarfedtoday at 9:32 PM

This isn't the dystopia we're worried about.

The dystopia we're worried about is a 1984 on steroids with llms and real 24/7 worldwide monitoring by the state.

Getting caught doing embarrassing things by teenage social standards doesn't threaten your life.

A competent version of Donald Trump could have walked into the office and we would have been worse than the third Reich.

Still could be today right now. The capability is TurnKey right now at the US government.

This is open research being discussed here. Palantir already has all of this and probably 10 times more.