Anonymity and the Internet

The anonymous blogger at X Journal misses zines because your coworkers, your exes, your future employers couldn't just Google you and find your zine. She speculates:

Every time I post...I ask myself, if only in a deep dark corner of my mind that I don't like to acknowledge: What would an employer think if they read this? If I ever ran for office, would this blog surface? Would I mind? I don't think so, but really, who am I to say how I'll feel five years from now?

These little things, they chip away at what you say, until you're left with nothing left.

There's nothing that makes me madder than the idea of something chipping away at what I've got to say. I won't succumb to that. Here, watch: boobs! Fuck! Smelly diapers! If someone tries to flip that back in my face when I run for mayor in 2017, that says more about them than it does about me.

I'm proposing a radical bit of etiquette here: don't Google your coworkers. Don't Google people you might think about hiring. Don't Google random people and then give them hell about what they say. I don't buy that crap about "if you said it on the Internet then you wanted me to find it." It smacks of the same uncivilized, idiot logic as "you wore that short skirt so you wanted to get raped." It deflects the responsibility away from the perpetrator. Please. Let's give our unsuspecting coworkers some privacy, eh?