Due to USENET (what’s a privacy policy?) being opened up with the advent of search engines and huge datastores being made available to the public, I had a decision point — was I going to try to distance myself from the more radical politics and social/religious/edge culture views of my youth, or decide to live transparently, and own everything that was out there online?

My decision was to own the prior decade of “ephemera” and to make the choice to live as I was then, and as I am now, without apology.

I think this may be the attitude of the new crop of digital natives, much as it was for those of us in the smaller cadre who were digital alien invaders from the 70’s through early 80’s.

We created our own online society because no one who hadn’t been there had a clue as to what we were doing for a living. Today’s digital natives have enough critical mass to create a generational effect.

It’s possible they will change social attitudes toward the callowness of youth — or it’s possible that, like the Reagan era ex-hippies, they will just try to bury their pasts entirely by some new methods we don’t have in place to protect privacy — but I have no idea how that would work, given that things live forever online…