On shitting on Google.

[Cramulus]

In the US at least, employers aren't allowed to ask questions about protected qualities like national origin, family status, sexuality, etc., because we know that they can't be trusted with it.  If everything is public, they won't have to - and that means nobody will be able to make a firm statement on a controversial subject online ever.

nail on the head
earns

[Cain]

In the US at least, employers aren't allowed to ask questions about protected qualities like national origin, family status, sexuality, etc., because we know that they can't be trusted with it.  If everything is public, they won't have to - and that means nobody will be able to make a firm statement on a controversial subject online ever.

nail on the head
earns

Seconded.

[Captain Utopia]

In the US at least, employers aren't allowed to ask questions about protected qualities like national origin, family status, sexuality, etc., because we know that they can't be trusted with it.  If everything is public, they won't have to - and that means nobody will be able to make a firm statement on a controversial subject online ever.

The unspoken premise here is that there are a significant number of people in jobs today, who wouldn't be if their employers knew what they talked about online, and that there are at least as many "conservative" unemployed workers who would easily replace them in those positions.

Well okay, but consider the prerequisites to move from where we are now, to this imagined dystopia.

Glenn Beck would be penniless because no longer would anyone want to hear him say the things they dare not say themselves, musicians wouldn't take drugs and party hard because no label would hire them if they did, taxi drivers wouldn't complain about cyclists because their employers would be just too thin-skinned, and authors and artists of all kinds would have to strive towards ensuring none of their art is controversial.  Social networking, as we know it, gone - replaced by e-prime weather observations.  Any party pictures posted online must contain at least one member of the clergy and someones sweet old grandmother (both fully clothed).

Forums of all kinds, previously held together by a community, gone.  I just searched three random car forums, and the off-topic/general discussion areas are among the most popular boards with discussions ranging from Obama to Twilight to whether you would "hit" a particular chick.  Okay - whatever - but next time something goes squiffy with your vehicle, it's not insignificant if you can save a few hundred to a few thousand dollars by tapping into a knowledge base like that.  Multiply that effect over every user group that maintains and collects wisdom.  And you can compare such sites with the official versions which, due to liabilities/image concerns/etc do not have a community -- without that human element people do not congregate to show off their knowledge.  Trite example, but if Yahoo Answers! was entirely anonymous, then it'd be dead too.

And here's the kicker for me - any company which takes up such puritanical hiring practices will be starving itself of the very same and valuable creative energy which its competitors will use to their own advantage.  Either our corporations and institutions rise to meet the challenge of tolerance/turning a blind eye, or they will crumble, to be replaced by organisations which are more hip.

So no, I think this is fear-mongering.  I think fear sells.  And I think that's something else we'll need to change unless we, too, crumble obsolete.

[Cramulus]

I dunno man, my roommate is an H.R. manager, and although he's fairly level headed, he does hire employees based on very picky criteria.

I used to live upstairs from this xerox salesman recruiter. He was a gigantic douchebag and took extreme joy in interviewing people and then shutting them down in as judgmental a way as possible. He was telling me this anecdote about how he threw out any applications he received which weren't on expensive 30lb paper. "If they're going to be selling photocopiers, they need to take photocopies seriously."

I was like, "really dude? Do you really think that the paper weight is a good indicator of how good of a salesman the applicant will be?"

"Totally," he said, "And anyway, I get so many applications, I can afford to throw out anybody that's not taking it seriously."



to me, it shows how arbitrary these decisions are. It may have a lot less to do with where you went to college, and more to do with what you look like in your facebook photos.

On some level, the hiring process is selecting somebody to join your tribe. This is a very picky and often emotionally centered process. When applying for a job, as an applicant, you want to control the frame through which you're being viewed. I do not want potential employers knowing that I LARP, for example. I'm not embarrassed by it, I just don't want it to be an employer's first impression of me. We can say, "A good employer will learn to see past that BS", and in a rational world I would agree, but if that vibe doesn't exist already, when will it appear? Employers have no shortage of employees banging on their doors, when will they lower their existing criteria?


I mean, consider yourself an HR manager. You have two applicants with equal qualifications. One has FB pictures of himself doing bong rips in his friend's car, the other has pics of himself going fishing with his kids. Which do you hire?

[Captain Utopia]

I mean, consider yourself an HR manager. You have two applicants with equal qualifications. One has FB pictures of himself doing bong rips in his friend's car, the other has pics of himself going fishing with his kids. Which do you hire?

Am I looking to hire a Bong Salesman?  But yeah, for most other positions I'd consider the stable family man image first.  Why?  Because it's our current environment - the family man may hit the bong in his friends car too as far as I know, but at least if he does he's smarter about it - because he is aware enough to know that it would reflect badly - and that's credit to him.  Also, if I hired Mr Bong I may have to explain exactly why I'm not personally horrified by his passtime. So that's how I'd respond in that position today.

But working towards GA's future dystopia, because nothing is private, both will have bong-rip pictures online - and that changes the equation because now I'm forced to consider that the family man may want to leave the office at 5pm sharp and not work late hours.  Because before we could get to the point where everyone is hyper-cautious about what they put online, a whole load of people will have to get caught out first, right?

And this is what interests me -- what do we do when faced with the evidence that society has been up to a whole bunch of crazy unexpected shit out-of-the-office or behind-closed-doors, than previously held by conventional wisdom?  GA supposes that we'll become more conservative and less tolerant, I suppose the opposite.  Look at the major trends in social issues over the last few decades centuries and come to your own conclusions I guess.

You'll still have petty tyrants in positions of power dismissing applicants for whatever reasons they can find justifications for - obviously less justification is required if you get significantly more applications than you can thoroughly process.  But on the other hand, the more twisted these mini-machiavelli's get, the greater probability that their schemes will spill into their personal life - also to be documented online.

[Jasper]

You're saying when there's dirt on everyone, people are going to be less hasty to judge.

[Captain Utopia]

Not really, no.

[Doktor Howl]

Not really, no.

That's how I read it.  Can you elaborate?

[Captain Utopia]

Sigmatic is saying that the thought process in an individual would be "I've done X, people might give me a hard time about that, so I shouldn't throw stones and complain about someone else doing Y".  Maybe - but I wouldn't credit people with being that free of hypocrisy.

I'm saying that conventional wisdom plays a large part in dictating what is "acceptable" in a society.  Traditionally it's been mixed and mashed and artists of all kinds push boundaries and expand the scope of what is "acceptable".  A TV show will have the first ever lesbian/multiracial kiss and it'll be a BIG DEAL, purely for this reason.  Or a movie will generate massive headlines for its shocking content, none of which is repeated for the dozens of copy-cat movies which follow.  It's a relatively slow process, but have you noticed that this doesn't happen as often any more?

Instead of these shared watershed events that people can point to and historians can document, our intolerance now gets eroded in smaller chunks by our personalised experiences on the internet.  A blog here, a news story we click on there.  It might be a while before we see juggalos or furries as characters on The Young and the Restless, but I think this is precisely because we have no efficient method to map our personal experiences back into the conventional wisdom - it's lagging far behind in this new environment.

We assume our neighbours would be shocked by what we get up to, they assume the same, and we're all wrong.  Meanwhile our masks feign the appropriate responses while in certain circles.  But that disconnect is always reducing, and as it does many more things suddenly become "acceptable" in terms of conventional wisdom.

Now the question is what happens as we move towards a theoretical society where "everything is public" - does that make us less tolerant of others and more afraid to live our lives in the way we want to?  I don't think it does.

[Jasper]

But don't you see the similarities between your hypothetical situation and MAD?  If everyone's capable of destroying everyone else's social standing, it's the same game as nuclear war.

[Captain Utopia]

Assuming that "social standing" is measured against a completely static sense of what is "socially acceptable", then yes.

But my premise is that conventional wisdom and social acceptability is not static, and can - in certain circumstances - change dramatically.

[Doktor Howl]

But don't you see the similarities between your hypothetical situation and MAD?  If everyone's capable of destroying everyone else's social standing, it's the same game as nuclear war.

Doesn't work if they can do it without the victim knowing who did it.

[Jasper]

In a situation like this, it would be plausible that any kind of attack on someone's character from an anonymous source would be ignored, the same way a good word from an esteemed person would not be ignored.  An incriminating picture can be doctored (or faked the old way), and there's no reason to believe it isn't, if it came from Anonymous.

[Doktor Howl]

In a situation like this, it would be plausible that any kind of attack on someone's character from an anonymous source would be ignored, the same way a good word from an esteemed person would not be ignored.  An incriminating picture can be doctored (or faked the old way), and there's no reason to believe it isn't, if it came from Anonymous.

Who says anonymous?  I could just make up a name...or hit one of the classbook sites, and use the name of an old fellow student.

[Jasper]

There is some risk in using a cat's paw like that.   Getting caught means never being publically trusted again.