"Living in a Post-Delete World"

"We're living in a moment of cognitive dissonance when it comes to deleting. The more evidence we're presented with that anything we do online can haunt us forever, the more we persist in trying to control our digital histories. A guy can send a barrage ofangry tweets at a woman he doesn’t know online and then delete each one, but he can't stop her from posting screenshots. Same goes for celebrities who hit on much-younger women through direct messages. Hillary Clinton's deleted emails are still lurking on a server somewhere, ready to be unearthed. And it’s not just evasive politicians and individual creeps who suffer from delusions of deletion. BuzzFeed and Gawker might be able to appease advertisers or revise editorial standards in real time by deleting posts, but they can't pretend the posts didn't happen. By the time the offending posts come down, we’re all already talking about them...

As Colson Whitehead describes it, "Our entire lives as B-roll, shot and stored away to be recut and reviewed at a moment’s notice when the plot changes: the divorce, the layoff, the lawsuit."

http://nymag.com/thecut/2015/08/living-in-a-post-delete-world.html

Too much data.

And I liked the conclusion this essay came to - we SHOULD stop pretending like the internet is distinct from normal life, and like we can have different rules.