Charlotte Gore is one of the most insightful and entertaining bloggers. She is a LibDem and started her blogging life supporting the party but taking the liberal line on all topics. Over the year she has become more libertarian with every post and more disillusioned with the LibDems, which you can read about here. That’s only to set the scene, she then went on to write a cracking post  post Libertarianism: Could it be any nerdier? . I’m not going to spoil it by only including parts here except this comment because it relates to a brief conversation I had with Chris after the November 5th stroll wth OH:

So Chris Mounsey’s election to leader of the Libertarian Party is fantastic news for fellow “evil nerds”, but can Chris reach out to a more broad audience? Chris runs the infamous and fantastically sweary Devil’s Kitchen blog, and because he’s one of the naughtiest geeks (second only to the incredibly, incredibly naughty Guido Fawkes) he’s right at the top of the evil dork hierarchy.

Mrs DK, the equally thoughtful bella gerens, picks up and mounts a sort of defence/agreement:

Chris is no different. As anybody who has listened to him speak, watched him on 18 Doughty Street back in the day, or met him in person knows, he is not a raving, swearing lunatic. The Devil’s Kitchen is a persona, the kind of irreverent ranting we do inside our heads but rarely share – and the fact that most of us have a Devil’s Kitchen version of ourselves in there does much to explain why his blog is so popular. It doesn’t mean that’s how we, or Chris, conduct ourselves in the usual course of things.

No, Chris isn’t a raving, swearing lunatic, but from his comment when I met him he is worried that it could come back to bite him in a future life.

I’m not here to defend Chris, I would probably make a hash of it and make him look worse, but to consider if the web really does make it harder to hide youthful indiscretions. All previous generations made them, but didn’t have the Internet to be so public with them and to have them archived only to be raised to embarrass us in later life. I’m sure that someone, somewhere has some photographs and memories of my indiscretions* just like I have of people from my past being right prats. The point is they are memories and sepia tinted photographs that none of has any real inclination to dig out, so we can just get on with our life, reasonably safe and secure that we are free from the past.

In the case of Chris (and Caroline Quigley see post below) his swear blogging is there for all to see and even if he shuts the blog down it is archived on 1000’s of servers and computers and anyone can dig it up, and may well do in the future especially he stays in politics. Chris isn’t alone and many people have started to worry about whether some photograph or comment they made on Facebook or Twitter when pissed will show up at a job interview, especially for senor level jobs. HR departments and managers routinely scan the web to see what employees and job candidates are really like.

This may be a problem now but, as I said to Chris, I  don’t think it will be a serious problem in the future. As my generation moves into retirement and his moves in to senior roles they will be more understanding and tolerant of what can be found about people’s histories on the web, mainly because all but the most boring will have embarrassing material in the public domain. Those who rise to position of power in firms will accept that most of it was just youth blowing off steam, for that is what they did as well.

As for moves in to politics, we already have a precedent. Thirty years ago any politician that admitted  that they had even been in the same building as someone who was taking drugs would have been out before they finished the sentence. Now it is almost a badge of honour worn by most of the cabinet, shadow cabinet and LibDem leadership to say they tried drugs. It isn’t a problem now because we all know that apart from the boring ones they all took drugs at university and if they didn’t and were the boring ones do we really want the governing us?

So, Chris, Caroline and everyone else of the Internet generation, don’t worry your all in to together.

*After nearly 26 years of marriage that now includes The Great Wise-One