I don’t really have time to elaborate, but the title of this post came out of my mouth today in a conversation about online behavioural standards. We were talking about youthful indiscretions (not mine), digital cameras (not mine), and online social networks (not mine), and the combination of which can be embarrassing and/or incriminating. As you can guess from the “not mine” declarations, we were talking in abstract terms, of course.

I’ll repeat the phrase to satisfy my ego. It wants me to win a round of the great internet catchphrase generation game, and this is one statement of the obvious I haven’t seen before: There is no morning-after pill for internet idiocy.

At some point I plan write a longer post that connects my newly-coined statement with some musings I’ve had about late twentieth-century attitudes towards personal privacy, and phenomena central to Bruce Sterling’s concept of “centipedes”:

“Centipedes” are covert conspiracies meant to drive politicians from power by creating moral panics. Centipedes have the same dynamics as modern terror-groups, but they exploit sexual scandal instead of bloody mayhem. Centipedes are a cheap, highly effective, low-risk, highly-mediated method of political destabilization. [Source: Wired’s beyond the beyond blog, via BoingBoing]

Wow! Kids misbehaving, social theory, political scandals, covert conspiracies, and sex. Can’t you just hardly wait? Unfortunately my thoughts are still only half-baked so you have no choice but to wait.