07-27-2016, 12:11 PM
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comm...scandalous
Do these e-mails strike anyone as appalling and outrageous? Not me. They strike me as . . . e-mails. The idea that people might speak casually or caustically via e-mail has been portrayed as a shocking breach of civilized discourse. Imagine! People bullshitting on e-mail!
But that is what people do on e-mail. They spout off, sound off, write first, and think later. Of course, people should do none of these things. They should weigh carefully the costs and benefits of each e-mail that they write, and consider the possibility that someone might make the e-mails public someday. (They should also change their passwords regularly and get lots of exercise.) Last year, unfiltered talk on e-mail also got several people in trouble in the notorious Sony hack. But the real question is whether any of these e-mails really matter. Do they reveal deep-seated political or philosophical flaws? Do they betray horrible character defects? In the case of the Democrats, it seems clear that the answer to these questions is no. The vast majority of the e-mails contain normal office chatter, inflated into a genuine controversy by people who already had axes to grind.
These sorts of issues are likely to recur, in the political world, the business world, and elsewhere. Hacks are virtually certain to become more common. Russian operatives are suspected of orchestrating the D.N.C. hack in an attempt to disrupt the Democratic Convention and help Vladimir Putin’s favored Presidential candidate, Donald Trump. But, beyond this single case, the sophistication of hackers, Russian or otherwise, is likely to outpace the rigor of e-mail-security measures for the foreseeable future. That means we’ll again be asked to parse the meaning of barely thought-through e-mails that were never meant to be public. We’ll all be better off if we evaluate e-mails in the spirit in which they’re written—or, better yet, write them off accordingly.
Do these e-mails strike anyone as appalling and outrageous? Not me. They strike me as . . . e-mails. The idea that people might speak casually or caustically via e-mail has been portrayed as a shocking breach of civilized discourse. Imagine! People bullshitting on e-mail!
But that is what people do on e-mail. They spout off, sound off, write first, and think later. Of course, people should do none of these things. They should weigh carefully the costs and benefits of each e-mail that they write, and consider the possibility that someone might make the e-mails public someday. (They should also change their passwords regularly and get lots of exercise.) Last year, unfiltered talk on e-mail also got several people in trouble in the notorious Sony hack. But the real question is whether any of these e-mails really matter. Do they reveal deep-seated political or philosophical flaws? Do they betray horrible character defects? In the case of the Democrats, it seems clear that the answer to these questions is no. The vast majority of the e-mails contain normal office chatter, inflated into a genuine controversy by people who already had axes to grind.
These sorts of issues are likely to recur, in the political world, the business world, and elsewhere. Hacks are virtually certain to become more common. Russian operatives are suspected of orchestrating the D.N.C. hack in an attempt to disrupt the Democratic Convention and help Vladimir Putin’s favored Presidential candidate, Donald Trump. But, beyond this single case, the sophistication of hackers, Russian or otherwise, is likely to outpace the rigor of e-mail-security measures for the foreseeable future. That means we’ll again be asked to parse the meaning of barely thought-through e-mails that were never meant to be public. We’ll all be better off if we evaluate e-mails in the spirit in which they’re written—or, better yet, write them off accordingly.
