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" Everyone&amp;#039;s worried about NSA wiretapping and such. But really, that&amp;#039;s not the invasion of privacy that&amp;#039;s going to affect our lives. Instead, it&amp;#039;s user-generated spying and gossip. That&amp;#039;s what is going to make America into the equivalent of a small-minded small town. Remember anonymity? Or the idea of making a fresh start in a new city? Or even the notion of having a mysterious hidden past? Such quaint ideas. Soon, everyone will be branded like a sex offender who moves to a different neighborhood only to have posters of himself on every third tree. We&amp;#039;re seeing the rise of a new morality. This is the dawning of the age of humiliation and dread.  We&amp;#039;re not talking about Big Brother here. It&amp;#039;s Little Brother. The shame blogs. Consider a site called dontdatehimgirl.com. Here, disgruntled exes detail the personalities and physical flaws of their former boyfriends. You can read about a man&amp;#039;s alleged cheating, stinginess, STDs, or general naughty behavior. (One man supposedly &amp;quot;did cocaine on his daughter&amp;#039;s second birthday.&amp;quot; Another has &amp;quot;extremely hairy [balls] . . . and a wang that is anything but satisfying.&amp;quot;) This is part of a breed of Web sites--including truedater.com and womansavers.com (formerly manhaters.com)--that review your potential mate like Zagat&amp;#039;s critiques a restaurant.  Then there&amp;#039;s your work life. Whatever your business, there&amp;#039;s a blog out there waiting to humiliate you (for Wall Street, DealBreaker.com; for restaurants, it&amp;#039;s bitterwaitress.com). Yes, sometimes this gossip will help. Sometimes it&amp;#039;s empowering. The tape recording of that AOL guy who just about refused to let the customer cancel his service? Brilliant. And sure, it&amp;#039;s acceptable to alert women about a Romeo who claims he&amp;#039;s single when he&amp;#039;s married with kids. But more often, it&amp;#039;ll be a pain in your ass. These sites aren&amp;#039;t always overseen by editors or lawyers. They&amp;#039;re teeming with bitter former mates who happen to have mastered the hunt-and-peck method or former employees who got fired for drinking a fifth of Jack on the job. Libel laws won&amp;#039;t help us; information wants to be free--even nasty, embarrassing, or false information. We can&amp;#039;t stop it.  We&amp;#039;ll take fewer risks. One mistake will follow us forever. Or worse. Internet shaming has been taken to such extremes in China that it&amp;#039;s generated a bizarre and scary trend called Internet hunting. In one case cited by The New York Times, strangers enraged by an online bulletin board formed posses--offline, three-dimensional posses--to harass an alleged adulterer at his house. While I said it was a new morality, it&amp;#039;s actually not. It&amp;#039;s a very old morality. It&amp;#039;s a return to the shame-based society. Think the stoning of adulterers in Mesopotamia or the stocks of the Puritans or the shunning practices of the Amish. And it means you better be careful. We&amp;#039;ll all be prudes. So please, for your own good, make sure your scrotum is manicured. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a270/esq1006esq100-192/>