Three Cheers for the Guardrails

The Internet of course is a mess, but I'd like to take a moment to appreciate the time we're in with it right now, because... well, at the risk of sounding like an old fogey, the standard of decency tends to devolve.  Each generation lowers the bar a little bit.  I don't mean to sound too judgemental of that.  I think it's empirically true that priorities shift and what was important for one generation to protect just isn't even on the RADAR of the next.  The song "Anything Goes" which complains about this perceived moral erosion was written in 1934.

 Oops I got off on a tangent about this but "perceived" is really the key word.  It's generational perspective, and I don't think that each generation gets together and holds a conference to decide what does and doesn't matter to them.  I don't know what happens, but the collective consciousness somehow seems to tune into the same wavelength and change the standard of what matters and what doesn't - the ambient decency.  I'm sure my generation did it.  A glimpse of stocking most definitely was looked on as something shocking, but at some point skirts went above the knee and it just didn't matter.

So for as much of a mess as the current internet is, I'm happy that the really terrible stuff (and you know it's out there) still remains very hidden.  Maybe I'm wrong about that but even in a time when it seems you're never more than one typo or errant click away from naked boobies, there still remains a "dark web" where new categories of abhorrent are surely being invented every day.  I really don't know who or what is responsible for keeping that stuff so hidden, but ultimately it remains that way because it violates the current collective moral standard, and that's great but if anything I just wrote above is true, the clock is ticking.