• by George Simpson , Featured Contributor, April 7, 2016

When the Ashley Madison customer list was leaked, I was relieved not to be on it (or maybe I should say, my wife was relieved that I was not on it). But now that nearly 12 million pages of the Panama Papers are out, it appears that I'm not on that list either. Nor was I featured in the Frappening explicit phone photo leak.

If you were tracking all of this with cookies, you could deduce that I am not very adventurous — or rich. Who knows, maybe the dangers of hacking will produce a global renewed commitment to morality (or at least smarter offshore banking practices.)  

As we saw this week with the revelation that Facebook has been an unknowing host to illegal arms sales, particularly in the Middle East, and the ongoing reality that terrorists are using encoded messaging apps to plan attacks, we have to stop and ponder the impact the rapid evolution of technology is having on our collective moral choices.

What parent isn't aghast that teens and even younger kids think that because they technologically can, it is perfectly OK to send Snapchat pix of their private parts to someone they hardly know or can trust? Or for strangers to use Skype for video "phone sex”? 

Especially since you can be pretty sure that somewhere, some NSA guys are killing time watching what you think are totally private sessions.

So the question is, has technology (especially video and mobile) fundamentally changed our sense of right and wrong?

When I was growing up (back when you could turn a corner and bump into a Triceratops), if I suggested to a girl I’d just met in high school that she go home, take a nude photo of herself, march it down to the drugstore to be developed, then send me a paper copy via snail mail, she would have asked if I had lost my goddamned mind and probably reported me to the principal for being a pervert.

Without question, the anonymity of comments boxes encourages folks online to say the most vile and hateful things that I am pretty sure they would never say on the phone, or much less face-to-face to whomever they are taking issue with. Some of the language and terms I see in those forums I haven't heard out loud in a couple of decades.

It’s hard to say that technology has encouraged terrorism — but terrorists have certainly used it to great effect (which is kind of ironic, since this advanced Western technology is one of the things they think is spoiling the strictly fundamentalist lifestyle they espouse). Without it, it would certainly be far easier to track and eliminate their hate-filled little caliphates.

Has technology growth, which has eliminated all but the most necessary face-to-face communications, dehumanized us to the point that we no longer care about the impact of what we say (and in some cases, do?) Or has it simply uncovered a coarseness and insensitivity that has been lingering in private for decades? 

Has technology encouraged intemperate behavior, not just uncovered it?

Finally, one wonders if the risk or discovery thanks to hackers and other whistleblowers is sufficient to reverse this trend and put the genie back in the bottle?