The Sex Lives of Neanderthals Are No Longer Private

One of the occasionally enjoyable side-effects of being an internet junkie is the higher frequency of what I like to call "convergences".   Consuming all of my news and literally dozens and dozens of essays, thoughts, images, and videos each and every day via the internet creates a greater opportunity for two completely unrelated items to shed new light on each other in an unintended and unexpected way simply because of their proximity to each other in my voracious consumption of them.  Like drinking Dr. Pepper with Pop Rocks.  Better together.  This happened the other night when I read Robert Scoble's essay (if we would call it that) on Facebook's new social contract with the world and this news article suggesting that there is credible evidence that early humans may have bred with other species, specifically Neanderthals.  The two items have literally nothing in common, save the fact that they were both written in English, but reading the two back to back provoked me to read each in a different light.  The article on the promiscuity of early humans lent a proper level of scale to Scoble's facebook piece, and the privacy concerns of the facebook article gave a certain humor to the Human-on-Neanderthal piece.  Everyone (and by everyone I mean the 2.5% of the population that knows or cares that Facebook is about to take over the internet) has been up in arms this week about the new features Facebook is implementing and how the default settings of these features is for them to be public.  The general consensus is that this is bad because…well…privacy is…good…therefore everything that's not private by default is…bad.  Right.  Here's the truth.  Very precious few people care about you and your little dog/cat/child/cactus.  No one wants to stalk you, except your mother, and she has all the dirt on you anyway.  If you DO have a stalker, facebook and twitter are not your biggest problems.  The benefits of a more open and public society are many, and most of them have not even begun to come to fruition yet.  The downsides--the idea that anyone can know anything about you--are only downsides if you don't have the common sense to engage the public with discretion.  If there's information you feel is too sensitive to share with others, don't put it on facebook.   Heck, don't even put it on a computer.  But how much information do you really feel you need or ought to protect that way?  Your credit card numbers?  Your home address?  Your social security number?  Your weight? The rest of your life is just your life and you should be thankful that there's anyone--let alone the whole of the internet or the world--who cares about that stuff at all.

I know I am.  The fact that people--granted, some of them are strangers and many of those are there by accident—visit this website or my facebook page or my twitter stream or take the time to read what I've read is a daily surprise to me and it is, in its sad little way, somewhat gratifying.  I put more of myself out into the public because the feedback I get, static and dynamic, is overwhelmingly positive and reassuring.  And sure, maybe some years from now some poor schmuck will take the time to search up something I wrote last week and use it against me in some damaging or undermining way, and I'll be forced to say, "Yeah, I was wrong." or "You see, there was this girl…" but should I really be afraid that some day my decision to be open now will force me to be honest with myself?  Terrible, right?  

 And lets face it, none of this matters one solitary bit because somewhere down the road an alien race will make a pitstop here, dig our Library of Congress out from under the sheets of ice or layers of volcanic ash and discover how to read our "hardrives".  Then they'll read the entirety of Twitter and you know what they'll say?  

"All these creatures did was fornicate, talk about fornicating, and eat!  And who the fuck is Justin Bieber?!?"