When the Internet Excavates Your Former Self
Accountability in the age of algorithmic retrieval
In the span of a week, three separate emails arrived in my inbox.
None of them were about anything I’ve written recently.
They were about blog posts I wrote in 2010 and 2013, respectively.
One message urged me to delete a “glowing article” I wrote thirteen years ago about a man I encountered at a state fair. I had described what I saw that day: a performer with bears, warm smile, small-town fair energy. It wasn’t investigative journalism. It wasn’t an endorsement of a worldview. I wrote about something I observed and believed was true at the time. In 2013, I was a younger version of me, writing in a different digital moment.
The email insisted I erase it.
Another message followed, more detailed, referencing current controversies and videos about the way the man treats his bears. I hadn’t seen the video or knew about the controversy surrounding the man. The through-line of this message wasn’t dialogue. It was removal.
Delete the post.
Then, in the same batch of messages, a completely different tone. A formal notice from a copyright enforcement firm referencing a blog post I wrote in 2010 and an image I had used to accompany the post. Case number included. Statute cited. Portal link provided.
That image wasn’t anything remarkable, by the way.
I deleted it and left the copy.
Three emails. Sixteen years of distance. Two completely different domains — ethics and law — converging on artifacts of my former self.
I didn’t argue. I didn’t defend. I didn’t panic. I made the 2013 article private. I removed the 2010 image. I closed the laptop.
What struck me wasn’t the content of the complaints. It was the mechanism.
The internet doesn’t forget. But more importantly, it doesn’t contextualize.
In 2013, the cultural conversation around performing animals was not what it is today. In 2010, blogging norms around sourcing images were far looser than today’s automated enforcement systems. Attribution often felt like sufficient effort. Reverse-image scanning at scale was not something most individual bloggers thought or knew about.
None of that erases responsibility. It describes terrain.
And terrain shifts.
What we’re living in now — what I’ve been writing about in It’s Not You, It’s the Algorithm — is not simply outrage culture or copyright enforcement. It’s retrieval culture.
Old writing resurfaces. Old images are scanned. Old versions of you are indexed and measured against current standards.
Not by someone who remembers the moment, but by systems that don’t experience time the way we do.
AI-driven retrospectives flooding Instagram of celebrities showing them aging either forward or reverse showcase this perfectly. The internet doesn’t let anyone escape themselves.
The email messages weren’t especially hateful. Two were emotional. One was bureaucratic. They all shared an assumption: the past is immediately available for evaluation, and action should follow quickly.
“Delete it! Produce proof! Respond by February 11!”
The speed is familiar.
What’s less discussed is how quietly this alters the relationship we have with our own history.
If you’ve published consistently for over a decade, you have sediment. Language that would change now. Observations framed differently today. Cultural snapshots preserved without annotation. Because you are not the same person you were then. Not necessarily malicious. Not necessarily pristine. Just reflective of a moment.
The algorithm collapses those moments into a continuous present. It serves the artifact without the original climate and allows the current environment to interpret it at full intensity.
Seeing this happen in your own inbox is clarifying. And I will confess: a tad unnerving. Even though I didn’t do anything wrong, the fact that strangers wrote to me about something that bothered them triggered my “uh oh” bell.
Thankfully, I have perspective. I don’t need to be defensive or self-exonerating, but instead, attentive. Asking myself, What’s the right next move here?
I decided to make the bear article private and delete the image that wasn’t mine. Those two decisions weren’t surrendering; they were quiet decisions to respect the owner of the image and the recent revelations about humans using wild animals as entertainment for their own gain.
The tension here isn’t whether we’re accountable for the past. Of course we are accountable for what we’ve done.
If harm was done, repair matters. If a right was violated, correction matters. If something no longer reflects our values, updating it matters.
Accountability is not the issue.
Proportionality is.
There’s a meaningful difference between concealed wrongdoing and ordinary participation in a culture that has since evolved. Between evasion and adjustment, erasure and curation.
The current climate flattens those distinctions. Everything retrieved feels urgent. Everything resurfaced feels indicting. Systems deliver the artifact without the climate that produced it, and the temperature rises instantly because people see things through their lens now, not through the lens of a different culture or climate.
That’s human.
Leadership requires resisting that flattening.
Not by dismissing the past, hiding from it, or dramatizing it.
But by assessing it through some thoughtful questions:
Does this reflect who we are now?
Does this require repair?
Does this require context?
Does this simply require removal?
Those are governance questions, not panic questions.
The internet will continue to excavate. Retrieval systems will continue to scan. Old sediment will continue to surface without warning. AI will grab hold of it all and twist it into some dysmorphic artifact it will then train itself on.
That reality isn’t going away.
What’s still ours is how we respond.
We can collapse into apology theater. We can harden into defiance. Or we can operate with measured stewardship over our own archives.
The future of publishing isn’t about pretending the past didn’t happen. It’s about building mature protocols for when it resurfaces.
That, more than deletion or defiance, feels like the work.