How much of yourself do you put online?

It’s as much of an age-old question as anything of the internet age is, but I think about it every few years. Slapping up a web page full of personal thoughts in 1999 didn’t carry the same weight that it does in 2024; employers, even ones literally in the internet space, didn’t necessarily do a web search on your name to see what came up.

Now, though, I don’t know. Now everyone does that kind of search. And, as someone who’s been conducting an unsuccessful, albeit woefully low-key, job hunt in 2024, it’s hard not to ask if what I have online at this point is working against me with more skittish employers. Even before I wrote about conservatives being snowflakes, it wasn’t exactly hard to suss out my left-wing politics, and I’ve been vocally skeptical of generative AI. In a moment where tech companies madly chase AI in either a sincere belief it’s going to change everything or mere FOMO that it might, vocal AI skepticism might be a career-limiting move—and in a moment where alt-right techbros cow companies into walking back DEI efforts, merely noting my pronouns at all, let alone noting them as “he/they”, might also be one. (“What kind of woke beta cuck uses pronouns?” Anyone who speaks English, you stupid motherfucker.) (Also, cursing in my blog might be a career-limiting move.)

And yet, I don’t know. Do I want to frantically dash around the internet, tearing down anything that might give a prospective employer the heebie-jeebies about me? Is that even possible? While I’ve never reached “internet famous” status, I’ve posted lots of stuff in lots of places. When I was more actively doing tech blogging at Coyote Tracks, it got linked to by other blogs often enough that I used to joke that while you’re probably not reading me, somebody you’re reading probably is. There is an alternate universe in which I figured out how to monetize that. And, well, while I don’t advertise being a furry, I’ve been writing furry fiction for decades and have been guest of honor at more than one furry con. One does not have to possess mad internet sleuthing skills to put two and two together.

Frankly, I’m always amazed when I find people I grew up with, especially members of the Original Internet Nerd cohort, have next to no footprint online. The one whose LinkedIn includes “Futurist at the Center for 21st Century Teaching Excellence” you’d kind of expect to have, I don’t know, a low-effort Substack, if not a YouTube channel, right? If you can tell someone your job title is “futurist” and keep a straight face, I’m pretty sure they’re legally required to give you a TED Talk. But apart from that LinkedIn, there’s basically nothing out there about them, and that’s true for the majority of other folks I knew in that place at that time. Does that help with job hunts? Maybe.

On the other hand, maybe it hurts. It’s my understanding the former futurist’s LinkedIn is long out of date, and they struggled to find work for years before moving into non-tech fields. I can’t say that actually being, you know, present on the internet might have helped if they’d wanted to stay in tech, but I wonder. I made the shift to tech writing largely because of my loudmouth tech blog, when Joey Zwicker at RethinkDB came across it and thought, “we should talk to them about our new tech writing position.”

Of course, I don’t know that they did want to stay in tech. If they didn’t, I couldn’t blame them.

In any case, I don’t think erasing my digital footprint is either possible or worth it. Anyone who reads what I write and decides they can’t work with someone like me is probably right.