on the nature of justice in blogs

I've discovered something really cool about blogs, and it makes me think about Plato.

Apparently, you can go back and edit previous posts! That's not the cool part. The cool part is that when you edit previous posts, it doesn't change the post date OR make any note of the post having been edited.

This has pretty incredible implications. Say I made a huge mistake on the last post, like I said something mean or incorrect by accident. I can go back and fix it, and it won't even say that it used to be the old way! And that happened! Or, say I wanted to go back and change what happened when I woke up on March 31. I can do that! Actually I did do that. In my hands is the power to rewrite history without anyone even noticing!

Why does this remind me of Plato? There's this part of the Republic where Glaucon claims that all personal benefits of justice come not from being just but actually from appearing to be just to other people, and that when there is an opportunity to be unjust without anyone noticing, the benefits of being unjust in that situation far outweigh the benefits of being just in that situation (of which there are supposedly none).

I don't actually buy that claim, but it's an interesting one to think about.

And, I do also understand, I suppose, that the power to rewrite my blog posts isn't quite the same as the power to rewrite history.