From “bake the cake” to various incidents of social media censorship to “ban the box” proposals for ex-felons seeking employment to media dumpster-diving for Bad Tweets, of late we seem to be scraping the edges of a recurring problem which is worth stating clearly.

This problem exists in two parts: first, contemporary society is, as for many decades, sufficiently complex and mutually interconnected that few if any individuals can survive absolute social exclusion. He who is barred from the market does not prosper where the market dominates.

But secondly, and crucially, the growth of digital memory and technology has out-stripped the development of corresponding moral and social restraints, permitting an individual deemed offensive to be excluded more widely and enduringly than ever before. Shame no longer expires.

One of the historical dangers of state power was the state’s capacity to track and enforce sanctions across a wide territory and over an extended period of time. The internet and digital memory now grants that power to anyone with sufficient desire and stature to employ it.

As a result, ideas of freedom which focus on protection from state coercion to the exclusion of all else now not only fail to protect substantive liberty, but erode it by enhancing and supporting the ability of private actors to use new coordination methods without restraint.

Any pre-existing school of thought which does not acknowledge the importance of this technological change is intellectually dead. The comical unreality of “just build your own (social media company/payment processor/internet/entire society)” bears witness to it. A dead end.

Memory follows us now, and we cannot escape it by some digital approximation of moving to another state and starting a new life. We cannot build entire new social structures when each of those structures is dependent on some other aspect of society which can be withdrawn at will.

This technological revolution- and that word is not used idly- cannot be rolled back. The task before us is to develop new legal, intellectual, social, and moral foundations to temper instincts which were set free to roam when circumstance penned them, but now have no restraint.

We are thrown back, not on first principles or even on first amendments, but on values which predate them all. Mercy, charity, justice, restraint, balance; these and more must be our guides as we seek to build an enduring and moral settlement beyond the mob and the boardroom.