Happy Internet Erasure Day

Before Thanksgiving, we should all get to wipe something from the record.

Photo by Devin Pickell on Unsplash

I want to propose a new holiday: Internet Erasure Day.

Let’s say today, November 24. Just in time to breathe a grateful sigh of relief before Thanksgiving.

Here’s how we celebrate: All of us who spend a lot of (okay, too much) time on the online will be entitled to choose something that makes us want to curl up into a little ball and die of shame — a bad-taste tweet, an embarrassing Facebook album from 2007 with 56 pictures from a single happy hour, that weird trying-to-be-professional headshot that keeps popping up in Google Images — and demand that everyone in the world delete it from their memory and never think about it or mention it again.

This is kind of in the spirit of Reply All’s “Email Debt Forgiveness Day”: a made-up holiday (but all holidays are made up so it’s okay!) designed specifically to make us feel better.

If you breathed a sigh of relief just thinking about Internet Erasure Day, that probably means you have something out there that you regret, like I do. Let me tell you about it.

*Deep breath*

In 2009, I was a miserable law firm associate working in DC when I got the bright idea, like many lawyers do, that…