Life is Short--Beware

A friend of mine called me the other day with the assertion that the Ashley Madison (AM) hack and the disclosure that 37 million people were on the hunt for extramarital relationships was yet further evidence of the decay in our moral structure and decline of our civilization.  He is convinced that we have descended into a modern Sodom and Gomorrah and, as a result, the end is just around the corner.  This rampant frolicking was so widespread, he believes, that either the 2nd coming is imminent or that a large proportion of Western Civilization and some parts of the non-Western world will surely be turned into pillars of salt.

My response? Nah.  The AM hack and disclosure evidences nothing really new, and my view is being borne out by the data.  Certainly, the website and technology purporting to facilitate tawdry meetings caused a stir, but not much actually seems to have happened.  Here is why I am not particularly surprised or shocked by any of this.

• Infidelity is not new.  It has been around a long time.  While good data is hard to come by (yes, people are untruthful about it), there is not much evidence that unsavory behavior is increasing.  In fact, if infidelity did not exist, the entire country music industry would crumble (My personal favorite: "My Wife Ran Off With My Best Friend, and I Sure Do Miss Him").
• The disproportionate incidence of men engaging in this is also not new. Men, by nature, are more prone to wandering than women (or at least they are much less surreptitious about it).  Cher cleverly once observed, "Husbands are like fires--they go out when they're left unattended." The preliminary data summary I read showed that 83% of the 37 million registered on AM were men and of the women registered, between 2,000 and 12,000 actually read emails.   In fact, the hackers themselves complained about the number of fake female profiles (as a side note, it's always amusing to see criminals whine about someone else's fraudulent behavior).  But given those tiny numbers of women that answered emails, one can logically infer that the numbers of actual meetings and physical encounters were infinitesimally small.  
• Men being stupid about sex and having out-of-the-mainstream sexual predilections and affairs is certainly not new.  You don't need to look any farther than Bill Clinton, Anthony Weiner (you can't make up a more perfect match between his name and his habits), Gen. David Petraeus and Dennis Hastert in more recent times to Alexander Hamilton in days of yore (who had an affair with a married woman), to know that prurient behavior outside marriage was not invented with the dawn of the internet.

Sexuality is at the core of our human existence yet good data and serious scholarship on human sexuality are relatively rare, mostly because most people are remarkably secretive about this fundamental aspect of their lives.   Edward O. Laumann at the University of Chicago has done some good work (Sex, Love, and Health in America and The Social Organization of Sexuality) and his work is the most comprehensive since McKinsey.  Daniel Berger wrote an interesting book, What Do Women Want? a few years ago that contains some interesting findings on women's sexuality. And for some scientific insight of sexuality on the neurological level, David Linden published a fascinating book, The Compass of Pleasure.  But there is little of substance outside these works that tell us of our habits and norms.   We keep most of the details of this part of our lives out of the sunlight.  

The AM hack spilled some of these details out.  The hackers disseminated lurid thoughts and preferences and identified individuals attached to them in a format that is accessible to the public.  W. Somerset Maugham once somewhat famously observed, "My own belief is that there is hardly anyone whose sexual life, if it were broadcast, would not fill the world at large with surprise and horror."   Similarly, the themes of Nobel Prize winning novelist Mario Vargas Llosa's novels often dealt with a person's "public self," "private self, and "secret self."  The AM hack simply exposed what some great writers have known all along.

None of this is to signal my approbation of AM as a business model or to condone the behavior of those that registered, but I believe that the potential consequences will be largely overblown.  The AM hacking reveals nothing new about human nature.  It should shock no one that many, many people have messy, complicated, and often unfulfilled lives and often behave badly. But the AM hack, along with those of the Office of Personnel Management, Defense Department and other commercial hacks show us how vulnerable and lasting information is once it is put in electronic form. Addressing security in this part of our new infrastructure is an initiative in which this current administration has shown little interest.  Our government, power grid, and financial infrastructure remain highly vulnerable to hackers.

Yes, the hack has caused a lot of red faces and anxiety among those who were registered on AM, and smug jokes from people who weren't.  Ironically, the AM data dump occurred on the same week that the FDA approved a drug to enhance women's libido.  So at a time when women have the potential to have their interest elevated, many will be supremely furious at their husbands.

In the end,  my prediction is that the fallout is likely to be fairly small and contained to a handful of incidents.  I hope there will even be some positive outgrowths from this.  People will be much more careful about their online interactions (including financial ones) and hopefully it will spur institutions and businesses to radically beef up their cyber security. The AM situation does not portend the end of Western Civilization.  It is not likely to bring fire and brimstone down upon us.  It merely highlighted two immutable constants of the human condition: human frailty and an overly optimistic confidence in technology.

We should have learned those lessons from the sinking of the Titanic.