I can’t remember when I noticed that WhatsApp had switched over to having an edit function but, once I did, I had the almost-immediate thought that it really changes everything.

The edit function, if you’re wondering, emerged out of the new protocol of Rich Communication Services, which reached maturity around 2017 and replaced the older SMS systems. It took a little while for platforms to introduce editing — Telegram did so almost immediately, WhatsApp did in 2023 but only within a 15-minute window after sending messages and Signal within a 24-hour window, while Twitter/X, which had famously long resisted an edit feature, finally did so as a Musk-era perk to premium users.

Editing is still not in universal use, but essentially what it does is to allow you to catch material in cyberspace and rewind it. And what that does — this has of course been true of the internet for a long time, but the edit function is a vivid manifestation of that — is to profoundly alter the meaning of what an object is, or what constitutes past and present, and to replace our common sense of how linearity works with this kind of ever-unraveling felt ball that belongs to no one exactly and can be stitched up from all directions.

A lot of this will already be obvious to computer people, but I’m trying to tease out some of the implications for laymen.

One is that the Gutenberg Galaxy really is over, and the notion of an object as a discrete entity replaced by a much more amorphous vessel. I’ve noticed myself doing this with certain of my Substack posts — being a little looser with copyediting, leaving some things indeterminate, knowing that I can catch glaring mistakes after I post. It’s hard to emphasize what a different mindset that is from anything in my life up till now. Work had always been based on having a concrete final product — with the language of it heavily borrowed from industrial manufacturing: there is a moment when you are supposed to ‘ship,’ or when you have a ‘deliverable,’ and nothing else in the process matters except the quality of that final product. The charged moments of my life — the student journalists staying up late to put the paper to bed; the theater rehearsals leading to the moment when the curtain goes up; the TV shows when the ‘cut’ goes out — were based always in this premise, having the object that represents a great deal of labor and that you can’t get back again. But what all of that is built on, in a more sober analysis, is just the process of manufacturing — the object is sent to the print shop or the broadcast network or whatever and then mass-produced by a factor of however much influence you happen to have. The idea that all of that may no longer be the case is, at first, bewildering but also liberating. It makes objects far more fluid, and the way we treat them far more relaxed and conversational. What we’re creating in digital space tends to be an extension of us, endlessly tweakable, as opposed to an entity living apart from us. This difference in production largely accounts for the loosey-goosey attitude of younger-generation influencers and YouTubers and so on as opposed to their more tightly wound forefathers — people with their foot in the door of digital space know that they get infinite takes and infinite chances, as opposed to the exhilarating moment of maximum stress and maximum release. To put that more theoretically, the whole idea here was contained in Gilles Deleuze’s prophetic 1990 essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” Deleuze contrasted the society of the ‘molehill’ where “one was always starting again” with the serpentine society we live in now where “modern man is in undulatory orbit.” This ability, with the edit function, to cover for past mistakes and to keep snaking around is the perfect illustration of Deleuze’s idea of how modern consciousness shifts.

The arrival of the edit function — or its emergent ubiquity — profoundly alters the relationship between past and present. Probably not enough has been written about the internet as sites of offense or defense. All couples deal with the use of the internet as ways of finding things out about the other or else hiding what the other person might be looking for — looking through someone’s phone, setting up additional passwords, using location trackers, getting a second phone are all weapons within marital relationships. And, in public space, our era has largely been about a game of hide and seek — online users seeking protection in anonymity and then getting doxxed, with the trolls and the doxxers in a constant scrum with one another. With the edit function that game of hide and seek now extends across time. Part of the doxxing game now is to screenshot the incriminating tweet or post before it ‘gets taken down.’ Malefactors now have various options of revising or ‘memory-holing’ anything from the past that they think will get them in trouble — which can be much to the delight of anybody who manages to catch them covering their traces. A great deal of the politics of the pandemic played out this way, with statements getting buried and then dug up again. It enters a sort of office politics zone with the edit function moving out of websites and into casual conversations. And the game of hide-and-seek takes on a new dimension with different platforms employing different settings. X still doesn’t have an edit function for the majority of users. Facebook does. E-mail doesn’t. WhatsApp does. Substack, interestingly, is in two different worlds — the world of gmail without the edit and then the world of the app and website where it’s possible to constantly tinker with one’s posts even after ‘publication.’ That blurring of past and present seems to have ramifications in two different directions. On the one hand, emphasis is placed on the moment — certain web users come to be something like radar operators, constantly alert for a well-known person to say something unguarded, at which point they can pounce on that person’s reputation; if the person then deletes or edits the post, it was the unguarded slip, carefully preserved, that is taken to reflect real intention. On the other hand, a work can be created that moves backwards instead of forwards. Let’s say — although this isn’t really a thing — that I was working on a popular online novel. If my readers were indignant about a plot hole in chapter twenty, it wouldn’t be so difficult to go back to chapter five, set things up differently and then move forward. Once longform becomes more of a thing again, we have the real possibility of creating breathing work that modifies itself in dialogue with an audience.

The existence of the edit function in WhatsApp specifically brings home something that we should be more familiar with — the way that our identity in digital spaces is not our identity as we normally conceive it. Legally speaking, our conversations on a platform like WhatsApp or, for that matter, Tinder, don’t really belong to us — they are held within the infrastructure of a tech company. And what is happening when a company like WhatsApp permits an edit to our conversations is that the space between us — which we are used to thinking of as ‘the world’ — is in reality the property of a tech company, so that a conversation, which was never editable (except, maybe, with the magic words of an apology or a phrase like “what I really meant was….”), is now eminently editable, with the tech company granting each user a badge of identity (an IP address or phone number) and with that identity conferring certain powers like the ability to edit your own utterance but not others but with that identity also ultimately revocable by the tech company, in the way that users can be deplatformed from various sites at, really, the whim of the tech company’s algorithms. What that should do is to make us more aware of how contingent our sense of ‘identity’ really is, and that our identity in digital space is constantly intertwined with the commons — the commons being, really, something like the matrix, the shared ground that we all participate in, but which is subject to constant interventions, say with different people in a group WhatsApp editing their earlier responses to clean up a thread as they go along.

What’s coming through, from a simple feature, is a deep shift in fundamental categories of what constitutes an ‘object,’ a ‘performance,’ a ‘conversation,’ the ‘present,’ and ‘identity’ in relation to the ‘commons.’ I’m not arguing for anything in particular here — I actually kind of really like the edit function and the possibilities it gives for objects and performance to free-flow, as opposed to being anchored in the single moment of ‘shipping’ — but this is very fraught territory, and the domain in which a great many of our ethical disputes, at all levels of our lives, are going to happen in the years to come.