The first thing you need to understand about the Hunter Biden laptop, though, is that it’s not a laptop. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call this nebulous cloud of data a “laptop.” Imagine, in a country with toxic and broken politics, how explosive this collection of data might appear to your enemies in the days leading up to a presidential election, and how valuable it might become after their defeat, as they seek to overturn and then undermine the results. Now imagine it’s not just anyone but the same political opposition that has already sought to destroy your father’s candidacy by improperly pressuring a foreign leader to offer up dirt about your (sketchy, for sure) business dealings.
Imagine revealing this kaleidoscopic archive of all your different selves to anyone else. Now imagine that you are both the son of a man running for president and a lawyer and lobbyist accustomed to mixing with powerful people and doing business overseas premised on your proximity to those powerful people, and that you are in the throes of a divorce and a midlife catastrophe brought on by the early death of your older brother and that, in your distortion field of grief, on a hell-bent drug-and-alcohol binge, you have been making even more horrible choices, taking up with your brother’s widow and, while in considerable financial debt, hiring prostitutes and zoning out with camgirls and staying awake for days at a time on crack cocaine and generally hurting everyone in your life who is trying to help you with your cruel and idiotic behavior.Īnd imagine that, in the middle of all of this, you lose control of 217 gigabytes of your personal data: videos in which you have sex videos in which you smoke crack bleary-eyed selfies selfies that document your in-progress dental work your bank statements your Venmo transactions your business emails your toxic rants at family members analysis from your psychiatrist your porn searches your Social Security number explicit photos of the many women passing through your bedrooms, photos of your kids, of your father, of life and death, despair and boredom. Imagine the entirety of your digital existence plotted out before you: your accounts and passwords your avatars your contacts every exchange of written dialogue the full history of your logged interests, banal and forgettable and closely held the note where you scrawled once-urgent word fragments that now make zero sense to you the rabbit holes you fell down or the minor obsession or the thing that connected to the thing that led you to decide to do another thing that became a part of a part of a part of who you are, or a part of who you are to some people, or a part of who you are only to yourself, barely recognizable in the light of day.
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