Social interaction online is Utopian. It’s how we would design interpersonal interaction if we were allowed to design it from scratch today.

Think about this: you’re at a farmer’s market with your friend. You come to a peach stand. You say hello to the farmer who is selling the peaches, a pleasantly wrinkled old lady. You pick up a peach. You turn to your friend and say, “Hey, I’m thinking about buying some peaches. Have you ever bought peaches from this farm?” Your friend looks at you, still within earshot of the kindly old lady selling the peaches, and says, “Oh hell no. You don’t want them peaches. They got bugs ‘n shit all up in ‘em. You want them peaches over there. Them’s some good peaches.”

If this scenario played out in real life, your friend might have just given the nice old lady an aneurysm. It’s not that the information your friend gave was incorrect; it’s that the presentation of that information didn’t take into account social norms. You might buy peaches from the old lady, even despite the bad review from your friend — in fact, it would be as a result of that bad review.

But online, it’s a different story. This scenario plays out all the time, and we think nothing of it. In fact, we expect this kind of dialogue. You can say what you want about the anonymity of the internet and its ability to embolden us, but we should all know by now that fewer and fewer of us actually want to be anonymous on the internet. That’s a dumb argument these days. No, our boldness is a result of something deeper, something more rudimentary.

Old folks will tell you that there is a disturbing trend among young people these days. They’ll tell you that we’ve lost all sense of morality and ethics. What were once considered basic manners are now anachronistic. You don’t take your hat off indoors anymore. You don’t open the car door for your girlfriend. You don’t wear a suit to church, if you even go to church anymore. Today, people won’t think anything of a weak handshake. We curse and spit on the sidewalks. We talk in public about sex (which is different than talking about sex in public — though we do that, too). We emulate the basest examples of pop culture. We are entirely without the God-fearing rigor that embodied generations before us.

But that rigor was based on a code of propriety that existed before we knew what it was like to be able to say mean things about Britney Spears without anyone knowing we were the ones talking. Expressing our opinions feels good. And why shouldn’t it? We are built to communicate, to send and receive complex information, and that information is best, to our minds, in its most raw form. It’s why we love watching Cops: fear and panic and carnal desires all wrapped up  neatly into a one-hour package and delivered to our prefrontal cortexes in a more-or-less continuous stream. Raw emotion on demand.

In our quotidian lives, the closest we can come to this (apart from building a meth lab and actually ending up on Cops) is to vent the information we have gathered about people, products and services and spew forth in a raw and unfiltered manner. And it used to be that the internet provided us with a “safe” place to do this without violating rules of propriety. But in the decade or so that we’ve been using it in earnest, the internet has become less anonymous and more an extension of ourselves. We don’t sign into chat rooms with clever pseudonyms — we log into sites with our Facebook info, which displays our actual names. So why are we still spewing forth and leaving the social rules at the door?

Because that’s what we want to do. And we can do whatever we want on the internet.

That’s amazing, isn’t it? The internet has given us the opportunity to see what it’s like to communicate without rules. And because we have that experience, we are beginning to realize that the rules were all pretty silly to begin with. And that doesn’t just go for communication. It goes for everything. When was the last time you talked to a bank teller? Or went to a record store? Or took the kids to an arcade? When was the last time you took off your hat when you walked into a building? Do you remember the days when these things were required of us? What would you think if your friend asked you, “Hey, do you know any good record stores around here?” Would you think something along the lines of, “Record store? Who goes to a record store anymore?” I know I would. I would because we killed the rule that said that if you want music, you have to go to a record store.

We’re also killing timidity. We’re killing that part of us that says, “Don’t talk back. Play nice. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything.” We’re killing the part of us that feels bad for the kindly old lady with the rotten peaches. We’re building new rules, rules that operate on the assumption that if you don’t have a thick skin, you’re not long for this world. It’s digital Darwinism. And it’s wonderful.

So here’s my question to you: If you had the opportunity to rewrite the rules for social interaction, what would your rules be? I’m going to come up with a wish list of my own. Share yours below, and we’ll compare notes later this week.