The Virtue of Being Forgotten

In this age of information and surveillance, privacy has become a necessary watchword—a countermeasure to the constant documentation of what we say, do, buy, and consume. Though the implications of the term have changed with the rise of the internet and other digital technologies, people have long been wary of intrusion into their personal life. In his 1975 book, Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault wrote about the rise of recordkeeping in 18th- and 19th-century Europe, namely the government practice of maintaining detailed legal accounts of surveillance and detention. He argued that the state “made of this description a means of control and a method of domination.”

Lowry Pressly’s new book, The Right to Oblivion, might be read as a useful update to Foucault, in an era when this sort of domination has become so regular and thoroughgoing that many people might not even recognize it as such. As Pressly writes, “Employers track their employees’ keystrokes and Internet usage. Teachers monitor their students’ eye movements.” These actions reflect “a lack of trust,” as Pressly argues, and produce a vicious cycle: “Surveillance creates suspicion and therefore the urge to surveil.” Pressly’s book is a probing critique of a modern public sphere that overwhelms the private realm, but it goes further than that. He argues for privacy, or what he more accurately terms “oblivion,” as not just freedom from surveillance but a positive, albeit essentially unknowable value—a place where true human depth and personality reside.

Today, when people think of privacy, they are likely to think of the protection of one’s personal data and information. But according to Pressly, that definition makes a dangerous assumption, namely that humans could be wholly reduced to a set of descriptions or records. As he explains, this notion is an outgrowth of the “ideology of information,” a worldview that holds that who a person is can be fully articulated, comprehended, and stored in data or other representations of them—whether in images, texts, or other accounts. This error has encouraged people to neglect aspects of their subjective interior lives that could never be captured by such data points. As a result, it has made our private lives shallower, and our public lives, in turn, less meaningful and trusting.

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Fear plays a major part in this phenomenon, Pressly argues. Tracing the modern origins of privacy to the advent of photography, he notes that in the late 19th century, people began to worry that the logical next step of this new and uncanny technology would be something like a “scope” that could probe their thoughts and desires. Today, that anxiety resonates in a new way: We know that even if our devices aren’t reading our minds, they are certainly tracking our behaviors. And as human life becomes an ever more digital affair, many of us have grown concerned with ensuring confidentiality and autonomy in how our personal data are shared and used. Privacy, in this respect, means guarding against technologies, whether photography or AI facial recognition, that threaten to reveal everything about everyone. Pressly suspects that this fear drives people to attend to their phones loyally, check their email habitually, and nurture social networks compulsively. These behaviors are attempts to gain some semblance of control over how their identity is managed and disseminated.

Our photos, our texts, our memes: Sometimes we offer these to the world freely. But what the world does with them is often beyond our control. In a stunningly short amount of time, a picture from a private moment can be stolen and disseminated to the public; this has played out in the growing number of cases of hacking, extortion, and personal damage.

Pressly offers an antidote to this fearful existence, inviting readers to slip into oblivion: to recognize the freedom of being temporarily forgotten, and resist the forces that reduce them to what can be gleaned on the internet. This might require individuals to put a little more space between themselves and the public gaze. Prescriptions of online abstinence are nothing new, but Pressly offers a unique vision of what can be gained by stepping back from the outside world, and the screens that try to possess us. Doing so can allow us to access the more ambiguous and inchoate spaces in ourselves. This is where the qualities that make us fully human lie: love, genius, creativity, unspeakable sorrow, utter joy. Privacy protects “space and time for the unaccountable,” Pressly writes, offering us “the chance to live with our murky parts by being murky ourselves, to experience the bits of ourselves and others that lie beyond our control and understanding. No wonder we seek privacy to enjoy the fullest experience of losing ourselves with others.”

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This sort of call to oblivion is not exactly new. A host of 19th-century philosophers gestured to the interior aspects of human life that, by definition, never see the light of day. Friedrich Schelling called it the Abgrund—the “groundless ground,” which is an indeterminate state that precedes true freedom. For Schelling, the Abgrund, like the experience of the Romantic sublime, defies rational explanation. Søren Kierkegaard directed his readers toward “inwardness,” or behavior that requires a personal and absolute belief that cannot be directly explained to others—acts of love and faith being the most notable. Edwardian feminists such as Ella Lyman Cabot referred to “reserve,” those psychic regions of individuality—both private thoughts and partially conscious dreams—that refuse to ever go public.

These thinkers wanted us to explore the essentially ineffable aspects of ourselves in much the way that William Blake suggested we reconsider love: “Never seek to tell thy love / Love that never told can be.” If it’s not possible to live in the modern world without leaving a digital footprint, Pressly’s book seems to suggest, we must at least protect these most personal feelings and experiences. More and more, it’s starting to feel like they might be all we have left.

What is at stake in Pressly’s insistence on the value of oblivion? Perhaps the ability, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s words, “to become what you are.” Growing into a full-fledged self requires a little darkness, and a little opacity. After all, it is in those “murky spaces,” as Pressly refers to them, that each of us has the freedom to determine our future. As Foucault wrote in one of his more touching passages:

The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is also true for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.

The game of life depends on remembering that each person lives partially in shadow. That it is necessary, at times, to access, and embrace, our deepest parts, the ones that can’t be plumbed by anyone—or anything—else.