This section has me thinking abut the fixity of shame (vs the potential/dynamism of guilt and forgiveness). Human memory affords us the ability to de-prioritize, forget, re-frame past actions that tether us to a self we may have grown past (both about ourselves and others) to the extent that we have "never forget" slogans about certain particularly terrible events so that we don't let the mists of time obscure their severity. But the idea that all of our non-private actions can be stored in a fixed manner and be brought up to constantly hold one to the self of that moment in time seems like a shame environment that would be very harmful to human development and self- discovery. It has made me think more deeply about how and why forgiveness is such a powerful concept, however one believes that it should be implemented.
The story of Funes, which I had not come across prior to reading this chapter, brought to mind another fictional character. Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen. The comparison isn't exact, but it's close. Like Funes, Manhattan can perfectly recall every memory from his past. His relationship with time is actually even more dire than Funes, because he observes his past, present, and future all at once. He also possesses knowledge of matter to the subatomic level. This makes Manhattan apathetic and detached. He sees events as inevitable. He possesses extremely little imagination. Manhattan, in other words, has no access to oblivion. And this paralyzes him, despite his immense super powers.
My big takeaway from Chapter 4 was that access to oblivion is a critical element of personal freedom in the Information Age. I really appreciate the historical threads Pressly has been weaving going back to centuries-old questions about the threat that mass information poses to privacy.
I'm liking this book quite a bit so far, and I look forward to hearing Pressly talk about it on Sunday!
Thinking about Funes, one of the tragic results of his condition seems to be that past seems to bombard the present with detail, such that he seems to be paralyzed by memories, so much so that it affects his agency. This makes forgetting important for Borges. (Pressly's own interpretation is a variant here, though I hope still compatible.)
In this context, I found myself thinking about what it would be like to be a member of a hive mind (like a Borg drone). As depicted in Star Trek, Borg drones are flooded with the thoughts of their fellow drones, which they cannot ignore. When I imagine their phenomology, I suspect that in such a condition of thought spamming, one would lose the ability to tell ones own thoughts from ones fellows, which means losing a sense of "my thoughts", and thus losing the ability to differentiate ones own deliberation from the cacophany. If Borg Drones were real (ehem, Neuralink?), would they simply have analysis paralysis, too many competing and messy thoughts to maintain agency, like Funes? I wonder if this might be how the mechanism of control also happens. If this condition makes individual action impossible, a stronger overriding thinker, like the aggegrate will of the Hive itself, may effortlessly acquire control. In other words, the lack of personal ability for action is not enforced by the hive mind, but perhaps simply emergent from the non-private condition of thoughts in a hive mind.
In both my reading of Borges and the Borg, an excluding mechanism (forgetting/ignoring) may be a precondition for present/individual agency.
I find the reference to Foucault edifying. Foucault points out, as Pressly puts it, "The expanding documentation of human life did not simply record preexisting facts for preservation. Rather, new methods of measuring people created new characteristics which they were then said to have"(p.141). The format and the structure in which personal information is fixated and recorded, shapes the understanding our selves. By singling out certain aspects as important, worth-recording, individual-identifying, the recorder (such as the government gathering personal information), exerts power and control over our self-understanding, and over the narratives of our personal experience.
We can't answer the question "who am I" there mere isolated introspection-at least we have to borrow concepts and categories learned from public language to scaffold our reflection. But sometimes we get lazy and let the scaffolding take over, trusting it to exhaust everything there is to say about the self. For instance, when the MBTI test was popular, it's easy for people to satisfactorily conclude their reflection on self-identity after finding out, say, "I am INFP". Whoever set this cultural trend threatens to deprive its faithful followers of an important form of agency: the control over how to understand and tell one's own life story.
Agency seems to be the thread that runs through all major themes in this book. The major benefit of privacy or oblivion, its main contribution to human well-being and flourishing, resides in the fact that it allows us to reclaim controls over aspects of our own lives: the use of our image (chapter 1 on photography), the decision on what kind of life to lead (chapter 2 on unaccountability), the image of self to present in future relations (chapter 4 on the tether of the past), and here the narrative of one's identity. Then we can understand why Pressly places such strong emphasis on ambiguity and potentiality throughout the book: the indefiniteness is presupposed by any conscious choice to be made, and agency can only be exercised through making conscious choices.
Once again, I waited until late Sunday morning to reëngage with chapter four, after which it took the rest of the day to work my way through an incredibly dense (secondary, tertiary, &c.) and stimulating sixty pages. When I first read the comment on Funes (p. 125): “the subject of the fable is more properly described as knowledge, for which both memory and perception are necessary” in conjunction with (p. 127) “this is why Funes’s tragedy requires both perfect perception and perfect memory”, I thought the word should have been (Huxley’s) understanding. But in the meantime, I reread an essay by Colin Wilson (1974), which includes this admittedly (by Wilson) harsh criticism of Borges, the story, and Funes’s mental state:
“—a condition Borges seems to regard as enviable, failing to recognize that such a detailed consciousness would be the opposite of everything we mean by evolution. To be possessed by a strong sense of purpose is to ignore ninety-nine per cent of your experience, and to forget (unlearn?) all the unimportant things that have happened to you. Because Borges has no sense of purpose, he sees nothing undesirable in the ‘total recall’ of Funes.”
Because his condition is (mostly) passive, he is unable to make the leap from knowledge (of everything) to understanding (consciousness). Having heard Jared speak of Husserl’s intentionality, I assume we can use perception and consciousness interchangeably; although, of course, the distinction between perfect and imperfect made by Pressly must be the distinction. Having neither perfect memory nor perfect perception, I nevertheless empathize with Funes, having also suffered interminably from acute insomnia. For the longest time, the only oblivion available to me was by means of alcohol. I read the story, Wilson’s essay, and DFW’s essay, Borges on the Couch (2004 – collected posthumously), all more than a decade ago and, as DFW’s essay predicted, missed the whole point.
While I agree wholeheartedly with virtually everything Pressly says about privacy and oblivion, I don’t imagine that it’s available anymore. I gave up thinking anything I do is private a couple years ago such that now I assume everything to be observable. Perhaps counterintuitively, it does not mean that (like May) everything I do is because it is being observed, but rather even though it is more than likely to be observed – or at least somewhere in between (not to be confused with a happy medium). It adds intentionality to perception, which is the marginal leap to consciousness, albeit imperfect, perhaps integral.
I hadn’t read any Foucault prior to this exercise, so I read part one of Discipline & Punish last week. For now, there isn’t time to read the whole thing, so yesterday I jumped ahead to Bentham’s Panopticism in part three, which is remarkable for two distinct reasons. First is that it evokes the Kilmainham of the 1993 film, In the Name of the Father. But more astonishingly, it couldn’t possibly describe (predict) more precisely the surveillance society we have voluntarily willed into existence if it were doing so directly. I highlighted so much it’s hard to choose from, but in a nutshell (p. 209):
“There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project to the other, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society.”
So then, as an ideal (p. 205), “it is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work.” However (also p. 205):
“The Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.”
It doesn’t seem accidental that the above citations appear in reverse order from how they are presented in Foucault’s logical progression. In Gebser’s integral consciousness, events tend to occur out of conventional sequence.
“I have, of course, done many wrong things—I’d prefer not to list them. I have felt immense guilt in my life. I assume that all of you have as well.”
This must be in the air because this is the premise of the new movie THE DRAMA starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. A week or two before their wedding they divulge the worst thing they’ve ever done (as does another couple) and it all goes downhill after that. No oblivion anywhere to be seen.
The story of K was indeed a really challenging example to use in this chapter! It’s an example where I understand why people might feel this information should be easily accessible, but I also see that the degree of fixity that two murders create in the minds of people around K is much higher and has a bigger impact than other types of information. Once you know someone has killed two people, they become, indelibly, “a murderer”. And if we ever want to have a justice system that rehabilitates people and allows them to reintegrate into society, part of that has to be an ability to forget and not keep people who have committed crimes fixed in our minds as Criminals.
Like ChristineB, this chapter also made me think a lot about shame. Shame is only a useful emotion if we can learn from it and become different. If shame over a decision we made that hurt someone leads us to rethink our relationships and make a commitment to treat people better, then it can be a good thing. If it just causes us to isolate ourselves and self-hate and spiral, what good is it really?
I think the argument being made in this section is, essentially, that we have an interest in holding the same true for others (and in others holding it true for ourselves). Whether it’s a credit score that banks interpret as saying you’re likely to default on a loan or a spate of articles about a crime you’ve committed that follow you around for the rest of your life, our culture’s unwillingness to forget forces a degree of fixity on others that assumes we have an interest in knowing about their past because they’re likely to do the same things in the future.
It leads to isolation, never-ending shame, and ultimately an inability to grow and move beyond your past. Like Pressly wrote on page 133, “The belief that one’s life is one’s own but with no point in trying to live it according to one’s lights is one of the more painful forms of estrangement from oneself and the world imaginable.”
I also just really loved the quote from Foucault on page 134: “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.” I’ve never read anything by him and now I really want to!
The story of K actually reminded me of a really great book I would recommend that I read recently. It is in a totally different genre than anything we're likely to encounter in this book club because it is true crime, but it is called A Thread of Violence by Mark O'Connell and chronicles the author's personal desire to get an interview with and actually speak to one of Ireland's most infamous murderers after just encountering him multiple times out in the public streets following his release from prison and witnessing what a social pariah he is. Spoiler alert: the author does get to talk to him and write about his life and crimes, but the book weaves in the author's own narrative to illustrate important questions that it surfaced for him around the right to privacy, parasociality, voyeurism and why we often so deeply desire to know the minds of others. He basically starts to ask himself why he wants to know and what he wants out of that relationship and self-examine the ethics of his own inquiry in really interesting ways.
For me with this chapter, I did feel like that was one thing I wish Pressly did actually delve more into: the reason why we now more casually use the term "stalking" and the reason why there is now an expectation on K's part that nobody will go into the magazine archives before meeting him but EVERYONE will use a search engine is in part because we as a society have been really complicit in creating an entitlement to know about others that really social media just capitalized on and understood would draw us into engagement. One of the biggest things people do online these days is engage in celebrity gossip, personal speculation and voyeurism of others in extremely toxic ways. But it goes deeper than that down to the level of not wanting to date someone who you couldn't Google, for example, without feeling like they're already being withholding. It isn't just the idea of "what are you hiding?" that becomes the reactionary response to privacy requests, but also the reaction of "it's my right to know" that comes alongside a deep suspicion of others and a sort of embedded extension of the "stranger danger" rhetoric that was around when I was a kid. Paradoxically, the more we demand to know about each other and the more information we are given access to about each other, the less we seem to trust one another. So oblivion to me could potentially also have a critical role to play in the flourishing of human trust, strangely, that I wish I could articulate or that Pressly or someone else could help me to start to unravel.
The gap between the ideal privacy people themselves wish for and then the amount of privacy they are willing to give other people or the suspicion/entitlement they have towards others is something worth exploring I think. We overfocus on what other people could get away with to the exclusion of allowing oblivion to be possible.
I was intrigued by the promises of this book – even hoping I’d be convinced by his perspective (and was especially hooked by the quote from Virginia Woolf in the intro about how there might be aspects of our lives where something similar to the Heisenberg principle applies), but as it’s gone along, I’ve found less and less that I agree with. It seems like he's arguing (at least) three things:
1. Certain aspects of our lives can’t be made into information.
2. We want others to be oblivious to certain aspects of our lives; we should also extend that same oblivious courtesy to them.
3. We should maintain oblivion toward certain aspects of our own lives.
Unless I’ve missed something, he hasn’t made a very strong case for the first point. Whenever he’s given concrete examples, they’ve been of instances where information absolutely does exist (his sex life, the fact that K is a killer, what Ben was doing in his motel room while he was unwittingly being spied on). I haven’t read the final chapter yet, so maybe he brings it home – but it seems like he mostly put his pencil down on this angle of the argument.
On the second point, I agree – but I also don’t think the ‘oblivion’ perspective really adds anything that the traditional view of privacy didn’t already have covered. I don’t want others to have pieces of private information about certain aspects of my personal life; I also shouldn’t seek out those pieces of private information about others.
The third point is one that I really expected to agree with – but the more I consider it, I don’t think that I do. It seems that being purposefully oblivious to aspects of ourselves runs counter to self-awareness. We have parts of ourselves that are malleable and shouldn’t be viewed as fixed, but my sense is that self-discovery is more about pulling those traits out of oblivion than preserving oblivion. In general, I’ve gotten much happier with myself as I’ve gotten older and that has coincided with hiding fewer truths from myself. Self awareness is just as important in solitude as it is in public, in my opinion.
This section has me thinking abut the fixity of shame (vs the potential/dynamism of guilt and forgiveness). Human memory affords us the ability to de-prioritize, forget, re-frame past actions that tether us to a self we may have grown past (both about ourselves and others) to the extent that we have "never forget" slogans about certain particularly terrible events so that we don't let the mists of time obscure their severity. But the idea that all of our non-private actions can be stored in a fixed manner and be brought up to constantly hold one to the self of that moment in time seems like a shame environment that would be very harmful to human development and self- discovery. It has made me think more deeply about how and why forgiveness is such a powerful concept, however one believes that it should be implemented.
The story of Funes, which I had not come across prior to reading this chapter, brought to mind another fictional character. Doctor Manhattan from Watchmen. The comparison isn't exact, but it's close. Like Funes, Manhattan can perfectly recall every memory from his past. His relationship with time is actually even more dire than Funes, because he observes his past, present, and future all at once. He also possesses knowledge of matter to the subatomic level. This makes Manhattan apathetic and detached. He sees events as inevitable. He possesses extremely little imagination. Manhattan, in other words, has no access to oblivion. And this paralyzes him, despite his immense super powers.
My big takeaway from Chapter 4 was that access to oblivion is a critical element of personal freedom in the Information Age. I really appreciate the historical threads Pressly has been weaving going back to centuries-old questions about the threat that mass information poses to privacy.
I'm liking this book quite a bit so far, and I look forward to hearing Pressly talk about it on Sunday!
Thinking about Funes, one of the tragic results of his condition seems to be that past seems to bombard the present with detail, such that he seems to be paralyzed by memories, so much so that it affects his agency. This makes forgetting important for Borges. (Pressly's own interpretation is a variant here, though I hope still compatible.)
In this context, I found myself thinking about what it would be like to be a member of a hive mind (like a Borg drone). As depicted in Star Trek, Borg drones are flooded with the thoughts of their fellow drones, which they cannot ignore. When I imagine their phenomology, I suspect that in such a condition of thought spamming, one would lose the ability to tell ones own thoughts from ones fellows, which means losing a sense of "my thoughts", and thus losing the ability to differentiate ones own deliberation from the cacophany. If Borg Drones were real (ehem, Neuralink?), would they simply have analysis paralysis, too many competing and messy thoughts to maintain agency, like Funes? I wonder if this might be how the mechanism of control also happens. If this condition makes individual action impossible, a stronger overriding thinker, like the aggegrate will of the Hive itself, may effortlessly acquire control. In other words, the lack of personal ability for action is not enforced by the hive mind, but perhaps simply emergent from the non-private condition of thoughts in a hive mind.
In both my reading of Borges and the Borg, an excluding mechanism (forgetting/ignoring) may be a precondition for present/individual agency.
"April 20: Chapter 4" nice 😎
I find the reference to Foucault edifying. Foucault points out, as Pressly puts it, "The expanding documentation of human life did not simply record preexisting facts for preservation. Rather, new methods of measuring people created new characteristics which they were then said to have"(p.141). The format and the structure in which personal information is fixated and recorded, shapes the understanding our selves. By singling out certain aspects as important, worth-recording, individual-identifying, the recorder (such as the government gathering personal information), exerts power and control over our self-understanding, and over the narratives of our personal experience.
We can't answer the question "who am I" there mere isolated introspection-at least we have to borrow concepts and categories learned from public language to scaffold our reflection. But sometimes we get lazy and let the scaffolding take over, trusting it to exhaust everything there is to say about the self. For instance, when the MBTI test was popular, it's easy for people to satisfactorily conclude their reflection on self-identity after finding out, say, "I am INFP". Whoever set this cultural trend threatens to deprive its faithful followers of an important form of agency: the control over how to understand and tell one's own life story.
Agency seems to be the thread that runs through all major themes in this book. The major benefit of privacy or oblivion, its main contribution to human well-being and flourishing, resides in the fact that it allows us to reclaim controls over aspects of our own lives: the use of our image (chapter 1 on photography), the decision on what kind of life to lead (chapter 2 on unaccountability), the image of self to present in future relations (chapter 4 on the tether of the past), and here the narrative of one's identity. Then we can understand why Pressly places such strong emphasis on ambiguity and potentiality throughout the book: the indefiniteness is presupposed by any conscious choice to be made, and agency can only be exercised through making conscious choices.
Once again, I waited until late Sunday morning to reëngage with chapter four, after which it took the rest of the day to work my way through an incredibly dense (secondary, tertiary, &c.) and stimulating sixty pages. When I first read the comment on Funes (p. 125): “the subject of the fable is more properly described as knowledge, for which both memory and perception are necessary” in conjunction with (p. 127) “this is why Funes’s tragedy requires both perfect perception and perfect memory”, I thought the word should have been (Huxley’s) understanding. But in the meantime, I reread an essay by Colin Wilson (1974), which includes this admittedly (by Wilson) harsh criticism of Borges, the story, and Funes’s mental state:
“—a condition Borges seems to regard as enviable, failing to recognize that such a detailed consciousness would be the opposite of everything we mean by evolution. To be possessed by a strong sense of purpose is to ignore ninety-nine per cent of your experience, and to forget (unlearn?) all the unimportant things that have happened to you. Because Borges has no sense of purpose, he sees nothing undesirable in the ‘total recall’ of Funes.”
Because his condition is (mostly) passive, he is unable to make the leap from knowledge (of everything) to understanding (consciousness). Having heard Jared speak of Husserl’s intentionality, I assume we can use perception and consciousness interchangeably; although, of course, the distinction between perfect and imperfect made by Pressly must be the distinction. Having neither perfect memory nor perfect perception, I nevertheless empathize with Funes, having also suffered interminably from acute insomnia. For the longest time, the only oblivion available to me was by means of alcohol. I read the story, Wilson’s essay, and DFW’s essay, Borges on the Couch (2004 – collected posthumously), all more than a decade ago and, as DFW’s essay predicted, missed the whole point.
While I agree wholeheartedly with virtually everything Pressly says about privacy and oblivion, I don’t imagine that it’s available anymore. I gave up thinking anything I do is private a couple years ago such that now I assume everything to be observable. Perhaps counterintuitively, it does not mean that (like May) everything I do is because it is being observed, but rather even though it is more than likely to be observed – or at least somewhere in between (not to be confused with a happy medium). It adds intentionality to perception, which is the marginal leap to consciousness, albeit imperfect, perhaps integral.
I hadn’t read any Foucault prior to this exercise, so I read part one of Discipline & Punish last week. For now, there isn’t time to read the whole thing, so yesterday I jumped ahead to Bentham’s Panopticism in part three, which is remarkable for two distinct reasons. First is that it evokes the Kilmainham of the 1993 film, In the Name of the Father. But more astonishingly, it couldn’t possibly describe (predict) more precisely the surveillance society we have voluntarily willed into existence if it were doing so directly. I highlighted so much it’s hard to choose from, but in a nutshell (p. 209):
“There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project to the other, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society.”
So then, as an ideal (p. 205), “it is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work.” However (also p. 205):
“The Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system: it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use.”
It doesn’t seem accidental that the above citations appear in reverse order from how they are presented in Foucault’s logical progression. In Gebser’s integral consciousness, events tend to occur out of conventional sequence.
“I have, of course, done many wrong things—I’d prefer not to list them. I have felt immense guilt in my life. I assume that all of you have as well.”
This must be in the air because this is the premise of the new movie THE DRAMA starring Zendaya and Robert Pattinson. A week or two before their wedding they divulge the worst thing they’ve ever done (as does another couple) and it all goes downhill after that. No oblivion anywhere to be seen.
The story of K was indeed a really challenging example to use in this chapter! It’s an example where I understand why people might feel this information should be easily accessible, but I also see that the degree of fixity that two murders create in the minds of people around K is much higher and has a bigger impact than other types of information. Once you know someone has killed two people, they become, indelibly, “a murderer”. And if we ever want to have a justice system that rehabilitates people and allows them to reintegrate into society, part of that has to be an ability to forget and not keep people who have committed crimes fixed in our minds as Criminals.
Like ChristineB, this chapter also made me think a lot about shame. Shame is only a useful emotion if we can learn from it and become different. If shame over a decision we made that hurt someone leads us to rethink our relationships and make a commitment to treat people better, then it can be a good thing. If it just causes us to isolate ourselves and self-hate and spiral, what good is it really?
I think the argument being made in this section is, essentially, that we have an interest in holding the same true for others (and in others holding it true for ourselves). Whether it’s a credit score that banks interpret as saying you’re likely to default on a loan or a spate of articles about a crime you’ve committed that follow you around for the rest of your life, our culture’s unwillingness to forget forces a degree of fixity on others that assumes we have an interest in knowing about their past because they’re likely to do the same things in the future.
It leads to isolation, never-ending shame, and ultimately an inability to grow and move beyond your past. Like Pressly wrote on page 133, “The belief that one’s life is one’s own but with no point in trying to live it according to one’s lights is one of the more painful forms of estrangement from oneself and the world imaginable.”
I also just really loved the quote from Foucault on page 134: “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.” I’ve never read anything by him and now I really want to!
The story of K actually reminded me of a really great book I would recommend that I read recently. It is in a totally different genre than anything we're likely to encounter in this book club because it is true crime, but it is called A Thread of Violence by Mark O'Connell and chronicles the author's personal desire to get an interview with and actually speak to one of Ireland's most infamous murderers after just encountering him multiple times out in the public streets following his release from prison and witnessing what a social pariah he is. Spoiler alert: the author does get to talk to him and write about his life and crimes, but the book weaves in the author's own narrative to illustrate important questions that it surfaced for him around the right to privacy, parasociality, voyeurism and why we often so deeply desire to know the minds of others. He basically starts to ask himself why he wants to know and what he wants out of that relationship and self-examine the ethics of his own inquiry in really interesting ways.
For me with this chapter, I did feel like that was one thing I wish Pressly did actually delve more into: the reason why we now more casually use the term "stalking" and the reason why there is now an expectation on K's part that nobody will go into the magazine archives before meeting him but EVERYONE will use a search engine is in part because we as a society have been really complicit in creating an entitlement to know about others that really social media just capitalized on and understood would draw us into engagement. One of the biggest things people do online these days is engage in celebrity gossip, personal speculation and voyeurism of others in extremely toxic ways. But it goes deeper than that down to the level of not wanting to date someone who you couldn't Google, for example, without feeling like they're already being withholding. It isn't just the idea of "what are you hiding?" that becomes the reactionary response to privacy requests, but also the reaction of "it's my right to know" that comes alongside a deep suspicion of others and a sort of embedded extension of the "stranger danger" rhetoric that was around when I was a kid. Paradoxically, the more we demand to know about each other and the more information we are given access to about each other, the less we seem to trust one another. So oblivion to me could potentially also have a critical role to play in the flourishing of human trust, strangely, that I wish I could articulate or that Pressly or someone else could help me to start to unravel.
The gap between the ideal privacy people themselves wish for and then the amount of privacy they are willing to give other people or the suspicion/entitlement they have towards others is something worth exploring I think. We overfocus on what other people could get away with to the exclusion of allowing oblivion to be possible.
I was intrigued by the promises of this book – even hoping I’d be convinced by his perspective (and was especially hooked by the quote from Virginia Woolf in the intro about how there might be aspects of our lives where something similar to the Heisenberg principle applies), but as it’s gone along, I’ve found less and less that I agree with. It seems like he's arguing (at least) three things:
1. Certain aspects of our lives can’t be made into information.
2. We want others to be oblivious to certain aspects of our lives; we should also extend that same oblivious courtesy to them.
3. We should maintain oblivion toward certain aspects of our own lives.
Unless I’ve missed something, he hasn’t made a very strong case for the first point. Whenever he’s given concrete examples, they’ve been of instances where information absolutely does exist (his sex life, the fact that K is a killer, what Ben was doing in his motel room while he was unwittingly being spied on). I haven’t read the final chapter yet, so maybe he brings it home – but it seems like he mostly put his pencil down on this angle of the argument.
On the second point, I agree – but I also don’t think the ‘oblivion’ perspective really adds anything that the traditional view of privacy didn’t already have covered. I don’t want others to have pieces of private information about certain aspects of my personal life; I also shouldn’t seek out those pieces of private information about others.
The third point is one that I really expected to agree with – but the more I consider it, I don’t think that I do. It seems that being purposefully oblivious to aspects of ourselves runs counter to self-awareness. We have parts of ourselves that are malleable and shouldn’t be viewed as fixed, but my sense is that self-discovery is more about pulling those traits out of oblivion than preserving oblivion. In general, I’ve gotten much happier with myself as I’ve gotten older and that has coincided with hiding fewer truths from myself. Self awareness is just as important in solitude as it is in public, in my opinion.