My Own Private Irony
The right to be forgotten.
We all have it, according to the highest court in Spain, anyway. A Spanish lawyer named Mario Costeja González filed a complaint with the Spanish Data Protection Agency against the newspaper La Vanguardia and Google, because some personal financial troubles long in his past and covered by La Vanguardia at the time kept coming up on Google’s results when anyone searched his name. It was prejudicial. It hurt his reputation and hampered his ability to practice law. His complaint against the newspaper was dismissed, but the court ruled against Google, stating that a citizen should be able to demand that a search engine remove prejudicial links from its data cache.
As Lev Grossman of Time put it, “Make no mistake, this is a watershed moment in human history: mankind, after spending untold millennia looking for ways to be remembered by posterity, must now beg to be forgotten instead.” The irony escapes no one but Señor González, who would be far more likely, as Grossman implies, to fiercely defend the First Amendment in favor of Google and the press were he a citizen of these United States. The NYT Editorial Board decried the slipperiness of that Spanish slope, the Index on Censorship equated it a bit melodramatically to “pulping books.”
But the digital-age-old question remains and always will: How much do we really need to know? And how much information do we really want people to know about us?
Before the internet was filled with mugshots and property records, I married a man. I was his second wife, and in another kind of irony so convoluted it could only be called wrought, his first wife’s name was Lisa, too. That Lisa was, I’m sure, on her way to becoming a responsible citizen; but not before she trashed her credit along with my now husband’s. What followed was a tortuous, Sisyphean quest to separate my identity, credit records and property ownership from that other Lisa. No government, from municipal to federal, could seem to get it right. No credit agency could untangle the Gordian knot that bound this stranger and I, and not one of them was willing to just saw through the damned thing.
When I think of that never-really-won battle (we ended up saying a financial fuck it, and paying the last few small debts so that we could just lay the ghost-credit of wives past to rest), I wonder what in the world it would have been like had the internet been what it is now. That other Lisa and I would be sharing a lot more than a last name to this day, I’m sure, and her foibles may very well have prevented my husband and I from conducting business in a favorable financial environment. The only plus is that there are now so many references to our very common two names that we would fall far, far down Google’s index if someone searched us. And both our identities would quite possibly be tangled up with a few more.
Contrast all that, in my case, with being a writer. We want everyone to know who we are, and to seek us out both literarily and socially. A friend posted a link to an article recently about the need for validation that writers and social media butterflies — and I confess to being both — can’t ever really suppress. As that same friend would likely agree, despite having had to abandon one lovely website and start another in order to get away from a piece of her long ago past operating under the delusion that he was in any way part of her present: it’s a privilege for the most part, this access to attention and approbation. For instance, I can talk about my support of gun control, of the ACA, of gay marriage, of legalized marijuana, of President Obama and of Debbie Wasserman Schultz and of Hillary Clinton, without my magenta-faced farming neighbor giving me his quasi-Libertarian-actually-Ted-Nugent-like view in rebuttal (or “accidentally” overspraying pesticides in our direction).
I have spam and troll filters on my site and I interact with mostly like-minded friends. There is little argument, just careful and caring discussion, reasoned debate, a lot of love and commiserative support. I am, in short, mostly protected by the comfortable cocoon I’ve spun for myself.
Yet the recent spate of media coverage and commentary regarding Monica Lewinski, Condoleeza Rice’s withdrawal as commencement speaker at Rutgers, GM’s shameful and homicidal delayed recalls, the Grimaldi family’s denouncement of a movie allegedly depicting parts of Grace of Monaco’s life…all of these current events stem from the past; proving once again that even more so in this era of instancy, history reiterates, revises and corrects itself loudly and at an ever-accelerated pace. The revisionist teachings of my southern youth would never survive the light of laptop screens now.
I wouldn’t want to see my personal history bathed in it either.
Not because of some lurid TMZ-worthy actions on my part; just because we are our own best editors. In our minds, in our memory, we rarely dwell on the stony things we’d prefer to forget. As a result of typical human psychological gymnastics, those events generally become as smooth as rocks in an eons-old riverbed. The life that came before and after flows over and around them, eventually rendering them featureless, with no jagged edges to cut and slash. They may come up for air once in awhile, but the further we are from them the less often that happens. To mix metaphors for the second time in a paragraph, I have no doubt that the items on my cutting room floor are the director’s cut in somebody else’s memory.
I was asked to participate in an interview recently, by an acquaintance outlining a possible piece about a large and prominent farming family in my community. I worked for them many years ago, during a brief period that happened to coincide with two natural disasters, a terrible and heartbreaking infanticide committed by a worker on their main property, a power struggle within two generations of the family itself and a couple of controversial acquisitions of rival farms.
I refused, because I have to eat lunch in this town. Also because the members of this particular family are a very private clan who manage to keep an extraordinary percentage of their personal lives under wraps, in a small town where the citizenry consists primarily of other complex, sprawling families, many of whom work for the family in question and all of whom chat with their relatives who don’t. I respect the effort this particular family has made not to be planted front and center in Miami-Dade politics as they easily could be. I admire their unwavering support of reasonable immigration reform in spite of pressure from Tallahassee and Washington, and the fact that they make no attempt to impose their conservative views regarding some other matters on to their employees or their supplier base.
But the first reason is by far the most prominent one for my omertà. Violating it would mean my own life while in service to that company is no longer private either, and many, many people would be affected by that. People I worked with there, friends and neighbors who have since moved on to other companies and other lives would be squinting at a glaring local journalistic light also — again, nothing to email Mario Lopez about. Just the mundane and tragic and triumphant moments in a successful company operated by an army of wildly talented and inventive people in a madly competitive and dangerous industry. There were deaths and divorces and betrayals and friendships and loves and wars and everything else you get with a sizable number of humans on the same path. None of it is any more relevant than Monica Lewinsky should be today.
I said most of that to the acquaintance who asked me to participate in his story. He was not pleased, and his last email contained a badly framed and ill-considered paraphrase of “what are you hiding?” in it.
Another irony, because while I respect anyone’s need to keep their personal and/or professional lives their own, I rarely manage it, and don’t generally try all that hard since my current personal life and my profession are the only mildly interesting things about me.
Attempting to maintain privacy about any part of our lives doesn’t automatically imply that we have a secret to keep, it just renders us somewhat sepia-toned, because privacy is now an old-fashioned concept. The perimeter around each of us is shrinking, and there isn’t much to stop that from happening.
The best I can do is manage where somebody else’s perimeter intersects mine.
