To be forgotten
or “trying to facilitate perfection”
Every social concept has its memes, the phrases, images or ideas that always tend to come up sooner or later when discussing the concept. When talking about privacy at some point the “right to be forgotten” will pop up.
This idea is within the top 5 talking points of the current global privacy discussion that the Internet has reignited. Even the European Union is currently trying to put it into law under the cheers of privacy and civil rights activists.
Being “forgotten” seems to be the silver bullet to all the privacy issues we are having as a global society: You accidentally uploaded an unflattering photo? Have it removed forever. You wrote something stupid? Away it goes. You are scared that Facebook, Google or whoever the boogeyman currently is knows too much about you? Get removed from their servers, completely.
Now the proponents of this idea have a really mighty argument at their disposal that tends to resonate well with the crowd due to its apparentness: Human beings forget, so why shouldn’t databases?
Most people have no eidetic memory so they have a hard time recollecting how things really were even after short amounts of time. For example: What’s the subtitle of this article? You read it a few seconds ago. But most of you probably didn’t remember it (Kudos to those that did!). Our society relies heavy on this “feature”: We can rely on that our mishaps and mistakes (if not too grave) will soon be forgotten, gone like so many memories before. Why not build our technology to emulate this behavior?
Because when celebrating our own forgetfulness we are cheating ourselves. While everybody would probably be glad to have his or her missteps erased from history we do everything we can to not have that happen. In school we teach kids how to focus, how to commit things to your mind. We admire people with eidetic memories or people with big memories. Especially in societies that value education the trope of the wise elderly professor knowing everything is still seen as something great and having someone like that in your life or past is considered great luck.
We don’t want to forget, forgetting is a bug. Well to be precise, unintentional forgetting is a bug - many would probably sell a kidney to be able to just erase the traumata of their present or past.
In 2007 Terry Pratchett the famous author announced that he had Alzheimers disease, a condition that at some point will start deleting his memories (amongst other things). And many of us were horrified, losing our memories is one of the worst things most of us can imagine. All those images in our heads that we cherish, the feeling we had when graduating, the first time you made your partner laugh, the warmth of your first kiss…
We don’t want to forget. So claiming it to be a great feature we should implement in our technology is just us bullshitting ourselves.
Look how successful historical documentaries are. When the Paris1914 Project released color pictures from the Paris of 1914 how many people browsed that page, shared it? How often have you heard the piece of advice that you shouldn’t buy gadgets and trinkets but spend your money experiencing things (and generating memories along the way)?
We don’t want to forget. But we ask for it because of our manic attachment to perfection (which I actually wrote a longer article about a few weeks ago).
We don’t want to forget, we just want others to forget our imperfections. And that is a whole different ballgame. Suddenly it becomes less about us and how good it is for us to forget the bad things in our live, it becomes about us trying to control the world and all the people in it.
Like a child we want to be god, want to decide what the different dolls we play and entities we interact with are supposed to know and what they must forget. It’s not something we want as a pact amongst equals - it’s something we want to hide behind.
The electronic databases all over the Internet belong to different companies and entities and it’s very easy to point at them as being the enemy, the monster with beady eyes tracking and saving our every move. What that perspective ignores is that we have made those databases part of us, part of our digital exoskeleton. Our social connections on the net, the archives of our ideas and comments and pictures and likes that our friends attached to it are a part of us. And them. It’s something we share. And that makes it something we really have no right to destroy unilaterally.
The right to be forgotten is a seemingly simple and effective solution for a real problem. But it also creates new problems: People could remove their part of a debate leaving other people hanging when trying to understand what was talked about. We are effectively putting a “best before” date on our history: Learn what you can from recent events while you still can.
In the end it boils down to us taking a bad habit from the world we know, a habit that causes stress, pressure and the constant feeling of being insufficient, and trying to implement all the necessary steps to make the new digital world obey the same rules.
And that is really just sad.
