Let Me Be Forgotten (with Lowry Pressly)

What do we lose when every moment is recorded, every action scrutinized, and every past mistake preserved? Philosopher and author Lowry Pressly joins EconTalk's Russ Roberts to discuss why privacy isn't just about secrets or information control, the necessity of spontaneity, the importance of moral growth, and what we need to become fully human. From photography to forgetting, surveillance to selfhood, this episode challenges our assumptions about what it means to be seen--and unseen--in a data-driven world.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today's July 10, 2025, and my guest is writer and teacher Lowry Presley of Stanford University, where he is in the Department of Political Science, the McCoy Family Center for Ethics

• 0:47Speaker 00

  in Society, and the Stanford Civics Initiative. Our topic for today is his book, The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life. Lowry, welcome to Econ Talk.

• 0:59Speaker 01

  Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.

• 1:02Speaker 00

  I want to tell listeners with children, we may touch on some adult topics in this conversation, you may want to screen this accordingly. We recently had Tiffany Jenkins on Econ Talk to talk about the boundary between the public and private sphere. Today, we're going to look at related issues, but from a totally different perspective. And I want to start with a question. I love the word oblivion, Lowry, but what do you mean by the right to oblivion?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  Well, first, I should say that I chose the word oblivion as a sort of deliberately distancing or defamiliarizing word for what it is that privacy gives us, both to those who are outside of privacy and those who are inside of it, protected. And the reason I did that is because I think we've lost sight of just the huge variety of different kinds of concealment and obscurity there are, and of their differences. So, you know, just to list a couple off the top of my head, there's privacy, of course, but you've got secrecy and confidentiality, anonymity, mysteries, the

• 2:10Speaker 01

  Forgotten, the loss, these are all ways to not know something. There are all kinds of barriers to our perception and knowledge. And my working assumption, and something I argue for throughout the book, is that we have different words for these different kinds of not knowing, because they're meaningfully different. And they're, and they're different, not just for the person within, who's, you know, protected in some way, but also everybody without. So, the point of the book is to think about what is the specific form of unknowing, or the specific type of barrier to knowledge or perception that privacy is, what role it plays

• 2:52Speaker 01

  in our lives, and how it's different from secrecy and so on. And I chose oblivion for a variety of reasons related to what I think the substantive kind of unknowing that privacy produces is, but also because there is this parallel history of, of talking about the private life, or the private sphere, that draws from liberal political thought, which is basically about a realm where state or societal intervention in the lives of individuals is unjustified, for more reasons having to do with how important it is for us to live our own lives. But that

• 3:33Speaker 01

  doesn't, that's not what we mean when we talk today about privacy as a kind of epistemic barrier.

• 3:39Speaker 00

  Well, it can be, as you, as you, as you mentioned in the book. And, you know, in particular, I think, what I love about your emphasis on oblivion is that when we think of privacy as information, which is the modern obsession with technological surveillance, technological knowledge about ourselves that is taken by often corporations and used for profit, sometimes to our benefit, sometimes to our harm, this inevitable focus on information

• 4:15Speaker 00

  as a commodity that I can keep to myself or let out into the world, is missing an enormous part of what is concerning about a lack of privacy. So, talk a little bit about why information is important, of course, but it's not anything close to the whole story.

• 4:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I, the contemporary way of thinking about privacy, and when I say the contemporary way of thinking about privacy, I mean, basically, people who are paid to think about privacy, philosophers and lawyers and activists and so on, I, is, so there, I think it's mistaken, and mistaken in part because it is, as you say, fixated or kind of grounded in the idea of information. But I say all that just to issue a disclaimer, that I think there's this sort of, ordinary folks understand what privacy is. It, it just, it animates so much of our day-to-day lives. And so I think our practices of privacy, the people who aren't paid to think about privacy or privacy activists,

• 5:25Speaker 01

  actually really do have a good understanding of what it does in our lives, what it's for. And so, part of what I'm trying to do is rescue that common sense idea against the sort of information saturated view of the, you know, the privacy theorists. So, privacy theorists think of privacy today, basically, I think, you know, sort of through the lens of privacy settings on social media. What privacy is for is to control who can see certain types of your information, what the audience is, maybe to protect it, to prevent certain access to it, to make sure it, quote, you know, flows to intended recipients.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  And I think there's problems with this. On a conceptual level, I just don't think that's what we think privacy is. It's not what we've always thought privacy was. It's a new idea dating roughly to sort of the 1970s or 80s, not coincidentally, but sort of the long start of the, of the digital age. But it's also a dangerous idea, I think, because what it does, even the sort of the defenders of privacy against the forces of surveillance in, you know, state and private life, what they do is they take for granted that some information about us is always going to pre-exist the moral questions of

• 6:53Speaker 01

  privacy. And that's a really...

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Weak defense against who we take today to be the greatest threats to privacy. So, you know, surveillance companies or the state or whatever, because, you know, they care very little about who we, you know, how we draw the boundaries of our audience for our information, just so long as the information about us is created, to which, you know, obviously, they have access to the, your privacy settings on Instagram or Facebook or whatever, never give you the option of creating no information at all, because that's the business model and profit engine of these companies.

• 7:37Speaker 00

  And it's part of, you know, what I've complained about as well, the quantification of the human experience, the idea that everything that we do, everything that we want to maximize, everything that we want to, all the life hacks, they're all about, you know, information, they're all about data, they're all about getting, using it more effectively, or keeping it from you, because I don't want you to have it, you know, in an extreme, in the old days, it might be my income, but today, it's my shopping habits, and it might be my heart rate, which are my steps, or where I am, or where I've been. And it's true that the modern world quantifies our human experience in ways that were not imaginable 25 years ago.

• 8:21Speaker 00

  Some of those are valuable to other people to get power over me, sometimes they're used to make money, but I think you make an incredible insight that because there is so much of the human experience that is not quantifiable, a view I hold dearly as well, that focusing on information or data as the most important aspect of privacy is missing a huge part of what's important about privacy, and is also misleading about what's important about being human.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so I begin the book with a line, something like, you know, we live in a time blinded by information. And I agree with you totally. What I mean by that isn't that, you know, isn't like what you sometimes hear about signal and noise, there's just so much and there's misinformation, disinformation. We don't know what to believe, but something deeper and exactly what you were saying, that we've just come to understand so much of human life, both what we know of it and what we don't, in the language of information or data or the quantifiable. So, you know, as we do that, of course, there might be economic or ideological, you know,

• 9:40Speaker 01

  reasons connected to economics for thinking that. But the one outcome of that is as we increasingly understand the human condition, experience, the human being and so on, as something that is essentially quantifiable, we lose sight of parts of experience that either aren't quantifiable or resist quantification or maybe are sort of destroyed or corrupted or changed by the quantification of it. So, you know, I mean, it sounds very abstract, but one example is, you know, like a moving experience you had at a symphony or something, or a poem you like or love.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  These things, when you try to put them into words, when you try to, you know, put a distinct exhaustive definition on them or to say, you know, say nothing of quantifying them, it's sort of, they're deflated a little bit. But what I would say, just in addition to all the stuff that you said, which I agree with. I do think there are lots of extremely valuable and exciting and profound parts of the human experience that aren't quantifiable, but I don't think that that is sort of a natural fact about the human being in the same way as it is that we're bipeds and we're mammals and the heart works and the way that it works and so on. These are social facts

• 11:08Speaker 01

  about the person that consist in a way we understand human beings and human life. And it's entirely feasible, because we have examples in history and anthropology, that we would come to conceive of the human being and human life over, obviously, a long duration as something different. And so part of the argument I'm making in my book is similar to what you were just saying, sympathetic with it, is that we need to take note of what we're doing in terms of understanding human life, because we might turn out to reimagine it in a way that we would rather not. We would lose what you were referring

• 11:52Speaker 01

  to as those sort of unquantifiable experiences.

• 11:55Speaker 00

  But there's another part to it, which I never, I think, fully appreciated until I read your book. And I want to say to listeners, this is an utterly fascinating book. It's dense. It's not easy to read all the time, but there's so many ideas in it and so many ways of looking at the human experience that are, I think, different from what we usually come across. It's really an extremely interesting and unusual book. And one of the things you write about early on, and we'll go into it, I hope, in some detail, is that when you quantify something, you tend to freeze it. To take a simple example, a trivial example,

• 12:37Speaker 00

  what's my temperature right now, my body temperature? Oh, it's 98.6. Well, I might want to go outside and go into a different environment. And the 98.6 is a statement about a point in time. And that's true about much more interesting aspects of me, as you point out, how much I care for someone, what I'm willing to do for someone. Even if I could capture that with a number, once you put a number on it, you tend to think of it as you now know what it is. I've measured it. And many of these things are about potentiality and what I might want to become. So I thought to get at this, I thought we'd talk a little bit about your insights into photography and the Ernest Svenson project.

• 13:22Speaker 00

  I don't know if I'm pronouncing his name correctly. But why don't you describe what Svenson did and why it was controversial and your take on it?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  So Ernest Svenson is an artist, photographer, living in Lower Manhattan. And he receives as a gift a telephoto camera lens from a birder friend. And what he does with that is he starts taking pictures from his apartment of the sort of the glass-fronted high-rise across the street in Lower Manhattan. So the apartments of his neighbors. And he takes lots and lots of pictures for a very long time. And no purient intent here, just is a sort of art project.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  And no one would have ever known, except that he showed some of the, you know, what I guess what he just thought were the best photos at a gallery in New York. And they are interesting and quite beautiful. And we have to, let's be honest, quite provocative. So the show got some press and the neighbors found out. And they weren't happy. They felt that their privacy had been violated, even though, you know, you could, he could have seen.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Them with his naked eye from, you know, from, I mean, this is the experience of living in New York or a large city. There's just, you look into lots of windows and not everyone covers them. You, there are different expectations of being seen there at home. And the neighbors said, yeah, that's fine. We expect that people will look in, but it's different when someone has a camera. And so a couple of them sued him. I should also mention that none of the pictures, or only one of the pictures showed someone who was identifiable and a child, and he removed those from the show. So the remainder of

• 15:23Speaker 00

  These are people's knees, elbows, their back, when they're bending over to reach for something. They're just people in their mundane, everyday life, not, it's not nudity, it's not, it's voyeurism, but it's a particular kind of observational look at everyday life. It's very powerful.

• 15:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I recommend that, you know, listeners can go Google Arne Svensson, The Neighbors, and look at the pictures. And you'll see that they are quite beautiful. And some of them are actually, you know, pretty funny. There'll be one where, you know, a hung curtain sort of just obscures somebody's face. So, you know, you could tell, he knows that he's flirting with a line about invasion of privacy here. Anyway, so some of these neighbors sued him, took it to the court in New York, who, and the court held that actually Svensson had invaded their privacy. They called it a literal home invasion. Yet, his, he won

• 16:25Speaker 01

  the case because the court decided that it's, that the photographs were works of art protected by the First Amendment. But the court said, well, you know, these are, there's a new technology here that, that enables new kinds of privacy violations. And the legislature really ought to do something about that. And what's funny is, a little more than 100 years earlier, A court, maybe the same court in New York State, said the same thing about the same technology, about photography when it was just coming on the scene, although this was a photograph taken in a public theater.

• 17:08Speaker 01

  So the question arises, and I think this is kind of what our intuition is. I think most of us would feel the same. There's something different about when someone takes a picture of us through our window than just looks. And so the question is, well, what's different about that? What's invasive? And as you pointed out, the difference seems to turn on. What is the difference between ordinary perception and living memory, which is fluid, it's in flux. We don't always see everything. We miss lots of stuff in our vision. We have blind spots. Our memory changes constantly. Every time we remember it, we know now.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Versus the photograph, which creates something that is fixed, a kind of, almost like a piece of information about the moment that doesn't change over time, that we can scrutinize. It is almost like a fact of what this person or thing or whatever looked like at the moment of the, you know, that the lens snapped.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  And then the question is, what's? I mean, there's a lot of things to say about this. I have a friend who's a wonderful portrait photographer. And when he takes a portrait of a posed portrait now, we're not talking about a candid on the street. But he takes a posed portrait. He says, first one, serious. If you say to someone, I'm going to take your picture. If they say to you, take my picture, they beam at you. They give you a very unrealistic smile. And sometimes it's a smile they only make when they pose for a picture. They don't know how to make a natural smile when they pose. So they do this very artificial thing. And my friend says, "First one's serious."

• 19:01Speaker 00

  And I use this myself now, often. And it's fantastic. The person, sometimes they can't do it. And they start laughing or giggling. And sometimes it's with two people. And you get a great shot of them trying to be serious. It's a very nice candid shot. Because sometimes they reveal things about themselves in that first photo that are striking. And it's why portraiture is so, can be so extraordinary. And reading your discussion of these issues, I wondered, when I take a great portrait, forget the fact, again, not talking about a candid shot, but a shot of a friend, or a relative, or someone at a party, and I'm the unofficial photographer, and I capture something, I look in their eye.

• 19:46Speaker 00

  Let's say it's a vulnerability. And it makes it a great photograph. And you show it to them, and they go, "Wow, that's fantastic." Or you take a picture of their kid, and they realize you've captured something about their kid. And I love doing that. What's wrong with it? Why is there that particular moment in time that is captured in that second? Is it, what's wrong with that?

• 20:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wouldn't say anything is necessarily wrong with it. But the idea that you're drawing out there with those examples about the relation of a person to this particular kind of technology, and how something about that person is revealed, is at the heart of privacy. I mean, this was the original idea that gave birth to calls for a moral and legal right to privacy. And, you know, it's interesting also, I just want to note before I go into that, that in your example, the portraitist, or the picture you take with the, it's the vulnerable look.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  You know, this is, we see this as discovering something about the person. Even the language, "candid photograph." You know, candid, before meant like freely speaking. But no, the candid photograph speaks freely about the person who it's of, because they're not guarded in some way. So the photographer who discovers that vulnerable look, discovers something about the person. That the person hadn't shared intentionally, hadn't willed, they might not even know about themselves. Right. And we do think that's what makes the great portraitists, great portraitists, you know, distinct from long ago when they were painted portraits, when they were supposed to show universals, not personals, you know, wealth, status and so on. And those were the clues that were read into them.

• 21:38Speaker 01

  So, you know, one interesting thing about privacy is that it's a relatively new idea. It's a distinctly modern idea, comes from the second half of the 19th century and particularly end of it. And everyone during that era who was talking about privacy, writing about it, I should say, that they really want to make clear that this is a new moral idea, a new right in reaction to new developments of modernity. And the main development they have in mind, there are of course others like urbanization, and a big one was the development and spread of newspapers as the first real mass media.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  But the big thing for the first privacy advocates was the photograph camera, and particularly the snapshot camera. So not the one that you have to pose for, for, you know, a long time in a studio and you can't move, so everybody has the same expression, kind of a guardedness, there's no expressiveness. But the snapshot camera that can capture what we would call a candid moment, but a moment out of time that might be too fleeting for, you know, us to, to perceive in ordinary, you know, in our ordinary round. And, you know, there's nothing bad about that. It's exciting and good, and we think we get insight into people.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  The reason that the Victorians, and I think, you know, people still care about having that kind of picture taken when we don't want it taken, is the idea that we still have, that something, as you noted in your example, is revealed about us. There's some kind of inner truth that comes out and is fixed, almost as like a fact about us, in this medium that we take to be an indisputable mirror on the world. And

• 23:33Speaker 01

  Those truths might be truths that we don't avow. I mean, I'm saying truths here in quotation marks, but that's the way we think about it. There might be facts about us that we disavow, or we didn't know about, or whatever. So it seems like, and this was the 19th century view, and I think the intuition continues, that the candid photographer is sort of forming us, defining our personality in a way that subverts our own will, our own sense of who we are, that's reaching into us and generating facts about us.

• 24:13Speaker 01

  And you can sort of imagine, it's not hard, now, when I hear myself say that, to hear an analogy to our time and the generation of information about people, albeit by, you know, more diffuse and invisible means.

• 24:28Speaker 00

  But it's such a strange thing, you know, when we think back to this example of the photographer taking the neighbors, you know, one argument would be, there's no harm done. And, you know, we'll come back to that theme, it's an important theme here. There's no harm done. You take a picture of me, just one picture, I might take a picture on the street of you without your knowledge, and I might keep it on my phone and enjoy it because I think it's a good photograph, I might put it on a website. I used to do that, I feel, not because of your book, but I don't feel comfortable doing that. I think it's wrong. And there's all kinds of legislation, regulations about what you can do with people when they're out in public, and, you know, when, but, you know, the example you mentioned in passing,

• 25:13Speaker 00

  which you talk about in the book, of the stage, the photograph of the actress on stage, she's in public. She's not behind her bedroom window with a curtain, a gauzy curtain across it that may hide her face. She's deliberately in a setting where she wants people to look at her, but she doesn't want her photograph taken. And I think, you know, for some moderns, that's a sign of neurosis. I mean, come on, Betty thinks she wants the photograph taken and spread around. What's your argument defending her, what was her argument, and tell us what you think of it?

• 25:49Speaker 01

  I mean, the argument there is basically the one that we were just giving. But let me say that I don't want to be taken to say that it's harmful to have one's photograph taken, or that it's bad to take pictures, or that like, these are like, there are serious moral stakes in all picture-taking. On the one hand, the intuitions about the Svensson photos and about photography in general, which we still have, I think, reveal a certain view of the person, which we still have, and it's the kind of view of the person that makes privacy relevant to us. We thought we were different, we might not need it in

• 26:27Speaker 01

  the same way. But also, because we really care, we can't, we, these are, these examples really activate strong moral intuitions in us. And they're very low-stakes examples, having your picture taken. I mean, if your, if your neighbor's taking pictures of you every day through their window, that might seem higher stakes, for reasons that'd be interesting to think about. But I, I like these low stakes, low harm stakes, high moral intuitions of badness examples. Because I think what they do is, by being so seemingly

• 27:09Speaker 01

  low stakes in terms of harm, but activating such a strong moral response, they, they point us to a kind of expressive value about what privacy does. writ large, it's not just about taking photos, obviously. These are sort of niche examples, but they are good examples of what privacy's value is more broadly. And so, the, the argument for the unwanted photograph, for not wanting, just in general,

• 27:38Speaker 01

  You know, what they called in the 1890s Kodak fiends, driving the world crazy by taking pictures everywhere. What you might, the, the reason to complain about that, at least in terms of privacy, has to do with exchanging a certain quantity of uninformationalized, unquantified, just say, you know, of life as it's lived in the flux and ambiguity that it does have for a sort of fact of the matter about it, for, for information. So they had people in the, in the 1890s and ever after responding to all kinds of different developments in terms of privacy, from, you know, the invention of the census to passports,

• 28:21Speaker 01

  to hotel registers and school records and all kinds of stuff. They complained in terms of privacy about basically the same thing, which is the increasing informationalization of human life, that there are just more and more domains of human life that before were known and remembered and experienced in the sort of protean ambiguous flux of normal perception and memory. And those were being replaced with registers of information, you know, facts of the matter, things that are unambiguous about who this person is, where they are, and what the weather

• 29:05Speaker 01

  was like, and so on. And I think so, even though in, you know, individually, some of these things may even seem silly, like, you know, like school records or passports or something, or, you know, public photographs, taken together, they do express a certain widely held, common moral view of that life, human life is better in some, in a variety of ways.

• 29:38Speaker 01

  When it has, I won't say when it has more, when more aspects of it are unknown or ambiguous, in my terms, when it has more oblivion, but when it has a sufficient quantity. And if it's diminished beyond a certain threshold, whatever that is, we're left worse off as a society and not just the individuals who are having their pictures taken on the street or whatever.

• 30:00Speaker 00

  Well, I want to come back to that actress because the way I understood you when you wrote about this, this section of the book is as follows. I'm out in public, I'm a public person, an actress or some kind of celebrity, and I want you to look at me. I'm performing, I may literally be on stage, or I may be holding a press conference, I'm doing something where I've invited you to look at me. And what do you see? Well, you see a thousand things. You see, you might see a flash of anger, you might see charm, you might see joy, all these things are going to flash across my face.

• 30:38Speaker 00

  And if we think about it as a high-speed movie, you know, you'd see all these, this rich panoply of emotions on my face. But instead, I take one photograph, and in that one look, I just happened to capture you looking insecure. And you could have seen that, going back to the Ernst Svenson example of him looking, you could have seen somebody's elbow without his camera, but you catch that and you capture it, you freeze it, and by definition, you're missing the richness of who I am. And there's two things happening there that, this is what I learned from your book.

• 31:20Speaker 00

  One is, I don't like potentially that you have taken one data point to reduce it to this information conversation, taking one data point when there's a thousand, and you said, oh, that's a picture of her. But the other point is, is that there's an enormous difference between you watching me in the moment in a, say, a conversation versus you taking a GoPro or through your meta, some weird Google glasses you've got that allow you to take a video of me while we're talking, and...

• 32:01Speaker 00

  I want to interact with you unobserved in that way. I don't mind being observed. I want you to be, I want to talk to you. I want to show you my emotions. I want to connect with you. But once you can preserve it and look at it later, that's a different thing. And all of a sudden, quote, "I'm on camera." Right? Obviously, I'm on camera with your eyes when we're having a conversation. But once you record it, a different thing is happening. And that, your intuition that that's different is, was fascinating to me because I think it is different. And it's very hard, and we're both struggling to put it into words of why that's different.

• 32:46Speaker 00

  But one of the concepts you use that I found so provocative is this idea of accountability. And sometimes I just want to be unaccountable. I want to be looked at but not recorded. I might want to be listened to but not seen. I might just want to call you on the phone. And that allows me to not have to hold my face in a certain visage when I'm interacting with you. All these things are different aspects of how I interact with others, and they're all different. And once you freeze them with a camera or a video, a photograph or a video, I don't like it because it's not me. I'm the movie. I'm not the still. And even the movie bothers me

• 33:31Speaker 00

  because I want to have you have the memory of our conversation, not the video of it. And that's, those are two different human experiences.

• 33:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So you could think about the stage performer, but in the same way, you know, a conversation partner or somebody living under surveillance in a surveillance society or in a prison or something. Once you, once the actress or the interlocutor is aware of that there's some kind of document that's being made that's going to be taken away, well, we become self-aware. We become self-conscious. We're thinking about where that's going to go. So we are, in an almost literal manner of speaking, in two places at once. And being in two places at once makes it very hard to be in, fully in the place that you are.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  So for the actress to lose herself in the role, the here and now, you know, to just be in that, well, that becomes very hard if you understand that everything you're doing now is going to appear in some sort of future context. And of course, this is also the sort of the disciplining force of surveillance. It makes us second guess what we're saying. And what is true, I think, and this comes out in what you were saying, what's true about the performer or the interlocutor who's being photographed or video recorded is also true for the audience, for the one who's doing the photographing or the recording. That person is also, in a sense, in two places at once.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Seeing the, if you look through a camera, you're seeing the object that you're, you know, looking at, but you're also seeing the photograph that it'll one day be. You're thinking forward into the future. Now you see everyone, I am guilty of this. If I see something interesting, I automatically, you know, take a picture of it as an instinct. And I know I'm not fully there with that object or with the other person. So I think, I mean, one of the real profound discoveries for me in the process of writing this book and thinking a long time about privacy was to really understand that the benefits of privacy,

• 35:49Speaker 01

  as we've just been discussing, aren't just for the one who exercises the right or who the privacy protects us. So not just for the performer on the stage, not just for the person talking to the, you know, the potential GoPro interlocutor, but also for the other person, the person on the outside, the person who we would think, well, privacy is just protecting against. But no, in this example and in others, it gives them something too. There's kind of a public good or a shared good of individual privacy. And I think it's been, this is another one of the sort of errors we've made in thinking about privacy, both sort of conceptual and moral, but also strategic and political,

• 36:33Speaker 01

  is thinking about it only in terms of a very, very individualistic good.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  And not something that benefits, as you pointed out, all parties to the transaction.

• 36:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'm trying to cure myself of the habit of taking my phone out every time I see something that I think is video-worthy or photo-worthy. I think one of the phrases that came to my mind while I was reading your book is a phrase I've always loved, and I suddenly am thinking about it in a different way, which is "dance as if no one is watching." Now, that phrase actually is, what it means is, which is the opposite, it means that when you're dancing in public, pretend no one's watching, which isn't easy to do. And I'm not even sure it's

• 37:25Speaker 00

  a good idea. But the idea of dancing when literally no one is watching is one of the great human experiences. If you've ever been alone in a quiet house and cranked up your stereo to something that makes you dance, and you start dancing, and there's no one there. So no one's going to capture it on their phone, you're not capturing it on your own as a selfie, you're just letting yourself sing, your body, through your body, to be together with the music. It's a glorious thing, and I'm not sure it's good to bring that into the public sphere. But we now live in a world where we dance as if everyone

• 38:09Speaker 00

  is watching. It's all a performance. And what you're suggesting, which I love, is that when we see something as a group that we think is powerful and important, if we're always taking out our phones, we're making sure that people dance as if everyone is watching. And I don't, we're losing something. So, talk about that.

• 38:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, one thing to notice, and this has come out so far in our conversation also, is that you're dancing in both cases. You know, dancing whenever, as if everyone's watching, dancing as if no one's watching. Maybe the dance looks, is the same. But I think we would all agree that it's not really the same dance. It's not really the same experience. Something changes. And, you know, if, from the perspective of dance, as if no one's watching, something's lost. But of course, it's, you know, we might be professional dancers, we might want to also dance in front of people. So I don't want to say that it's always bad, or always, or it is always a loss, but maybe it's, you know, the thing

• 39:13Speaker 01

  that's gained, dancing in front of others, is valuable, too. But it's just, in the same way, that we're trying to think about the substantive goods of privacy, that aren't just about controlling my data, or whatever, I think it's useful to think about the two different kinds of dances. What makes them different? What's valuable about the one where no one's watching? And it's another good example for the, you know, the central claim that privacy isn't about controlling information. In other words, privacy isn't the same as secrecy. Because I'll, I'll admit, here, for your many listeners, that I do that all the time. I, I love putting on music and dancing by myself at home. So it's not

• 39:56Speaker 01

  a secret now. Nevertheless, when I go do it, as you all know, can expect me to do later today, you know, I will be in private. There will be something there. It won't be a secret that I'm doing it. I'm here announcing it to the world. Nevertheless, privacy will give me something in that case. It will make, it will give me that different kind of dance. And, I mean, I don't want to loop all the way back to your first question about oblivion, but I will say another reason that I chose that to, that word, to describe the particular form of unknowing that we get from privacy, both inside and without.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  Is that when we, if you dance with no one's watching, like that, that recommendation, that encouragement is an encouragement to be oblivious to the others. It is just like, it's not to go hide in the bathroom and do your dance there. It's to act as if no one were here. And to the extent that you succeed will be determined by like the extent to which you are able to make yourself oblivious, or at least pantomime obliviousness to the others. And that's a particular kind of, of not knowing where you think, okay, there's not, I mean, even if you're, if it's just a sort of imitation or pantomime, as if no one was watching, as

• 41:21Speaker 01

  if you were oblivious, you, in that case, you're not only like not being viewed or whatever, but what makes you particularly freed in, in that state is that you're just completely unaware. It doesn't occur to you that there would be people watching you. And that's the great freedom of obliviousness.

• 41:42Speaker 00

  And talk about why that's important. You say at one point, quote, "And yet it is a basic assumption of agency and moral responsibility that we are to a significant extent accountable for the sorts of persons we turn out to be. All this means that for human agents, living a life takes persistent effort. You have to keep it up if you would be anyone at all." And you argue, and again, this is a totally novel idea for me, that we as human beings need moments and places where we have to, where we are oblivious. Not because it's, "Oh, I'm going to be irresponsible. I can do whatever I want. I don't have to worry about somebody judging me."

• 42:26Speaker 00

  But also judging myself. I can just be. Why is that important? And why is that oblivion that we can have when we're in private, why is that important for my, my own personal well-being and development?

• 42:44Speaker 01

  So the quote that you read gives a view of why it would be important, not from the point of view of that it feels good, or it's nice, or whatever, but actually from the point of view of the value of its opposite, the sort of accountability of human agency, of becoming one kind of person rather than another. So like a basic premise of

• 43:06Speaker 01

  of human agency is that it's up to us, the kind of people we become. And for that to be the case, we need others to take us seriously. You know, you can imagine how debilitating or alienating it would be if nobody ever took you seriously, if everybody, and this is a way that, you know, it's like the famous way that, you know, siblings will bully a younger sibling or something by pretending they're invisible for a week or something. You know, if nobody took you seriously, if your actions seriously, the way that you were, as reflecting on the kind of person you were, that'd be enormously alienating. It would be terrible. So we want that. We want to be accountable. We want for the kinds of people we are to direct our own lives

• 43:51Speaker 01

  and have that be reflected back at us from the world. So that's an enormous good, like just a real fundamental foundational good for human life. But it's not easy to be the kind of person, kind of creature, about whom that's true. It can be exhausting. And so the bit that you were reading, it comes from an argument where it says, well, for that good of agency, of being accountable for the kind of people we turn out to be, we need periods, spaces, the access to these periods and spaces, where we can be off the hook, where we can

• 44:36Speaker 01

  either, on the one hand, rest from that quite difficult, but very important work of becoming the kind of person one becomes. But also, and this is an older idea, all the way back to the beginnings of our thinking about privacy in the 19th century, to have a space for spontaneity, for self-surprise. And this connects to our discussion about the performer, the interlocutor. If you're on the hook, or, you know, I mean, personally, not like in terms of legal or moral responsibility, but if everything that you say or do is going to be reflected back to you from the, you know, the eyes of the public as part of who you are, well, then

• 45:18Speaker 01

  you're going to be enormously constrained in what you feel free to do, how spontaneous you feel free to be, how comfortable you are with potentially unpleasant and certainly unbidden and unexpected surprises about yourself. I mean, and this is, that's just the, the goal of the sort of panoptical or surveillance society and state is to, is to make sure that people are always feel accountable. You know, the, like, the greats are the great, but the big and highly effective surveillance states are, are touchstones to, you know, East Germany or something, long before the

• 46:00Speaker 01

  kind of technology that we all carry in our pockets today to surveil ourselves all the time, they're enormously effective. And they weren't effective because they had this great technological expertise, but because they instilled a kind of doubt into society. And the doubt was whether I'm, can ever have a space where I'm unaccountable, whether there might be a microphone, or whether my, you know, friend or lover might be an informant. And the, the lack of confidence in those kinds of spaces where one can be unaccountable, off the hook for the sort of things one says and does, has a very, very powerful disciplining influence on people's lives.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  And so there are strong political reasons you might want this, having to do with that discipline and human freedom, but also, I think, just the very basic facts of agency need us to have places to come apart, even as we have to recognize and acknowledge that that coming apart is only going to be valuable. If it is paired with coming together in public, becoming the kind of person that we become, being accountable for ourselves. So you need both.

• 47:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's a really, it's a powerful idea because generally being accountable is a good thing. But it's too big a burden to bear for human beings to wear those, that cloak all the time. I'm going to read a long quote to give the flavor of what you're saying in a different way. You say, quote, "There is yet another way that being unaccountable contributes to well-being, which relates to the sense of the unaccountable that is perhaps closest to oblivion, that which is obscure to scrutiny, resistant to rational explanation, mysterious or ineffable. The unaccountable in this sense is that which resists the exhaustive

• 48:02Speaker 00

  explanation that we aspire to when we speak of accounting for some phenomenon or action. Although as agents, we need to be accountable for ourselves, that capacity is imperfect. The limits of self-knowledge, self-control, and self-determination mean that we can never fully account for ourselves. There is no place to stand outside of oneself or one's life with which to conduct such an accounting. And in any case, we all have our blind spots and dark spots that refuse to surrender their opacity, no matter how long we stare into them. But these lacuna are not, or not only, failures of introspection and self-governance.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  They are also sources of the sense that one's life has meaning, depth, and a quality essentially resistant to instrumentalization and control. Poetry and music gesture in the direction of these ineffable zones of human experience. Tragedy gives them moral character. That such unaccountable elements of the self exist is an empirical claim."

• 49:08Speaker 00

  But we can make it normative and turn it toward privacy by adding the thought that this zone of experience and self relation is unaccountable, not because it is hidden or secret, but rather because something is lost in the attempt to put it on display or translate it into information, close quote. So there, I mean, it's just a beautiful passage you've written there, getting at this idea that I sometimes just need to turn, turn, turn it off, my, my, my self improvement mode and my self awareness mode. And I, you know, it goes so against most of our philosophical intuitions.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think that's right. I think, um, and, you know, thank you for, uh, reading that, that passage. It said it better than, than I could say, um, because, you know, I am, uh, oblivious to my, even my own book. I've, I've written this big book about not knowing to make a virtue, uh, of my vices. Um, uh, but you know, it's interesting, um, you know, when we talk about oblivion or not knowing or privacy even, uh, you know, as you were reading that and your, your gloss on it, which was so beautiful, um, you know, what you're recognizing is that, you know,

• 50:31Speaker 01

  human beings are complicated, extraordinarily, uh, uh, complex and, and exciting and interesting. Um, and, uh, we, we often need, um, goods that can be in conflict with one another, that might even be opposed that we need at different times. And that seems like just an ordinary, um, common sense recognition to make about human life. And yet there's something, uh, or for some reason, it seems to me that privacy and the associated kinds of goods about forgetting or, or not knowing, um, in this particular way and so on.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  Rarely gets the benefit of that recognition that it's always, not always, but certainly most often discussed in sort of absolute terms. So like, what do you mean? You be unaccountable. What about criminals? And this sort of thing. Yeah. Or, you know, you can have privacy or you can have, you know, security. Like, these things are put into like, you know, privacy is put into a stark balance with other things where other goods aren't like, we don't, we rarely talk about freedom and security in the same way, as if they were essentially opposed. And so, you know, part of my motivation here, I don't think I'm, you know, revealing,

• 51:51Speaker 01

  I'm dropping new truths on people's heads. I think what, part of what I wanted to do with the book is say, hey, we already recognize these things. My examples aren't from, you know, the history of, I mean, there are philosophers in the book, and it's a work of philosophy, but they're not, I'm not trying to draw from, you know, the history of professional philosophers thinking about things, but rather from ordinary life and the kinds of things we do and think about. So I want to say, actually, we have this stronger, more maybe ambivalent, but certainly more profound view of privacy already. And I just want to remind us, in a sense, of what we have and maybe what we're at a risk of losing by coming to think of it in these sort of, in

• 52:36Speaker 01

  these stark binary terms, or as being concerned primarily with information.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  Let's talk about forgetting, which you just mentioned. What's the value of forgetting? Again, it would seem to be, forgetting is bad. I mean, I should remember things and learn from them. Why would I, why is forgetting a good idea?

• 52:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I wish I had a better memory. Me too. But, uh, yeah, so this is another, it's like, um, you know, the book as a whole is arguing for limits to what we can know. And not just any limits, because one of the big claims that I mentioned a couple of times is like, different limits are different. They play different roles in our lives. We might want some, but not others. We might want them in some certain contexts and so on. So secrecy and privacy are my two, secrecy is my big foil for privacy. But that limits don't just inhibit us or restrict us or make us smaller, but actually limits and limits of the right sort give us something. And so one of those is privacy, another one is forgetting.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  And so that could be a sort of, at least in terms of oblivion, as privacy produces the not knowing I call oblivion in the present moment, uh, memory does with regard to the past. And that's where the word oblivion, I think, has its most natural and certainly common usage as the root word for forgetting in romance languages and so on. And so, you know, my argument isn't that we need to forget more. I really wish I could remember more, but like the, the, the not knowing of privacy, it is to recognize that actually this limit to what we can know and understanding it

• 54:25Speaker 01

  in a particular way plays a valuable role in our lives, gives us a sense of depth, gives us a sense of possibility, so or the idea that I can be different from the way that I was. And, uh, and also gives us a sense of, of depth to human life, which is, so the, um, I'll say that the depth one really quick and then, um, and then quickly about the, um, the penultimate one I said about them, uh, about being different. But just, and we could talk more about this if you want, but to the extent that we think of, you know, what we don't know, what we can't remember, we don't think this way. But if we did, by analogy to privacy, as like hidden from me, a secret, as being some

• 55:06Speaker 01

  information that I just can't get at as opposed to, um, you know, just being.

• 55:13Speaker 01

  unreachable by me, but being gone, we have a different view of the human person. And for reasons, I argue, it's a shallower view and certainly a more sort of paranoid, self-surveilling view. And I think the other benefit of forgetting that I mentioned is maybe a bit more obvious. And this ties into contemporary debates over the right to be forgotten, which is that being able to forget, let's say, for me, maybe some horrible missteps I've made or whatever, like, you know, these make me a better agency, less anxious or concerned

• 55:57Speaker 01

  or convinced that I'll do it again, you know, if I have to do it. And the idea that those around me, you know, won't know about, I don't know, let's say I was just like incorrigible punk in, as a teenager, which isn't too far from the truth. You know, the idea that that's not gonna sort of precede me everywhere I go, that others won't know about my past, that that'll recede into the past, makes my view of the future seem a lot more open. It makes it seem a lot more possible for me to be different than the way that I was. And this might be true for individual memories, but it's certainly true for, let's say, the

• 56:41Speaker 01

  collective memory of society around us.

• 56:46Speaker 00

  And I think, you know, it's, it's related to the claim earlier about the frozen nature of a still photograph.

• 56:56Speaker 00

  You give a dramatic example of a murderer who serves a prison term and comes out and should, should every, you only use his initial, should every encounter he has now for the rest of his life be preceded by that knowledge, you know, hi, I'm so-and-so, the murderer, when he introduces himself to somebody in a cafe, or I'm so-and-so, if you Google me, you'll find out I murdered somebody, but I did 20 years in prison. And at the same time, should that person now be free for that to be forgotten, either by Himself, which I think is could be very beneficial in allowing him to become

• 57:39Speaker 00

  someone different, or should he carry that burden, right? It's a very, it's a tough question.

• 57:49Speaker 01

  It's a tough question, and that question, you know, the way you phrase it is in terms of, you know, theories of punishment. And that's the way a lot of it is discussed. And then just note that it's interesting that we would discuss memory and collective memorialization as a punishment, or at least as a potential punishment, just points to the ambivalent nature of memory, but also to its social force. And, you know, my view about that, I see the, of course, when it comes to the murderer and the, you know, his interest in meeting people who, when they Google him, and this

• 58:31Speaker 01

  is really sort of at the heart of this thing, where we now have discussions about the right to be forgotten, because we all Google, not all of us, but it's extremely common, Google people before we meet them. We essentially became private detectives overnight, and we compile a dossier on the people we're going to meet before we meet them. And I just, I don't think we appreciate how strange that is, that in the past 10 years we've all become private detectives who make a dossier on the people we meet, everyone we meet, it's just become common practice to me, which is extremely wild. And what's even stranger is that it just has receded into invisibility, it's become common practice. But the idea that he has an interest in that not happening to him, even though he's committed

• 59:15Speaker 01

  one of the greatest crimes anyone could commit, service time and so on, to me is, I think that he has that sort of interest and right in this, for the same reasons that I'm against the practice of criminal branding. I think criminal branding is barbaric. They used to, you know, they, in ancient times, they would brand someone's face. I think it's barbaric in any part of the body. And the point of the brand wasn't to cause pain, wasn't to be a, you know, to keep someone in a prison. It was meant to be a permanent punishment by making it such that this person could never meet someone without knowing, you know, that they had been a slave or that they had, you

• 59:57Speaker 01

  know, this is like the scarlet letter, even though this was sewed on Hester Prynne's clothes, to never meet somebody without them knowing immediately before you even say your name,

• 1:00:09Speaker 01

  that the worst thing about your past, or at least just something about your past. And that's an incredible constriction of human freedom. But of course, we think some constrictions of human freedom, like incarceration or something, might be justified. But also, it's just beyond that. It's, I think it's an immense, and this is my main reason that I'm against both criminal branding and the sort of the digital version of it, is that it's an immense injury to a person's sense of self as an agent. Because what it's meant to do is not protect the people, you know, who see the brand or who find out, because at that point, you're already within arms. If they were going to do something, they would do it. Most crimes are committed by first offenders, most violent crimes by people the person

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  knows. And, you know, presumably this person is, you know, has, at least the murderer has certain time and proven that he's no longer more of a threat than those of us who haven't committed a crime yet. Statistically, maybe he's less. But what it's meant to do is to sort of crush his sense, the branded one's sense, that they could ever be different. That this is, you will never, you will never outrun this thing that happened in your past. And that, to me, seems like a really barbaric punishment, not that it's like affected on the faith or the dossier or whatever, but on the, let's say, the human soul or spirit.

• 1:01:36Speaker 00

  And we're picking, because it makes it dramatic, you know, as you say, a heinous crime. But think about the thousand examples in our own lives of inconsiderateness and selfishness or cruelty, pettiness. Think of all the complicated mistakes we make as human beings. And imagine one of them being marked on you, or worse, you have a blow up in public that illuminates your imperfection, and people know about it and talk about it. And in today's world, sometimes it goes viral. And, yeah, I don't think you quote Whitman, and I'm not a big Walt Whitman fan, but I

• 1:02:18Speaker 00

  think Whitman said, "I contain multitudes." And I think one of the things you're getting at that's profound is that, you know, all of us contain multitudes. Any one moment of weakness or imperfection should not be front and center all the time. And it's a burden, you say, it's a burden on the soul, that it's not, I'm not sure I feel that way about, I think murder might be, it's a special case with a few other horrible things. But when we think about it more generally, we don't want to be summed up by one moment

• 1:03:00Speaker 00

  when we have a thousand that are on the other side, and yet, where's my, where's my gold star for that that you're not seeing? And I think, and it gets at the fact that as human beings, we have trouble remembering that, the gold stars, that, you know, the person that sits across from us who's, has a moment of imperfection, maybe in public or in our presence, and we tend to label them. And then that's over, when we know that for our own selves, we're richer than that, we have more in our multitude, we have more, we contain multitudes. And we can imagine, if we're careful enough, that people are more complicated. But when you see the one thing, and it's with them all the time on

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  their face, for whatever version of it we're talking about, it's not accurate.

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, and the Whitman quote is, I think, really profound. Because Whitman, he wrote, "I contain multitudes," as a way of not saying, "Look at me. Look how special and full of multitudes. Look how multitudinous I am." But rather as a way of connecting, of showing some sort of shared, universal, human basis with everyone. So as a fundamentally sort of democratic, shared multitudinous. The idea that we have all of these things isn't something special about us, but rather is something we have in common. And what a miracle, how wondrous that is.

• 1:04:34Speaker 01

  And yeah, and I think this goes all the way back, I think, to the beginning of, the first thing you said about quantification, the way that we think so much in terms of data and information and so on. Because I think on some fundamental level, the cultural and personal impulse towards quantification, information, even like the focus on very specific identity categories, is to some extent at odds with that idea of multitudinous. So even if I say, "Well, I contain multitudes, and here they are. Multitude A, B, C, and D. Here's the information about myself. And look, I have 10,000 data points. What multitudes?"

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  The kind of thinking that comes from seeing the world in terms of information, or the binary of one thing or another, is, I think, fundamentally opposed, at a very basic level, to multitudinous. Because for something to be quantified, for it to be a piece of information, it doesn't matter if you have 10,000. Each piece of information has to be discrete, has to be unambiguous. And so if we think about people and the world, even if like in their immense complexity as being composed, or at least in principle, being able to be composed, of just a myriad of discrete data points that are, at least in theory, knowable and

• 1:06:02Speaker 01

  You know, identifiable is one that's against the, yeah, it's against the idea that we contain ambiguous. So it's that we can be, that we have aspects of us that are protean and malleable. And as I said before, this isn't a natural fact about human beings, but rather depend that we are, that we do contain multitudes depends on us thinking that way. If one day we came to think that we don't contain multitudes, or if we, you know, there are lots of systems of belief still around today that don't think this way, then I think we would be less well off.

• 1:06:38Speaker 00

  It's beautiful. I want to quote, I'm going to read a quote that you have of Werner Herzog, which I found quite haunting. And it's a quote, but it, in one part of it, there's a bracketed word, which is the word peering. So otherwise than that, it's a literal quote of Herzog. Incidentally, I forgot this quote. I forgot who said it. And I, I read this part of your book very, relatively long ago, like a month ago. And then I'm finishing the book today and I'm thinking, you know, isn't there a quote from somebody about, about darkness and light and psychotherapy and self-awareness? I wonder who said it. I got on ChatGPT and Claude, and I'm trying to find it.

• 1:07:23Speaker 00

  I eventually find it and I'm thinking, oh, great. I'll get, I'll get Lowry's opinion of this quote. Well, you taught it to me. Here it is. We're talking about Werner Herzog, the director. He says, explaining and scrutinizing the human soul, peering into all its niches and crooks and abysses and dark corners is not doing good to humans. We have to have our dark corners and the unexplained. We will become uninhabitable in a way an apartment will become uninhabitable if you illuminate every single dark corner and under the table and wherever. You cannot live in a house like this anymore and you cannot live with a person anymore.

• 1:08:09Speaker 00

  Let's say in a marriage or a deep friendship, if everything is illuminated, explained and put out on the table. Close quote. Now, this goes against. You know, the whole, the whole idea of, of much of psycho, psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, you need to, you need to bring everything out, dredge it up, go into your past, remember everything, and you need to expose it and put it on the table, and that way you can heal yourself. And Herzog's saying the exact opposite. There are things you need to push down, repress, and keep them in the dark. How does, how does he, how do you justify that? How do, why do you think that's a, I understand it's not a universal sentiment

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  for every situation, but what's he getting at there that's important and valuable?

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  So I would say that, um, I, I don't read him, um, because obviously I read him, that is sympathetic to, to my view. I don't read him as saying that there needs to be some things pushed into the dark. Like, we need to keep, some, certain things are shameful or secret, and we shouldn't be telling anyone about them. I don't think that's what he's saying, because he's talking about a marriage, or a close friendship, or, or something where we actually do know these kinds of secrets about one another. And that's also an idea from psychotherapy and Freudian psychoanalysis, that nothing's lost. Everything, the things that, you know, that might be forgotten or, or gone, they're actually pushed down, they're sedimented, they're somewhere down there, and so we need to dig them up. But whatever is, you know, your past, your memories, and they're not actually forgotten. They don't

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  recede into oblivion, but rather, they're just like, they're not, they're like secrets, or hidden things in your past that now you have to be really paranoid about, on the one hand, but also try to discover. And so I see Herzog, like, my argument is arguing against that, saying that, uh, yeah, we have things that we repress, yeah, we have secrets, yeah, we have all of this, but seeing all of human life as, as being like that, seeing, thinking that that, um, uh, sort of describes the, the, the whole boundaries of what we are, that all of the things that we don't know about ourselves, that are dark regions and dark corners and so on, and unexplained, are, um, dark and unexplained because there's

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  something there that we're either repressing, or that we haven't become aware of, or whatever, but they like, it is in principle illuminable. That is a dangerous and also just, I think, a really impoverished view of the human person. I take him to be saying that the human person, and I would say, you know, society, is like that, you know, apartment that he mentions, that if it is just completely glaringly illuminated at all times, that's just, it's a, it's a hard place to live, and it's in some ways in humans. So we need dark corners, I think he says, we need the unexplained. And I don't think what he means there is we need to like, there need to be

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  pressing things about us, or even trivial things that we just, eh, whatever, I don't care about that, or I won't explain it, or things that we should not want other people to attend to, but rather, there need to be, we need to cultivate within us and within our societies zones of obscurity about which we don't know anything. We don't know what's on the other end of the darkness. That's what real darkness is like. Not darkness that hides something, but actual profound, deep darkness. We don't know what's on the other side of it. Nevertheless, that darkness, that limit to our knowledge, is in our apartment,

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  is in ourselves. So we have limits to what we can know in society, but also in introspection and our relationships with others that we bump up against. But we don't see those limits as concealing something from us, as hiding something. But rather, we see them as being a limit beyond which there is just sort of a region of beyondness to us that we can't reach, we can't exhaust or know, we can't instrumentalize, and so on. And that is a much, that is a view of the human person and human society that contains a great deal more depth and mystery and capacity for surprise and rebirth than one in which everything

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  that we, that is in that, you know, Herzog's darkness, is hidden or secret or repressed.

• 1:12:32Speaker 00

  I think he's saying one other thing, or at least I learned another thing from it, which is that, and I, you know, this is something you learn from marriage, or a close friendship, you feel an injustice.

• 1:12:46Speaker 00

  Or you're accused of an injustice. And you play back the tape in your mind. And you realize, no, I was right. I did the right thing. And my friend or my wife is misremembering this. And let's bring it out in the light. Let's play the tape. Let's get the video. Let's get the CCTV, the closed circuit television of that conversation we had in three weeks ago at breakfast. And I'm gonna show her. She's gonna show me how it really was. And that's not available, that tape. And your mind has, it's an illusion to think you can bring that into the light and settle it.

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  And it's one of the deepest things I think you learn for marriage is that your self righteousness is usually, it's either wrong. It's a fake memory. We don't have the tape. And it's much better to just say, maybe, maybe I was wrong. And I'm gonna learn from it. But the idea that you could just get that, get that big flashlight and illuminate that dark corner from childhood, from two years ago, from last week. It's just an illusion. And it's a, it's a dangerous, unhelpful illusion for interacting with other human beings who have the same challenges you do.

• 1:14:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, as you'll know from the book, I've also learned a lot from marriage and much of it appears in there. And in that case, it does, it seems really, I mean, the the desire to prove one's self righteousness and run back the tape is inevitable and hard to avoid and never successful. But it does seem important for the quality of the relationship. And I think this scales down to the relationship with oneself and also broadly to the sort of, kind of society we have. It seems important for the relationship between spouses or romantic partners that there is no tape.

• 1:14:56Speaker 01

  To be run back, that there is no information about it. There's no fact of the matter. And so recognizing that between the two of you, you know, requires a negotiation, requires a sort of commitment to our mutual vulnerability of in the face of like, you know, the our fallible memories, to say nothing of our fallible, you know, way of behaving in the present. And that kind of commitment, I think, is not just like a deal you make every time you get in an argument about how we're going to resolve this dispute, but is a much more profound commitment about your relationship to each other or the role in the world of your relationship, that

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  there is a sort of mutual, well, yeah, mutual commitment in the face of this profound and and ineradicable vulnerability. And I think that's a valuable thing even. I think our disputes would be more easily resolved. You'd certainly want this in court if we had a tape to run back of everything, then we would just figure it out and we wouldn't have to fight about it. We'd just go check the tape. But we would lose something, I think, in the quality and the depth of our relationship, even as we became more efficient or precise or exact about resolving disputes. And there's a there's a great short story that you might enjoy if you haven't read

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  it by the sci fi writer Ted Cheng on this, where there's basically imagining the if we did have a tape to run back. It's called The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling. And you know, it's a it's a sort of Black Mirror type premise predating the Black Mirror show. But what makes Chang such a good writer and his story so good is he explores it through the really emotionally potent relationship of the of family. And I think it's a great story and a great way to think about this issue.

• 1:16:54Speaker 00

  Well, just thinking about the inevitable. Hard to capture aspect of the human experience. I think we imagine incorrectly. We think, well, we don't have the tape, of course, of that Wednesday morning breakfast, but I have the transcript. It's in my head. And we forget that a transcript, which we think of as a fact, as information, is incredibly ambiguous. It leaves out the raised eyebrow. It leaves out the chuckle. Sometimes it's put in. Chuckle in brackets in the transcript, right? But was that a cruel chuckle? Or was that a self-awareness nervous chuckle?

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  And all those complexities of the human experience are really hard to capture. And even the video, of course, is also going to mislead us. As we know, video evidence is often terribly flawed, but we don't have anything close to that. And it's, I think it's better just to appreciate the complexity of our interactions and language and the ambiguity of it.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that's, that's true. And so one of the, you know, it's still one of the broader, not just the broader arguments of the book, but one of the, what's coming out of this conversation is that there, that there is an aspect of, of human life from the relationship to oneself, to others, that either we talked about sort of, you know, limits to knowing, so privacy or memory or whatever, but also, so that needs those, but also that needs a different kind of limit, which is the limit of how much of life is made sort of unambiguous. Or, and this is, this is, has sort of a dialectical relationship to that, how much

• 1:18:43Speaker 01

  of that of unambiguity do we want? Do we demand from life? So when it comes to knowing oneself and another.

• 1:18:52Speaker 01

  How much certainty, how much information do I demand? How tolerant am I of ambiguity, of uncertainty, of irony, of not knowing? Do I need to know if I don't have, I mean, I don't have, as you might expect, given the book, I don't have a smartwatch, health tracker. Suppose I had one, you know, do I feel that I'm bereft of self-knowledge, that I know myself less, if I don't have it or something? What's my heartbeat doing? I need to know. You know, they're all subtle and small, and they seem seemingly laughable in isolation, but I think they're all indicative of a cultural shift that predates the 21st century by a

• 1:19:37Speaker 01

  little bit, or maybe by another century, to the beginning of privacy maybe, but which seems really in overdrive now. And, you know, it's hard to see when you're going through it. But if we don't see it as we're going through it, then I think we stand really to lose these valuable aspects of human life that depend upon what you were describing, the ambiguity, the flux and flow of human life as it's lived, you know, undatified, off the screen, off-camera.

• 1:20:15Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Lowry Presley. His book is The Right to Oblivion. Lowry, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 1:20:24Speaker 01

  Oh, it's been so great. Thanks for having me.

• 1:20:33Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.