Should we learn to forget?

[Ace Pace]

Ars Technica.

difficult for humans, has become simple. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a professor in Harvard's JFK School of Government, argues that this shift has been bad for society, and he calls instead for a new era of "forgetfulness."

Mayer-Schönberger lays out his idea in a faculty research working paper called "Useful Void: The Art of Forgetting in the Age of Ubiquitous Computing," where he describes his plan as reinstating "the default of forgetting our societies have experienced for millennia."

Why would we want our machines to "forget"? Mayer-Schönberger suggests that we are creating a Benthamist panopticon by archiving so many bits of knowledge for so long. The accumulated weight of stored Google searches, thousands of family photographs, millions of books, credit bureau information, air travel reservations, massive government databases, archived e-mail, etc., can actually be a detriment to speech and action, he argues.

"If whatever we do can be held against us years later, if all our impulsive comments are preserved, they can easily be combined into a composite picture of ourselves," he writes in the paper. "Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to speak less freely and openly."

In other words, it threatens to make us all politicians.

In contrast to omnibus data protection legislation, Mayer-Schönberger proposes a combination of law and software to ensure that most data is "forgotten" by default. A law would decree that "those who create software that collects and stores data build into their code not only the ability to forget with time, but make such forgetting the default." Essentially, this means that all collected data is tagged with a new piece of metadata that defines when the information should expire.

In practice, this would mean that iTunes could only store buying data for a limited time, a time defined by law. Should customers explicitly want this time extended, that would be fine, but people must be given a choice. Even data created by users—digital pictures, for example—would be tagged by the cameras that create them to expire in a year or two; pictures that people want to keep could simply be given a date 10,000 years in the future.

Mayer-Schönberger wants to help us avoid becoming digital pack rats, and he wants to curtail the amount of time that companies and governments can collate data about users and citizens "just because they can." Whenever there's a real need to do so, data can be retained, but setting the default expiration date forces organizations to decide if they truly do need to retain that much data forever.

It's a "modest" proposal, according to Mayer-Schönberger, but he recognizes that others may see it as "simplistic" or "radical." To those who feel like they are living in a panopticon, it might feel more like a chink in the wall through which fresh air blows.

[Sea Skimmer]

He has a very good point, but I don’t see how we could ever go back to not archiving craploads of minor crap, without simply trashing all computers out of a fear they might build terminators covered in zombie flesh.

[R. U. Serious]

Afraid how our words and actions may be perceived years later and taken out of context, the lack of forgetting may prompt us to speak less freely and openly."

Or, you know, it could expose the hypocrisy in many people. It could humble people to get a sense of reality injected into their often helplessly twisted self-image. The reason politicians have to be like politicians, is because regular people are ften not aware of how much they themselves change over the years, or how different their behaviour and their opinions are now then they were 20 or 30 years ago - they constantly adjust their self-image and retell reality in a way that fits their own story. When stuff is dug up about politicians there is suddenly a conflict people don't know how to deal with, or well, they think it's aberrant and the person becomes suspicious. If everybody made the experience themselves and had a basic level of knowledge and education to see that for what it is, then maybe the expectation towards politician would change as well.

Of course all this applies to "public information". As discussed in the other thread, when it comes to privacy things are a bit different, and people should (by default) have the option to keep private things private. I also think that the possibility of anonimity is a necessary component of democracy. So in a way I do agree that people should have some room and ability to grow and find themselves, which is not automatically made part of their public record, I guess I ust disagree on the ways to achieve that end.