Lowry Pressly - The Right to Oblivion
APAvar.: Lowry Pressly (2024). The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life. Harvard University Press.
Link: https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1427708093
pages 3 - 4:
Contemporary debates over privacy are blinkered by an unreflective tendency to understand everything in terms of "the information age," under whose ideological sway so much of contemporary life takes place.
... we are correct to think that we have, or ought to have, moral and legal rights to exercise control control over such information .... But we are mistaken to think that this is what privacy is for.
One of the main claims of this book is that privacy is valuable not because it empowers us to exercise control over our information, but because it protects against the creation of such information in the first place.
page 121:
... [Jorge Luis] Borge's story ["Funes, El Memorioso"] has become a touchstone for understanding the value of forgetting to human life.
... The widespread acceptance and repetition of the story as expressing a truth about our capacities for memory and forgetting has made it a myth or a fable of our time. It has become, in other words, the kind of truth, not about what really happened or is actually possible, but about what people at a certain time and place find valuable.
page 123:
The blatant category error of taking Borge's fiction as a "hypothesis" reveals once again the quasi-factual role the story has come to play in our time.
(note: perhaps other seeming category errors can be understood in the same way;-- as kinds of truth that we find valuable in certain contexts)