Can We Still Recover the Right to Be Left Alone?

Summary

Books & the Arts / February 24, 2025 Can We Still Recover the Right to Be Left Alone? The political theorist Lowry Pressly thinks we’ve abandoned a more creative and humanist definition of the concept. Akseli Gallen-Kallela’s The Lord of the Castle Spying on His Daughter (circa 1900).(Photo by Heritage Art / Heritage Images via Getty Images) In 1971, the artist and poet Bernadette Mayer shot a roll of film each day during the month of July. Alongside the photographs, she kept a journal and recorded herself reading it. “I thought,” she wrote many years later, “that if there were a computer or device that could record everything you think or see, even for a single day, that would make an interesting piece of language/information.” Books in review The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life by Lowry Pressly Buy this book Mayer’s project—like other meticulous attempts at self-documentation—seems quaint in the year 2025, when there are, in fact, on most of our persons, devices that record so much of what we think and see and do, creating indexes of personal information whether or not we are aware of it, and whether or not we wish them to be doing so. (We also self-consciously and knowingly participate in this recordkeeping; it’s funny to read that among the 1,153 photos Mayer took, only 27 were self-portraits.) The contemporary understanding of privacy—the one that has compelled me to use Signal, to quit Instagram, to browse in incognito mode, and toggle the little switches at the bottom of websites to reject cookies—focuses on the control of such information. I spend a lot of time thinking about who I want to know about me and exactly what they should know. But Mayer’s 1971 work underlines that such information has to be created in the first place, and she noted how much was not captured in her experiment: “emotions, sex, thoughts, the relationship between poetry and light, storytelling, walking, and voyaging to name a few.” A poet’s list, to be sure, but it helped...