Let Me Be Forgotten (with Lowry Pressly)

Lowry Pressly: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Lowry Pressly: 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, just to list a couple off the top of my head: there’s privacy, of course, but you’ve got secrecy, confidentiality, anonymity, mysteries, the forgotten, the lost. 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 different not just for the person within who is 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 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 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 moral reasons, having to do with how important it is for us to live our own lives.

But, that’s not what we mean when we talk today about privacy as a kind of epistemic barrier.

Lowry Pressly: Yeah. So, 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, lawyers, activists, and so on–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 ordinary folks understand what privacy is. 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–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 privacy theorists.

So, privacy theorists think of privacy today basically, I think, 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, “flows” to intended recipients.

And, I think there are 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 the 1970s or 1980s–not coincidentally, the long start of the digital age.

But, it’s also a dangerous idea, I think, because what it does–even the defenders of privacy against the forces of surveillance in 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 privacy.

And, that’s a really weak defense against who we take today to be the greatest threats to privacy: surveillance companies, or the state, or whatever. Because they care very little about how we draw the boundaries of our audience for our information–just so long as the information about us is created, to which obviously they have access to. But, 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.

Lowry Pressly: Yeah. So, I begin the book with a line, something like, ‘We live in a time blinded by information.’ And, I agree with you totally.

What I mean by that isn’t 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, as we do that–of course, there might be economic or ideological 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 destroyed, corrupted, or changed by the quantification of it.

So, I mean, it sounds very abstract. But, one example is a moving experience you had at a symphony or something, or a poem you like, or love. These things, when you try to put them into words, when you try to put a distinct, exhaustive definition on them–or, to say nothing of quantifying them–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 is sort of a natural fact about the human being in the same way it is that we are bipeds, and we are mammals, and the heart works in the way that it works, and so on. These are social facts about the person that consist in the way we understand human beings, 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 durée, as something different.

And so, part of the argument I’m making in my book is similar to what you were just saying–a sympathetic thing 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 to as sort of unquantifiable experiences.

Lowry Pressly: So, Arne Svenson is an artist, a 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 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 prurient intent here–just is a sort of art project. And, no one would have ever known, except that he showed some of the, 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 he could have seen them with his naked eye 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. 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.

Lowry Pressly: Yeah. And, I recommend that listeners can Google Arne Svenson, The Neighbors, and look at the pictures, and you’ll see that they are quite beautiful. And, some of them are actually pretty funny. There’ll be one where a hung curtain just obscures somebody’s face. So, you can 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. And the court held that actually Svenson had invaded their privacy. They called it a literal home invasion. Yet, he won the case because the court decided that the photographs were works of art protected by the First Amendment. But, the court said, ‘Well, there’s a new technology here 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 a hundred 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.

So, the question arises–and I think this is kind of what our intuition is–I think most of us would feel the same–that 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. Versus the photograph, which creates something that is fixed. Almost like a piece of information about the moment that doesn’t change over time. That we can scrutinize; that is almost like a fact of what this person or thing or whatever looked like at the moment that the lens snaps.

Lowry Pressly: 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, it’s interesting also–I just want to note before I go into that–that in your example, or the portraitist, or the picture you take that gets the vulnerable look, we see this as discovering something about the person.

Even the language–candid photograph, candid form, 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. And, we do think that’s what makes the great portraitist, great portraitists, distinct from long ago, when they were painted portraits, when they were supposed to show universals, not personals–wealth, status, and so on. And, those were the clues that were read into.

So, 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 the end of it. And everyone during that era who was talking about privacy–writing about it, I should say–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–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 a long time in a studio when 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 us to perceive in our ordinary round[?].

And, there’s nothing bad about that. It’s exciting and good, and we think we get insight into people. The reason that the Victorians–and I think 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, those truths might be truths that we don’t avow. 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. They’re reaching into us and generating facts about us.

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

Lowry Pressly: 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 these are–there are serious moral stakes in all picture taking.

On the one hand, the intuitions about the Svenson 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 the same way.

But also, because we really care, we can’t–these examples really activate strong moral intuitions in us. And they’re very low-stakes examples, having your picture taken. I mean, if your neighbor is taking pictures of you every day through their window, that might seem higher stakes, for reasons it’d be interesting to think about. But, 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 low stakes in terms of harm, but activating such a strong moral response, they point us to a kind of expressive value about what privacy does. Writ large. So 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 argument for the unwanted photograph, for not wanting–just in general–what they called in the 1890s, Kodak fiends, driving the world crazy by taking pictures everywhere–the reason to complain about that, at least in terms of privacy, has to do with exchanging a certain quantity of un-informationalized, unquantified–just say, 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 information.

So, they had, people in the 1890s–and ever after–responding to all kinds of different developments in terms of privacy, from the invention of the census to passports, 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, facts of the matter–things that are unambiguous about who this person is, where they are, and what the weather was like, and so on.

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

Lowry Pressly: Absolutely. So, you could think about the stage performer, but in the same way, a conversation partner or somebody living under surveillance, in a surveillance society or a prison or something–once the actress or the interlocutor is aware 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 fully in the place that you are. So, for the actress to lose yourself in the role, the here and now–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 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 is being photographed or video recorded is also true for the audience, for the one who is doing the photographing or the recording. That person is also, in a sense, in two places at once. If you look through a camera, you’re seeing the object that you’re looking at, but you’re also seeing the photograph that it will 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 take a picture of it, as an instinct. And, I’m not fully there with that object, or with the other person.

So, I think 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, as we’ve just been discussing, aren’t just for the one who exercises the right or for who the privacy protects. It’s not just for the performer on the stage, not just for the person talking to 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–is thinking about it only in terms of a very, very individualistic good, and not something that benefits, as you pointed out, all parties to the transaction.

Lowry Pressly: 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. Dancing as if everyone’s watching, dancing as if no one’s watching–maybe the dance 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. From the perspective of dance as if no one’s watching, something’s lost. But of course, 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 the thing 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 central claim that privacy isn’t about controlling information. In other words, privacy isn’t the same as secrecy. Because I’ll admit here for your many listeners that I do that all the time. I love putting on music and dancing by myself at home. So, it’s not a secret, now. Nevertheless, when I go do it, as you all know, can expect me to do later today, 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 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 word to describe the particular form of unknowing that we get from privacy, both inside and without, is that if you dance with no one’s watching, that recommendation, that encouragement is an encouragement to be oblivious to the others. 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 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 not knowing, where you think, okay, there’s not–I mean, even if it’s just a sort of imitation or pantomime, as if no one was watching, as if you were oblivious. In that case, you’re not only not being viewed or whatever, but what makes you particularly freed 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.

Lowry Pressly: 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 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 can imagine how debilitating or alienating it would be if nobody ever took you seriously. If everybody–and this is a way that–this is like the famous way that siblings will bully a younger sibling or something by pretending they’re invisible for a week or something. If nobody took you seriously–your actions seriously, the way that you were as reflecting on the kind of person you were–that would 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 and have that be reflected back at us from the world. So, that’s an enormous good–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, 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 our discussion about the performer or the interlocutor. If you’re on the hook for–I mean, personally, not 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 eyes of the public as part of who you are, well, then 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, that’s just the goal of the sort of panoptical or surveillance society and state–is to make sure that people always feel accountable. The great–or the big and highly effective surveillance states are touchstones–East Germany or something–long before the 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 can ever have a space where I’m unaccountable. Whether there might be a microphone, or whether my friend or lover might be an informant. And, the lack of confidence in those kinds of spaces where one can be unaccountable or off the hook for the sort of things one says and does has a very, very powerful disciplining influence on people’s lives.

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.

Lowry Pressly: Yeah. I think that’s right. I think–and thank you for reading that passage. You said it better than I could say it. Because I am oblivious to even my own book. I’ve written this big book about not knowing to make a virtue of my vices.

But, it’s interesting, when we talk about oblivion, or not knowing, or privacy even. As you were reading that, and your gloss on it–which was so beautiful–what you’re recognizing is that human beings are complicated, extraordinarily complex and exciting and interesting. And, we often need 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, common-sense recognition to make about human life. And yet there’s something–or for some reason, it seems to me that privacy and the associated kinds of goods about forgetting, or not knowing in this particular way, and so on–rarely gets the benefit of that recognition. That it’s always–or not always, but certainly most often–discussed in sort of absolute terms. So, like, ‘What do you mean you could be unaccountable? What about criminals?’ And this sort of thing. Or, ‘You can have privacy or you can have security.’ These things are put into–privacy is put into a stark balance with other things where other goods aren’t. We rarely talk about freedom and security in the same way, as if they were essentially opposed.

And so, part of my motivation here–I don’t think I’m revealing, I’m dropping new truths on people’s heads. I think part of what I wanted to do with the book is say, ‘Hey, we already recognize these things.’ My examples aren’t from the history of–I mean, there are philosophers in the book, and it’s a work of philosophy, but they’re not trying to draw from 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 wanted 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 stark binary terms, or as being concerned primarily with information.

Lowry Pressly: Yeah, I wish I had a better memory.

Lowry Pressly: But, yeah: so this is another–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 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 on. So, secrecy and privacy–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 this is privacy. Another one is forgetting. 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, 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, my argument isn’t that we need to forget more. I really wish I could remember more. But like the not-knowing of privacy, it is to recognize that actually this limit to what we can know, and understanding it in a particular way, plays a valuable role in our lives. Gives us a sense of depth, gives us a sense of possibility, or the idea that I can be different from the way that I was. And also, gives a sense of depth to human life, which is–so I’ll say that the depth one really quick, and then quickly about the penultimate one I said about being different. And, we could talk more about this if you want.

But, to the extent that we think of 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 hidden from me, a secret as being some information that I just can’t get at, as opposed to just being 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, these make me a better agency, less anxious or concerned, or convinced that I’ll do it again, if I have to do it.

And, the idea that those around me won’t know about, I don’t know–let’s say I was this incorrigible punk as a teenager, which isn’t too far from the truth. The idea that that’s not going to 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 collective memory of society around us.

Lowry Pressly: It’s a tough question. And, that question, the way you phrased it is in terms of theories of punishment. And, that’s the way a lot of it is discussed.

And I 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, my view about that, I see the–of course when it comes to the murderer and his interest in meeting people who, when they Google him–and this is really sort of at the heart of this thing where we now have discussion 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 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 has committed one of the greatest crimes anyone could commit, served his time, and so on–to me is I think that he has that sort of interest and right for the same reasons that I’m against the practice of criminal branding. I think criminal branding is barbaric. They used to–in ancient times, they would brand someone’s face. I think it’s barbaric, any part of the body.

And, the point of the brand wasn’t to cause pain, wasn’t 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 that they had been a slave, or that they had–this is like The Scarlet Letter, even though this was sewed on Hester Prynne’s clothes–then you never meet somebody without them knowing immediately, before you even say your name, 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. I think it’s an immense–and this is my main reason that I’m against both criminal branding and this 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 who see the brand, or who find out, because at that point you’re already within arm’s length. 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 knows. And, presumably this person is, at least the murderer, has served his 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 outrun this thing that happened in your past. And that to me seems like a really barbaric punishment, not that’s effected on the face, or the dossier, or whatever, but on the, let’s say, the human soul or spirit.