We all make mistakes. From the small and mundane, to the enormous, accompanied-by-a-bad-word mistakes that make us want to burrow down into a hole and never come back out. Like my Snapchat story last Friday. Or the first fifteen years of my life. Or that old Facebook picture I should have deleted before adding any new college friends.
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| For your entertainment, circa 2010. I did in fact eat that box all by myself. |
Thankfully, I could take both the story and the picture down, and promptly get rid of them, and no one was the wiser. However, The Circle offers an alternative: banning the deletion information. By not deleting anything, The Circle aims to make all information free, but instead, they create a prison of mortification.
The basic premise we operate under is pretty simple: we all fail. We all make mistakes. Saying "that's okay, you're only human", is a way of empathizing with the person who just made a mistake, and assuring them that they're not in the mess alone. Being "human" is, innately, being flawed. And that's okay, because humans have a particularly interesting quality to them:
We learn from our mistakes.
It's true, we're not allowed to "delete" in real life; to go back and make our mistakes disappear, or to actually have them taken off our record. All of our actions do take a toll and leave a mark on us, but this mark then allows us to learn. This in turn helps us rationalize the fact that we messed up, and then come to terms with it. We slowly forget we messed up, and only the correction remains.
In not being able to delete anything off the company's cloud, the opposite happens: we aren't able to grow past our mistakes, because we never go through the process of rationalization that characterizes learning from them. We keep on being reminded that we messed up, over and over, by the certainty that the evidence is uploaded somewhere on the cloud. Besides, there are copyright issues.
This is an example (quite extreme, I must admit) of an enormous copyright dispute:
David Slater, a British nature photographer, was photographing Celebes crested macaques in Indonesia, when he purposefully let the camera's shot trigger within reach of a pair of female macaques. The macaques proceeded to take "selfies", and Slater then sold the pictures to a news agency, under the premise that it was his own work. This created disputes across ethics and legal boards, as to whom the copyright belonged to. In 2016, a judge declared that given that monkeys are not humans, they can't hold copyright over material, and the picture was permitted to circle (pardon the pun) freely.
What if the monkey had won the dispute? What if this picture actually threatened their way of life in a certain manner? It would create immense repercussions within nature, all because of a certain "harmless" image that couldn't be erased. The same goes for humans-- the ability to erase is a precious one given to us by the Internet, through which our privacy can be protected, and we get a second chance, and we should always have the right to this.
The aim of not being able to delete anything uploaded to the internet is, according to Eamon Bailey, in line with their well-meaning but reductionist mantras of "Secrets are lies. Sharing is Caring. Privacy is theft". However, these mantras are white or black: they don't take into account the grey areas. And the thing is, life is a collection of grey. We should be allowed to keep our right to privacy, just as we have for the past thousands of years before the "new dawn" of technology, or we risk becoming machines who think they know everything about everyone around them... but really, don't know anything at all.
This is an example (quite extreme, I must admit) of an enormous copyright dispute:
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| Source, Wikipedia |
David Slater, a British nature photographer, was photographing Celebes crested macaques in Indonesia, when he purposefully let the camera's shot trigger within reach of a pair of female macaques. The macaques proceeded to take "selfies", and Slater then sold the pictures to a news agency, under the premise that it was his own work. This created disputes across ethics and legal boards, as to whom the copyright belonged to. In 2016, a judge declared that given that monkeys are not humans, they can't hold copyright over material, and the picture was permitted to circle (pardon the pun) freely.
What if the monkey had won the dispute? What if this picture actually threatened their way of life in a certain manner? It would create immense repercussions within nature, all because of a certain "harmless" image that couldn't be erased. The same goes for humans-- the ability to erase is a precious one given to us by the Internet, through which our privacy can be protected, and we get a second chance, and we should always have the right to this.
The aim of not being able to delete anything uploaded to the internet is, according to Eamon Bailey, in line with their well-meaning but reductionist mantras of "Secrets are lies. Sharing is Caring. Privacy is theft". However, these mantras are white or black: they don't take into account the grey areas. And the thing is, life is a collection of grey. We should be allowed to keep our right to privacy, just as we have for the past thousands of years before the "new dawn" of technology, or we risk becoming machines who think they know everything about everyone around them... but really, don't know anything at all.
I didn't think about how we learn from our mistakes, and the Circle prevents that by constantly reminding us we messed up. I like how you said that machines think they know everything but yet nothing at all; interesting post!
ReplyDeleteThis is by far one of my favorite posts that you've written on this blog. You took an interesting and engaging approach to this post, using a personal example that everyone could relate to/with. Keep the creativity flowing.
ReplyDeleteAmazing post! It was fun reading from the very beginning. I liked how you mentioned you could delete and Snapchat and no one would even know. The real world example of Snapchat tied well into your argument. Also, the part about the monkey was really hummourous, but it had a purpose and you tied everything in well.
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