Had Viktor Mayer-Schönberger started writing Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age yesterday, I’m sure he would have the Season 3 finale of BBC’s Sherlockas his prime example for humanity’s desire for perfect remembering. The greatest detective now relies on technology and the fact that the world takes digital memory out of context to plant himself into a case.  Sherlock’s villains not only use technology for their evil ways, but also strive for inhuman powers of memory to control others with blackmail and deception.  Remembering, digital or otherwise, is at the forefront of our societal mind, perhaps even more now than when Delete was first published in 2009.

Mayer-Schönberger’s book goes deeper than just technological proliferation in popular culture.  It is an all-encompassing look at how we remember and how remembering affects our lives.  He specifically looks into how technology has impacted human nature – how we remember and how we use memory with these aids.  His thesis is two-fold: the cult of remembering is growing and the dangers are not being recognized.  Mayer-Schönberger, however, does not spiral into an anti-technology rant.  Instead he focuses on presenting both sides of the argument – from the great benefits of remembering aided by digital technology to what happened to Stacy Snyder, the teacher who lost her certificate for ignorant online posting – which lets the reader decide how much memory is too much.

Mayer-Schönberger suggests six processes that might help our society in this rapid transition to never-ending memory.  These range from digital abstinence (which might have saved Stacy Snyder, although he believes digital abstinence to be near impossible and condemns her ignorance as inexcusable[1]) to law-enforced privacy rights that need improving and constant updating around the world to remain viable.  In the age of never forgetting, Mayer-Schönberger suggests that a law must also be ever-protecting or, if the law should change or be abolished in the future, all that was stored digitally and protected will be returned to public attention.

Following perhaps the most vivid example of remembering gone wrong (the use of the 1930’s Dutch citizen registry in the Nazi deportation and killing of Jews during the Second World War) Mayer-Schönberger brings his strongest argument against digital remembering.  Even if humanity could learn to adapt techniques of remembering (which he believes we cannot do), or even if laws could be created that protected individual’s privacy enough, the information itself is still in existence.  If anything were to happen, an unexpected invasion or, more likely in today’s age, an electronic invasion in the form of hacks or leaks, the information that has been stored, forgotten and protected would become accessible, remembered and public again.  Mayer-Schönberger suggests the only solution is “information ecology,”[2] an adult and digital adaptation of the motherly advice ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.’  Only by not collecting information will information be truly inaccessible and private.  Information ecology can also work by institutionalizing deletion policies like happens with criminal records in some cases.  Were we to practice this mandatory digital deletion, Mayer-Schönberger’s fictional Jane and John might be able to have a carefree friendship again and I might not have emails from exes that are now way out of context and hard to forgive.  Deletion is not for the sake of saving space, but perhaps it can save us.

While the information ecology aspect is enshrined to some degree in other aspects of society like Microsoft’s customer surveys (deleted when no longer needed) I believe Mayer-Schönberger would adjust his argument more towards actual digital abstinence had his book been written after the recent NSA revelations and the CSEC wifi monitoring scandal here in Canada.  While these two cases are more examples of monitoring present-tense activity and have led to inquiries and future reforms for the agencies and laws (think again to Sherlock’s use of technology), who is to say what was stored from these collections will be deleted?  Some people, like Andrew Feldmar, could be detained in the future for what websites they browsed – not even what they published – decades before, information that, if taken out of context, could be seen as a threat by the government.

Viktor Mayer-Schönberger’s Delete is cautionary to say the least.  His suggestions are important to consider, especially with a generation that has grown up with digital technology and may not think twice about posting things online or how they’re being monitored.  We are now in the age of “living with a historical record” as Google CEO Eric Schmidt is quoted as saying,[3] and Mayer-Schönberger believes that this is a major concern for the way we work as humans.  Human nature, desiring to remember because memory is power, has meant we are now remembering too much, and if we don’t learn to control memory and how we remember, that power will become even more dangerous.