Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
By Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
Princeton University Press, $24.95

Are you fed up with hitting the delete button? For most of computing history, storage has been expensive, forcing people to make decisions about what is worth preserving. The periodic culls required of their corporate e-mail inboxes have long presented workers with a moral quandary: which to keep, the PowerPoint of last month’s sales meeting or that amusing but risqué video sent by a friend from outside work?

Scarcity is now giving way to abundance with astonishing speed. From one-terabyte personal hard drives to web 2.0 services that offer unlimited photo storage, there seems no need ever to delete again. And that, according to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, is where the trouble starts.

To most people, the unlimited and permanent digital memory that seems within grasp might sound like a boon. As long as it can be digitised, no detail of your life, no matter how trivial, need be lost. Everything would be permanently and instantly accessible. But to Mayer-Schönberger, an internet policy expert at the National University of Singapore, this sounds like information hell.

His stance fits with a dystopian view of the internet that has been fashionable in the book publishing world of late. This basically holds that the collapsing costs of information storage, processing and dissemination have deeper social and personal costs than anyone has bothered to count.

Mayer-Schönberger, to his credit, does at least give a nod to the benefits that flow from greatly expanded access to information, but makes no attempt to weigh these benefits against the costs he enumerates.

For all that, Delete is a useful recap of the various methods that are – or could be – applied to dealing with the consequences of information abundance. It also adds a thought-provoking new twist to the literature.

Two ideas are intertwined in this book. One is about privacy. To greatly oversimplify: there is no way to guarantee people control over all the digital information about them that exists. Somehow, somewhere, there is always a risk it will leak or be misused. One partial response would be to make sure all personal data are expunged once they have outlived their usefulness to the individual.

The second and more original part of the book concerns the personal implications of never having to forget.

The bold claim presented here is that perfect memory, were it ever achieved, would endanger human reasoning. The brain forgets for a purpose, filtering out information as it distances itself from past events and allowing for learning and change. If the past were permanently present, all facts would carry equal weight and temporal perspective would be lost.

This misses an important point. Just because everything is stored does not mean it will be constantly accessed. Like today’s stacks of old photographs and diaries, much will probably rot away in some digital attic as the brain chooses what to discard. Techno-visionaries such as Larry Page at Google like to speculate about a future when digital implants will bring perfect human memory, but for now it seems enough that we retain full control of our external digital storage. We can always choose not to search.

Still, assume for a moment that the overall direction of Mayer-Schönberger’s arguments are right, and that there is value in placing limits on perfect machine memory. How to do it?

The proposal in Delete is that all data should be made mortal. Every piece of digital information should expire on a predetermined “sell-by date”, selected by the person who created it. Like humans, machines would then simply start to forget.

It’s a cute idea, but would not work. As we drop our crumbs of digital data around the world, we have better things to do than assign an expiry date to each one. Much simpler just to default to the “save forever” setting. The act of forgetting is far more complex – and creative – than allowed for by this automated self-destruct mechanism. When memories are created it is impossible to know what significance they will hold in future, or why the mind lets some survive while appearing to delete others.

Ultimately, though, the shiny attractions of digital abundance are still too new and too obvious, while the darker risks still exist only in the abstract. Mayer-Schönberger is right to conclude that a wider discussion is needed about the implications of the perfect remembering that is now upon us. But he is overly alarmist to reach straight for the delete button.

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