We don’t yet know what the effect will be, do we, of living your life sprawled across the internet, of sharing every passing thought from your unwashed mind, of photos from your 16th birthday at Alton Towers fossilising on Facebook, and the look you were giving Adam, and the trainers you cleaned that morning. Across the news pages of this paper we’re seeing the political fallout of our personal data being mined and sold, but the consequences of growing up under a thousand tiny spotlights, where whole lives – whole relationships, bad choices, griefs and parties – are pixelated into data, are yet to be seen. Sometimes, especially when we read another report on millennial loneliness, or anxiety, or depression, it feels like this generation is being run as an experiment.
Last week, in a landmark case, a businessman won his legal action against Google to remove search results about his criminal conviction. He was arguing for the right to be forgotten. Which is a phrase that, when I first heard it a few years ago, struck me as impossibly sad, and fairly devastating in its blankness. The most exciting words in the English language, in my experience, are, “Eva, we were talking about you yesterday.” For, of course, everything we do is in order to be remembered, and to avoid those inevitable, “Nice to meet yous” as you leave a room, from people who we’ve met many, many times before. What, is this face so forgettable? Was my opinion on Three Billboards not salty enough to stick in your mind? Dick. To remember is to care, and to be remembered is to avoid catching that infected loneliness that whispers through cities. But equally, as we’re learning through the thought experiment that is 2018, when identities are created almost solely by collaging memes across social media, it seems only fair that we should be able to adjust that identity as time passes.
It’s something that’s required on a micro level, daily. Every time I lend someone my laptop, for example, and swiftly erase my history, a history swimming, as it is today, in evidence of the descent from research into the number of vaginas a kangaroo has (three) to the number of penises (two), to pictures of the tapir’s penis (it has what appears to be a small foot at the end?) to photos of the “penis snake”, a horrific crime of nature that is neither penis nor snake but in fact a caecilian that presents as a terrible allergy.
Had I been born a year later, deeper into the 1980s, evidence of whole episodes from the early seasons of my life (selling nipple tassels at nightclubs, for example, or taking a job that involved wearing a beard three nights a week) would be searchable and free, and available to download as handy weapons. I thank my parents for not waiting any longer to have me. To be young and evolving today involves a risk of always having to show your workings, be they nipple tassels or worse. There is a future prime minister right now texting a cheeky topless photo to her friend with the caption, “55378008”, and there’s a future president WhatsApping Simpsons gifs about how stoned he is to his pal. And perhaps by the time they’re in power, these cached moments will have little impact – my suspicion, as we tut worriedly at sexting teenagers, is that these images will be so layered into the fabric of daily life that their value to shock and destabilise will be negligible. But if they do have an impact, if proof of petty indiscretions will still matter in 20 years time, then those who want them to be forgotten should indeed have the right to try. Because we grow, don’t we? We shed skins in order to move faster.
As so often happens when the modern world is forced to reassess the legal boundaries of its shifting villages, it’s not simply the content of the legal claim that triggers our joint anxieties, but the language, and its romance. The right to be forgotten. It glitters with fantasy, like something a wronged hero would growl before heading into a burning building. Except, what we’re talking about is not really the right to be forgotten, is it? It’s the right to forget.
While cases such as last week’s, about Google removing links to a criminal past, are the ones shaping the discussion, the real meat of the issue is in the drama-less images of drunk holidays and bad exes. It’s in the possibility that, even though a young person has lived their life online, the moments they regret needn’t follow them into adulthood, acting as barriers to their new ambitions. At its core the right to be forgotten is about the right to reform and edit the details of your past in order to move forward – the right to continue shaping your identity, this grand, pathetic, fluid thing, because when the wifi’s down, really, it’s all we’ve got.
One more thing…
In 2016, a study found that Dyson Airblades spread more germs than paper towels. I think about this about three times a day, over the groaning whoosh of the thing. And now, a new study is compounding this obsession: hand dryers can actually suck up fecal particles floating around the bathroom and then blow them on to your hands. The next time I shake your hand, expect it to be wet.
There’s a brilliant exhibition of new paintings by Caroline Walker at Kettle’s Yard at the University of Cambridge. They are portraits of female refugees living in London, in the basements of a church, in the psychiatric ward of a hospital, all these cold rooms strewn with cushions, pictures. Anything to make it feel more like home.
In the gallery of objects that will tell the story of our century, I propose we include Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘billionaire’s booster seat’. Let’s start a list.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.ukor follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
