Machine Rule

In his just-released book, Delete, author Viktor Mayer-Schonberger explores the surprising phenomenon of perfect recall in the digital age and makes a strong case for reintroducing the capacity to forget.

To be sure, Mayer-Schonberger isn't suggesting that all of the bits and bytes about us be subject to erasure. But he is one of the first privacy advocates to assert that "the balance between what we remember and what we forget has been unsettled" by the always-on, data-hungry machines we have created to help us keep track of each other. But much information, Mayer-Schonberger asserts, is better left ungathered—or, at the very least, allowed to escape digital eternity. "We need to be able to delete," he says. Part of being human is to consistently re-contextualize the past as it relates to the present; machines rob us of that choice.

Cause Global caught up with Mayer-Schonberger recently to talk about how unbridled digital recall is reshaping society and human behavior. What follows is an edited transcript of that conversation:

A number of books have been published recently about the limitations of human memory, including Total Recall: How the E-memory Revolution will Change Everything by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell. But you argue in your book, Delete, that the capacity to forget serves a human purpose and must be integrated into our data-rich culture. You say our personal freedoms are at risk.

I’ve been interested in privacy for better part of the last two decades, and have been working on both sides of the Atlantic on information privacy issues. Privacy always has been dear to me, and this culture's perfect recall problem became clear to me when I started thinking about our digital world’s ability to record a lot more data than the analog world. The threat that eminates from this problem is not just of a privacy nature, but there is another type of danger that is at least as threatening and as problematic. Humans yearn to remember, although they mostly forget. We've developed tools to lighten this biological limitation, like books and videos, to help us remember things and they've proven to be extremely helpful to us. But until a few decades ago, these tools did not unsettle the balance between remembering and forgetting. To remember was the exception; to forget, the default. In the digital age, this balance has been altered fundamentally. Today, forgetting has become costly and difficult, while remembering is inexpensive and easy. With the help of digital tools we—individually and as a society—have begun to unlearn forgetting, to erase from our daily practices one of the most fundamental behavioral mechanisms of humankind.

We're forgetting how to forget?

It’s becoming real for most of us extremely quickly. Maybe 20 years ago or so, if a politician made a gaffe on live TV, it was played over and over again and we laughed and it ruined a political career. These days, it's not just public officials who might experience this. It's pretty much everybody now. Just consider this: in 2007, two out of three young Americans created or uploaded digital content onto the Internet or to some social networking site. So two out of three people partook in the weaving of this thick digital blanket and this, for many, was able to impede or destroy our careers. You have more and more of these examples coming up as YouTube and many other portals function as hubs, where you can upload everybody else's information, gaffes and outtakes and laugh about them. I’m sure you’ve seen or heard of the South Korean person who has been laughed at and criticized hundreds of thousands of times online because her dog pooped on the subway and it was recorded on YouTube.

This kind of permanent memory will lead to bullying?

It has already for some people, but more troubling is how the fear of such behaviors might be influencing large numbers of people in society. It would be horrible if we were to stop expressing ourselves because we start fearing that 20 years from now, or sooner, our utterances will be held against us. What does this do to free speech? Our democracy, our nation, our culture, will be much poorer and much more impoverished. So I'm suggesting that we create new legal and social tools not to encourage self-censorship, but instead create ways of choosing how long we want to preserve the information we put online. Inherent in this, of course, is an acknowledgment that some kinds of information loses validity over time, and therefore it needs to be discarded—or labeled, at least, as being past its expiry date.

This suggests that the facts don't always serve us. Why is the capacity to forget an advantage?

Researchers have found that perfect human memory is actually not an advantage but a disadvantage, because it disables people from deciding, over time, to move on. Perfect recall locks and anchors everything that has ever happened to the present. People who cannot forget feel they are always tethered to the past; they remember all of the wrong decisions they made in the past, which makes them afraid to decide in the present. Perfect digital memory, then, not only creates a power imbalance between the past and the present but impedes on our ability to decide and act quickly in the present.

Further, it's about information control. Perfect digital recall gives us no choice or control over how accessible our information is, or how long-lived it is in the public sphere. Much of what is online about us at any given time is accessible to anyone, will live forever, and occur out of context. In the past, we could control who 'saw' us and when and under what circumstances. We had a better chance of being able to explain.

Moreover, human remembering has not been a process of mechanistically retrieving facts from our past, but rather, as Daniel Schacter so eloquently argued, the constant reconstruction of our past based on the present. In other words, the past as we remember it is constantly evolving. The past captured in digital memory is constant, frozen in time. It is likely these two visions will clash, yet neither is an accurate and complete depiction of what or who we are.

What can we do about it?

It’s a collective action problem; my 'expiration date' proposal is meant to say there is a way we can start to introduce some selective forgetting into our digital world. We can start a movement by introducing new technologies. A number of companies, from Microsoft to ask.com, all offer the ability to forget, to allow expiration dates on certain kinds of data. In fact, Yahoo and Microsoft have announced they will delete some things after nine months so they will have selective forgetting implemented.

Have you gotten any pushback on the book?

Most pushback has come from people who run the large search engines. Others, of course, have said it is ridiculous not to be able to delete. Other pushback comes from people who accuse me of wanting to destroy archives and libraries. That is not at all what I want to do. I don't want forced forgetting. I want us, as a society and as individuals, to be able to choose what to remember. If nothing is done—if the status quo persists—we will lose a lot of the democratic and open, robust debate we have in society. That would be horrible. Equally horrible would be a world in which we become so locked to the past that we become frozen in the present, afraid to take risks and innovate, and to simply live for the moment.

—By Marcia Stepanek

(Photo, top, by Peeter Viisimaa for istock.com)
(Photo, middle, of Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, courtesy of Princeton Press)

Milo

Meet Milo, a completely digital boy who can recognize human faces, voices and emotions. Developed by Peter Molyneux and his team at the digital game creator, Lionhead Studios, Milo represents the latest in human-machine interaction technology—a big step in artificial intelligence that will not just revolutionize computer gaming. It's also sure to influence the way people communicate across the metaverse—as well as offline.



Molyneux told the Webzine Eurogamer during the recent Electronic Entertainment Expo, where Milo was first unveiled, that the digital boy represents Lionhead's—and Microsoft's—efforts to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence. "The first thing we did was go round [to speak with] all the Microsoft people—the handwriting recognition people, the facial recognition people, the motion recognition people [involved in developing new upgrades for the Xbox 360]," Molyneux said. "We brought the technology together and put it in there. ...Milo can recognize what you're wearing. If he notices you've got dark bags under your eyes, he will say, 'You look tired today.'"

Milo is part of Project Natal—the code name for "controller-free gaming and entertainment experience" for the Xbox 360. The add-on peripheral lets users control and interact with the Xbox 360 without a game controller, but rather through gestures, spoken commands, and presented objects and images. A release date has yet to be announced for the upgrade, but Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer says the technology will be incorporated into a new Xbox 360, due for release some time in 2010.

6.6 Degrees

Small world? Apparently so. A study by two Microsoft researchers of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people around the world suggests that socially, each person on the planet really is, at most, about 6.6 people away from knowing actor Kevin Bacon (left)—or any other stranger on Earth.

The study—which reviewed one month's worth of Microsoft Messenger instant messaging traffic—was presented to the World Wide Web 2008 Conference in Beijing in April and reported today in The Washington Post. The findings appear to corroborate the popular "Kevin Bacon" theory of social networking that puts you just one degree away from everyone you know, two degrees away from everybody they know, and so on. At best, this six degrees of separation, or small-world theory, says that any two people—on average—could be linked by roughly seven or fewer acquaintances.

So why does this Microsoft study matter? Researchers say the findings underscore the real-world power and potential of social networks and social media to organize groups of people in order to raise money, spread ideas, and influence the way others spend their time. Until now, the "six degrees" theory was only a hunch. Now, researcher Eric Horvitz told the Post, "it's pretty shocking. What we're seeing suggests there may be a social connectivity constant for humanity...People have had this suspicion that we are really close. But we are showing on a very large scale that this idea goes beyond folklore."

(Source: Wikipedia/Map of Six Degrees Theory of Social Connectivity)

Kevin Bacon—the well-connected actor for whom a 1994 college game about the phenomenon was named—has been applying the small-world theory to fundraising. Last year, Bacon launched sixdegrees.org, which maps his own social network and invites others to join it to raise money for social causes. In a Spring 2007 conversation, Bacon told me he initially thought the three college students who created Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon were poking fun at him:

"I thought at first that they were making fun, asking why a loser like me could know so many people, right? (laughter) Then I met these guys and saw it was for real," Bacon said. "Now, of course, this concept (of six degrees) is in the zeitgeist: the movie, Babel, was all about human connectivity. The potential here is that one person can reach out to two people and have those two people reach out to two more, and so on, and see the power of change grow exponentially around somebody's hope of having an impact. "

Bacon's sixdegrees.org site—developed with social entrepreneur Bill Strathmann, the CEO of Network for Good and co-author of People to People Fundraising: Social Networking and Web 2.0 for Charities—has raised some $4 million for a variety of social causes.