"[O]blivion is restorative: we come apart in order to come back together. (Sleep is a case in point; without a nightly suspension of our rational faculties, we go nuts.)"

"Another is the notion that oblivion is integral to the possibility of personal evolution. 'The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning,' Foucault writes. To do so, however, you must believe that the future can be different from the past—a belief that becomes harder to sustain when one is besieged by information, as the obsessive documentation of life makes it 'more fixed, more factual, with less ambiguity and life-giving potentiality.' Oblivion, by setting aside a space for forgetting, offers a refuge from this 'excess of memory,' and thus a standpoint from which to imagine alternative futures. Oblivion is also essential for human dignity. Because we cannot be fully known, we cannot be fully instrumentalized. Immanuel Kant urged us to treat others as ends in themselves, not merely as means.... [O]ur obscurities are precisely what endow us with a sense of value that exceeds our usefulness.... The modernist city promised anonymity, reinvention. The Internet is devoid of such pleasures. It is more like a village: a place where your identity is fixed...."

Writes Ben Tarnoff, in "What Is Privacy For? We often want to keep some information to ourselves. But information itself may be the problem" (The New Yorker).

The article is mostly about the book "The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life," by Lowry Pressly (commission earned).