Brad Barrish

In life, erasure is a sort of luxury. In death, some platforms, like Meta or Apple, allow users to appoint a “Legacy Contact” to manage their accounts. Without that however, the law tends to prioritize the “privacy” of the deceased, making it difficult to remove anything from these accounts posthumously.

The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralise the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality. Somehow we would now be

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