Finally, I must thank my parents, who made many sacrifices so that I could get an education and write books. And Regina, without whom I would not bother to write them.

Love, she thought, sought to create union out of plurality, which made it inimical to the valuable pluralism of the public sphere but also dangerous and fickle as a principle of politics which, often as not, resulted in the world alienation she sought to correct (for example, Christian love and the fascist idea of the ethno-nationalist family).

Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 191. Gilles Deleuze’s concerns about “the control” society, and Bernard Harcourt’s arguments about “the expository society,” as attempts to explain the forms that knowledge-power took after the end of the disciplinary society, also fit into this category.

Bernard E. Harcourt, Exposed: Desire and Disobedience in the Digital Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015),

Bert-Jaap Koops, “Forgetting Footprints, Shunning Shadows: A Critical Analysis of the Right to Be Forgotten in Big Data Practice,” SCRIPTed: A Journal of Law, Technology and Society 8 (2011): 2.

The connection of branding to the phenomenology of being shackled to one’s past is sometimes hinted at, especially by reference to one’s past as a “scarlet letter.” For instance, Rosen writes: “The permanent memory bank of the Web increasingly means there are no second chances—no opportunities to escape a scarlet letter in your digital past”

Our memories are not fixed like a photograph but, as experience and science confirms, are a constant shifting process of rewriting, revision, introjection, and error. Although we sometimes lament losses or inaccuracies of memory, Borges’s fable and the right to be forgotten reveal that our relationship to ourselves as creatures capable of change,

This coincides with one hypothesis about why sex-offender registries don’t seem to decrease recidivism by previously convicted offenders: If offenders lose confidence that they could ever form new relations that are not preconditioned by accurate knowledge of their crimes, or that it is worth the trouble to change if they’ll always be known as a

Reiman’s view that “privacy is a social ritual by means of which an individual’s moral title to his existence is conferred”