Delete Quotes

“Do we really want to live in a society of servility and fearfulness? Second, forgetting performs an important function in human decision-making. It permits us to generalize and abstract from individual experiences. It enables us to accept that humans, like all life, change over time. It thus anchors us to the present, rather than keeping us tethered permanently to an ever more irrelevant past. Plus, forgetting empowers societies to be forgiving to its members, and to remain open to change. Digital remembering undermines the important role forgetting performs, and thus threatens us individually and as a society in our capacity to learn, to reason, and to act in time. It also exposes us to potentially devastating human over-reaction—a complete disregard of our past.”
― Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

“For millennia, the relationship between remembering and forgetting remained clear. Remembering was hard and costly, and humans had to choose deliberately what to remember. The default was to forget. In the digital age, in what is perhaps the most fundamental change for humans since our humble beginnings, that balance of remembering and forgetting has become inverted. Committing information to digital memory has become the default, and forgetting the exception.”
― Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age

“As humans we do not travel ignorantly through time. With our capacity to remember, we are able to compare, to learn, and to experience time as change. Equally important is our ability to forget, to unburden ourselves from the shackles of our past, and to live in the present.”
― Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age