The Right to Obilivion

By Lowry Pressly

The book builds its argument through a small set of very carefully chosen examples. Each chapter takes one everyday-sounding situation and uses it to quietly break a common assumption about privacy.

Chapter 1: Photography and the invention of privacy

The book opens with a modest case. An actress is photographed in 1870s while performing in a play. She doesn’t sue for money. She doesn’t claim reputational harm. She simply wants the photographs to disappear and her privacy restored.

Until photography, the language of harm was mostly about intrusion or theft. Someone broke in. Someone took something. Someone caused damage. But photography doesn’t take anything away. It copies. It freezes a moment and allows it to travel.

This is where privacy, as a modern idea, really begins. The harm isn’t injury or loss. It’s the loss of control over how one appears in the world. Once technology makes moments permanent, society suddenly needs a way to make them disappear again.

Chapter 2: Privacy is more than damages

The second chapter sharpens the point. A hotelier secretly takes photographs of a guest. He never shows them to anyone. No one else ever knows. From a traditional legal standpoint, he can claim there’s no harm — no reputation damage, no economic loss, no consequences at all.

And yet something has clearly gone wrong.

Pressly's point here is that privacy doesn’t depend on outcomes. The violation happens the moment someone loses agency over how they are seen. Even if nothing bad follows, the person has been turned from a self-directing individual into an object of observation.

This chapter breaks the idea that privacy is only about measurable damages. It’s about dignity and agency, not accounting.

Chapter 3: “Nothing to hide” misses the point

In the third chapter, Pressly takes on the familiar argument: If you have nothing to hide, you don’t need privacy.

The counterexample is almost banal. Everyone knows you go to the bathroom. That fact isn’t secret. There’s nothing shameful about it. And yet it is very clearly private.

Why? Because privacy isn’t about hiding information. It’s about controlling situations of exposure. Some things are meant to happen without being watched, recorded, or evaluated. Not because they’re wrong, but because constant visibility turns living into performance.

This chapter reframes privacy as something that makes ordinary human life possible - not a cover for wrongdoing, but a condition for dignity.

Chapter 4: From privacy to oblivion

The fourth chapter makes the book’s most important move. Imagine a couple kissing in a public park. Taking their photo isn’t necessarily a violation of privacy — they’re in public, visible to anyone nearby.

But it is a violation of something else.

What’s being violated is the expectation that the moment will pass. That it won’t be stored, indexed, resurfaced, and attached to them forever. The harm isn’t being seen. It’s being remembered.

This is where Pressly introduces oblivion as distinct from privacy. Privacy is about who gets to see you. Oblivion is about whether ordinary moments are allowed to fade. In a world of permanent digital memory, even public life needs forgetting.

The through-line

What makes these examples powerful is how systematically they remove our usual excuses for dismissing privacy concerns. It’s not about theft. Not about disclosure. Not about shame. Not about secrecy. And not even always about privacy in the traditional sense.

What’s left is a simple but unsettling idea: human freedom depends on forgetting. Not erasing history, but letting most moments remain unimportant. When everything is recorded, people lose the space to change, grow, and simply be ordinary.

The book is dry in places, but the examples are compelling.