Description: Constant digital surveillance has inspired a heated but also limited privacy debate. Lowry Pressly looks beyond the narrow discourse of rights and information to extol privacy as a tool for living. Privacy, he argues, not only reinforces our capacities for play, self-discovery, connection, and trust, but also is vital to the search for meaning.
Brief description: Lowry Pressly is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. His writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Point, Political Theory, and Public Books.
Review Quotes: Pressly's book presents a trio of brilliant revelations: seeing privacy as the legal right to control information has serious limitations; technological challenges from photography to the digital age alter the meaning of privacy; and a deep, interior, unknowable self is a vital source of creativity and action in the world. The Right to Oblivion will change how political theorists, philosophers, and psychologists of the self alike understand privacy.--Nancy L. Rosenblum, coauthor of A Lot of People Are Saying: The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy