In 1971, the artist and poet Bernadette Mayer shot a roll of film each day during the month of July. Alongside the photographs, she kept a journal and recorded herself reading it. “I thought,” she wrote many years later, “that if there were a computer or device that could record everything you think or see, even for a single day, that would make an interesting piece of language/information.”

Mayer’s project—like other meticulous attempts at self-documentation—seems quaint in the year 2025, when there are, in fact, on most of our persons, devices that record so much of what we think and see and do, creating indexes of personal information whether or not we are aware of it, and whether or not we wish them to be doing so. (We also self-consciously and knowingly participate in this recordkeeping; it’s funny to read that among the 1,153 photos Mayer took, only 27 were self-portraits.) The contemporary understanding of privacy—the one that has compelled me to use Signal, to quit Instagram, to browse in incognito mode, and toggle the little switches at the bottom of websites to reject cookies—focuses on the control of such information. I spend a lot of time thinking about who I want to know about me and exactly what they should know.

But Mayer’s 1971 work underlines that such information has to be created in the first place, and she noted how much was not captured in her experiment: “emotions, sex, thoughts, the relationship between poetry and light, storytelling, walking, and voyaging to name a few.” A poet’s list, to be sure, but it helped me understand the argument of Lowry Pressly’s The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life. Pressly’s aim is to recapture a more expansive, even romantic ideal of privacy—one that is not about controlling our data and avoiding surveillance, but about the importance of everything Mayer could not record and the fact of its not being recorded; of the unknown and the unknowable.

Pressly’s book is less about privacy and more about what it protects, a condition he calls “oblivion.” A good deal of the book is devoted to justifying the choice of this word, although it is used to express a fairly straightforward concept: Privacy actually concerns limits to the knowable. For Pressly, oblivion is “a particular form of not knowing,” a circumstance in which “there is no information, no fact of the matter, one way or the other.” The book, then, is an intricate case for a quite simple and appealing intervention: Sometimes we want others—and even ourselves—not to need to know anything at all. It is Pressly’s contention, and a convincing one, that this particular unknowing “is essential for the sense of potentiality, depth, play, and freedom in human affairs.”

Pressly, who teaches political science at Stanford, is concerned by what he sees as the rampant misuse of the term privacy, its “elision…with other forms of concealment or opacity—secrecy, anonymity, confidence, hiding.” The most pernicious of these misconceptions, he argues, is the idea that private information is a kind of property, as the legal theorist Bernard Harcourt has written, and that privacy is about who controls it—users like you and me, or the companies and institutions that facilitate its gathering. This concept of privacy as contested property is so prevalent that Pressly finds it in no less an authority than the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It is behind the notion—common in discussions of government surveillance—that privacy is irrelevant for those with “nothing to hide.” It is reflected in the way we talk about “exchanging” our data or privacy “trade-offs” when using fitness apps or social media.

“Surely we are correct to think that we have, or ought to have, moral and legal rights to exercise control over such information and to protect us from the harms that can ensue when it falls in the wrong hands,” Pressly writes. But to treat that as the end of the debate is to accept the terms set by the state and capital. Rather, he maintains, “privacy is valuable not because it empowers us to exercise control over our information, but because it protects against the creation of such information.” We now assume that Mayer’s experiment in data-gathering has been perfected, that all of human life has become information hoovered up by our own devices. Pressly argues that this assumption is incorrect—and that to the extent that it is true, such a state of affairs must be resisted in order for our debates about privacy to have any meaning at all.

Pressly is hardly the first person to point out the paucity of our current conceptions of privacy. He cites Harcourt and others and notes that the postcolonial philosopher Édouard Glissant called for “opacity for everyone.” I’m reminded, too, of the arguments by Teju Cole and others against circulating raw images of suffering, of drowned migrants or videos of police killings—as Cole puts it, surely “among the human rights is the right to remain obscure, unseen, and dark.” But for Pressly, while it is correct to be concerned with the unequal distribution of privacy, that still doesn’t explain what privacy is for.

Unexpec