The Right to Privacy: Lowry Pressly in Conversation with Alexander Nemerov

Join the Silicon Valley Archives in welcoming Lowry Pressly for a conversation with Alexander Nemerov. The two will discuss Pressly's newly published book, The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life, on April 1, 2025. This event is co-sponsored by the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society.  A copy can be purchased here. 

The parts of our lives that are not being surveilled and turned into data diminish each day. We are able to configure privacy settings on our devices and social media platforms, but we know our efforts pale in comparison to the scale of surveillance capitalism and algorithmic manipulation. In our hyperconnected era, many have begun to wonder whether it is still possible to live a private life, or whether it is no longer worth fighting for.

The Right to Oblivion argues incisively and persuasively that we still can and should strive for privacy, though for different reasons than we might think. Recent years have seen heated debate in the realm of law and technology about why privacy matters, often focusing on how personal data breaches amount to violations of individual freedom. Yet as Lowry Pressly shows, the very terms of this debate have undermined our understanding of privacy’s real value. In a novel philosophical account, Pressly insists that privacy isn’t simply a right to be protected but a tool for making life meaningful.

Privacy deepens our relationships with others as well as ourselves, reinforcing our capacities for agency, trust, play, self-discovery, and growth. Without privacy, the world would grow shallow, lonely, and inhospitable. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Hannah Arendt, Jorge Luis Borges, and a range of contemporary artists, Pressly shows why we all need a refuge from the world: not a place to hide, but a psychic space beyond the confines of a digital world in which the individual is treated as mere data.

Lowry Pressly is a lecturer in the Department of Political Science, the McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, and the Stanford Civics Initiative. His philosophical work, criticism, fiction, and translations appear in a wide variety of publications, both academic and popular, including most recently Ethics, Asymptote, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

Alexander Nemerov is the author of many books on American art, most recently The Forest: A Fable of America in the 1830s, praised by the novelist Annie Proulx as “one of the richest books ever to come my way—deeply beautiful, achingly painful and astonishingly tender”; and Fierce Poise: Helen Frankenthaler and 1950s New York, named by Vogue one of its best books of 2021 and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography. Nemerov is the Carl and Marilynn Thoma Provostial Professor in the Arts and Humanities.