thetangent.space

Weekly digest 67

theTangentSpace — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 21:14:16 GMT

Happenings

First week back at work after the half-term break. Not a tonne to report here.
Little one has been waking in the night again D:.
Pretty nice weekend — saw my parents for the first time since they took a holiday to Cananda (we have family there). We went to a local town event where there were some animals to pet and also a BMX/trial bike stunt show, which was really fun and didn’t cost us anything.
The next day we took the kids to an open farm event. Lots of animals to see (even though I obviously don’t dig animal agriculture, I do like my children to see these animals up close and develop empathy for them), and lots of cool farm machinery that you could sit in the cabs of.
It almost ended in disaster, however. A young child, probably four or so, sat in the cab of a foresting machine and, well, someone had left the key in the ignition. The child accidentally started the machine off in reverse. His siblings were hanging around the machine. Luckily, no one was crushed, and a farmer was able to catch up to the machine, leap up to the cab, and pull it into neutral before it crashed and harmed its unwitting driver. The farmer had a minor injury from when he reached in, but it could have been much, much worse. The family left immediately after in shock.

Links

Demand for low-tech tractors booming. I’m not connected to farming in any way other than living near a lot of farms, but this story stood out to me as I was looking at all the machinery on the open day. The modern tractor is loaded with computers and, alarmingly, DRM that prevents unlicensed repairs and can brick your tractor. Among the tractors I saw at the weekend were many beautiful older “low tech” machines. I don’t know how many of them were still in service but they were well maintained and clearly running well.
OpenClaw vs. Amish. Road trip + reflections on agentic AI. The vlogger, Chad Whitacre, was a notable figure in the Open Source movement until he got disillusioned with AI and quit altogether. Strangely peaceful video though.
Two videos on the recent “An LLM just solved an old geometry problem” news story. First is two economists hyping it up, then Cal Newport bringing it down a peg. Newport’s sober AI reality checks are actually really good.
ChangeNames.co.uk scam. I have changed my name by deed poll and it is true, there are a lot of shysters out there who will try to sell you dodgy deed poll services. The fact is anyone can make their own deed poll in the UK. No lawyers are needed. This guy is doing good work calling out the scammers and providing free deed poll templates.

Playing

Some small progress with Chrono Trigger.

Code stuff

I’m still making very slow progress on my (as yet unlaunched, unfinished) maths practice site. I started porting the code over from JavaScript to TypeScript. I’m a total TS noob, so it’s not super clear whether this will pay off in the long run; what I do know is keeping track of types mentally was starting to get a bit of a headache even though the project is only small.

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Weekly digest 66

theTangentSpace — Sun, 31 May 2026 22:48:12 GMT

Happenings

It’s been half-term week, and it was a major heatwave here in Britain.
Monday and Tuesday were scorchers. We got the paddling pool out only to find it had gone mouldy, but thankfully someone nearby was selling one, so I drove over to get it. Rest of those days we just watched the kids play in the pool and grilled outside.
It’s been a pretty tough week parenting. Mr Four is really quite deaf now, and on a waiting list to get assessed and treated (hopefully, it is just a case of glue ear, which is treatable). But it impacting heavily on his communication, mood, and behaviour. It’s upsetting to see him like this. We have started teaching him some Makaton signs, which he really enjoys.
Managed to make it to the gym a couple of times this week. Mr One has finally started to settle into better sleep patterns, so my wife and I are both getting into better fitness habits in the evenings, which is great as it means we both get actual me-time (while exercising, and while the other is exercising).
Today was pretty nice. Made progress on a DIY project, took Mr Four out for a ride on his scooter, and baked a trio of pizzas that turned out great.
Spent a while configuring my server.

On this site

I’m hosted on a VPS now.

I also added a page about my Miyoo Flip. The next day the hinge on my Miyoo Flip broke.

Playing

I finally finished Shadow Of The Colossus. Flawed masterpiece? Or just not really a masterpiece. I don’t know. The ending was really good, as everyone always says. The controls and some of the boss designs sucked though.

I also played some Sonic 2 with the wife, and she kicked my ass pretty hard in the vs. mode.

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Switching to VPS

theTangentSpace — Sat, 30 May 2026 22:48:13 GMT

If you’re reading this now, it’s been freshly served to you from my new VPS (virtual private server). Previously, this site was hosted on Cloudflare Pages, a generous free hosting option. You just point Pages at a hosted git repo and it will rebuild your site every time you push an update, up to 500 times per month.^[1] It was super reliable (I wasn’t even affected by the recent outages), and pretty much effortless. So why did I just make life harder for myself?

Greater flexibility. I know you can use Cloudflare Workers to do more fancy server-side stuff, but honestly I think I’d rather just play around on the actual (virtual) server.
Opportunity to learn. I’ve been using the Linux desktop for over ten years now, and I’ve been learning a little about how this web malarkey works for around three years. It’s time to go to the next level by managing my own web server.

As for why I didn’t go “all the way” and host the site from some old hardware at home (I was tempted), there are a few reasons.

Security. I’m a beginner at this and don’t know a whole lot about security, but I suspect inviting the whole internet to interact with a device on my home network presents a non-zero security risk to the other devices on the network.
Energy efficiency. While an argument could be made that hosting at home prevents old hardware going to the landfill and reduces the local impact of data centres, running and cooling an old machine at home is almost certainly less energy efficient than the economy of scale offered by a data centre.
Potential ISP issues. My ISP terms of service state I cannot use the service for anything beyond “ordinary residential use”. Is hosting a small website ordinary residential use? I don’t know, I have no idea what you perverts get up to in your homes. But I’d rather not risk it.

So far, I have taken some basic security measures such as configuring the firewall and disabling root access. Since I don’t handle sensitive data and have a very small audience, the risks are mostly vandalism, or having malicious content added to my site, both of which are unlikely for a site of my size, so I don’t think I need to go crazy. But if you have ideas for other things I should be doing to secure my site, please send them my way (with links to reputable source, please).

Then I cloned my site to the VPS, configured the web server to serve http and was delighted when it worked (after several headaches with the configuration).

Finally, I had to point my domain thetangent.space to the new host, and set up an SSL certificate. That’s the reason for the bit of downtime today while all that stuff propagated.

One thing that shocked me on reading the server logs for the first time was the sheer number of bots already making requests — even before the domain name was pointing toward my server. The requests were weird — strange long urls made by concatenating bits of actual url on my site. Also some that were clearly malicious, requesting files that could reveal security vulnerabilities (if I were careless enough to leave such files lying around in the public folder).^[2] I know this kind of thing is probably not new to anyone who has hosted a site before, but it was all pretty surprising to me. I know I have a small human readership; however, I seem to be serving hundreds of thousands of bots. For this reason, I decided to continue proxying through Cloudflare to hopefully provide an extra layer of defense against the relentless botspam.

Still on my todo list is setting up a webhook so my site automatically rebuilds when I push to my git remote. And after that, I’ll enjoy tinkering and using it to add new features to the site. Maybe I’ll have comments online by Blaugust.

I know not everyone is a fan of Cloudflare ↩︎
Maybe I’ll start leaving rude messages in suspiciously named files. ↩︎

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Weekly digest 65

theTangentSpace — Sun, 24 May 2026 21:39:35 GMT

Happenings

Last week of the half-term. Not a bad week… finally started gathering some stuff for my performance management at the end of the year, so that was a stress off.
Bought a cheap used car to make the wife’s new job possible, and by sheer coincidence the seller we found 40 miles away online was someone we had a prior personal connection with. This made the whole thing much less stressful.
Took the kids to a local “carnival” today. It didn’t seem to be as good or as busy as previous years, but it was something to do.
After a long break, I finally went back to the gym this week. I fell out the habit after periods of family illness and the disrupted sleep of life with a 1-year-old. It was okay, I’m definitely weaker and less fit.
Fiddled with my Miyoo Flip quite a bit. In terms of custom OSes, I started on SpruceOS, which is great, except it doesn’t support HDMI out (a real shame). I then tried Surwish, which had functional HDMI but jankier UI. Now I’ve settled on Knulli, which has a great UI and HDMI, but has some WiFi issues (I think they should be resolvable when I get time to look through some dotfiles).

Playing

A little more progress on Chrono Trigger. I also had an evening playing Streets Of Rage 2 with my wife, using the Miyoo Flip, HDMI out, and two Dualshock 4 controllers. It was fun. I love my retro handheld.

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Weekly digest 64

theTangentSpace — Mon, 18 May 2026 07:09:10 GMT

Happenings

I’ve had that chest infection all this week. I’m on the tail end of it now, but for Monday and Tuesday I had basically no voice, which is not ideal as a teacher, especially as I had an observation lesson from my line manager.
The observation went fine. I generally don’t mind lesson observations.
My wife got a new job. Everything seems really positive, and it gets her out of a less-than-ideal situation at her current job. The big downside is it will only be practical if we get another car, which we’ve resisted for a long time. We live in a rural area with poor transport links. My work is only 10 minutes drive away, but buses are every two hours and the journey can take up to an hour, especially at the end of the day, and I’m not cycling down winding country road while motorists do 60. There’s the expense, the ongoing maintenance, the extra space it will take up, plus all the social and environmental problems caused by cars. But in some parts of the country, it feels like the only way.
Had a nice weekend with the family. On Sunday we had some bananas on the turn so I baked a banana loaf with them. This is the first cake I have baked since childhood. It turned out okay, though my wife mocked me pretty hard for my first attempt at lining a baking pan.

Links

This guy does amazing genre-breaking covers, like this pop-punk/emo version It Wasn’t Me by Shaggy.
A triumph for blogging. Kind of aspirational for me, I guess. I’ve “met” a few cool people from blogging but I think it’s awesome when people are able to forge friendships as close as this without having actually met in person yet.
The Paradox of Mastery: Why the Expert Must Remain a Beginner. Great post from Writing Slowly. I’ve been itching to pick up my bass guitar again recently (it’s currently in the loft, and I’d need to clear some space in the house proper before I can actually justify getting it down). I’d describe myself as an “okay” bass player: an intermediate. I can play some cool songs, I have created some okay bass lines, and I know my scales and arpeggios. But I also have a strong sense that to get beyond the level of an intermediate, I’ll need to adopt the mindset of a beginner.

Playing

I got to the final Colossus in Shadow Of The Colossus and then my PlayStation crashed. Talk about an anti-climax! I’ll finish it next time, I guess. I’ve also been playing through the Sega Master System games from my childhood on my retro handheld. I set up Syncthing on the handheld so now when I take a screenshot it appears on my laptop pretty much instantly, which feels lke magic.

Reading

I aim to finish The Score (and maybe even Republic) this week. Next week I’m taking a break from the technology reading list I’m following to do a buddy read of another classic of ancient Greek philosophy. More on that to follow, no doubt.

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Revisiting the Master System games from my childhood (Part 1)

theTangentSpace — Sun, 17 May 2026 16:10:07 GMT

My introduction to console gaming was at my grandparents’ house. I’m not sure how old I was — maybe 5? But my grandfather, who always loved technology, had a Sega Master System, and one day he was looking after me and introduced me to it. I’d played games on the family’s Acorn computer before, but never a home console. The selection of games he had was a bit random. Most of them don’t seem to be regarded as classics of the system, but I played the heck out of them. I don’t think I ever finished one though! Still, I have many fond memories of playing while my grandfather watched. Now that I have a retro handheld that plays Master System games, I’m revisiting the 10 or so games I used to play all the time to see how they hold up today. I’ll review the games over three posts, starting with…

Air Rescue (1992)

I remember this one being tough as nails when I was a child — my grandfather also thought so. This time around I was able to finish it on my second attempt. My conclusion is either I used to be terrible at the game, or, more likely, the D-pad on our Master System controller absolutely sucked. This side-scrolling action game is about piloting a helicopter, shooting terrorists, and rescuing hostages. Each level has a required number of hostages rescued to progress (6 or 7), and you can carry up to four at a time. This was considered quite a “mature” game by my family and while I was never quite banned from playing it I remember there was a bit of discomfort around little me shooting terrorists.

The helicopter has inertia, which is your biggest enemy by far — most deaths will be caused by being unable to stop in time to avoid an obstacle or enemy. Thus it’s all about finessing the controls and never rushing. The game has only 5 levels, and the final one is a significant difficulty spike, as it is through a cave network with ample opportunity for crashing into the ceiling or walls as you dodge enemy fire. The crazy thing is I don’t think I’d ever even seen this final level until I played it for this post, so difficult was controlling the chopper on the spongy, wobbly D-pad.

The two buttons are used to fire your weapon or lower your rope ladder (which swings pleasingly as you move left and right). You have a choice of 4 weapons/tools that can be changed from the helipad, but only 2 of them are worth using — a horizontal machine gun and a kind of forward-down launching bomb.

Overall, the game looks decent, with a cool title sequence and the helicopter nice and detailed with its swinging rope ladder. Level 2 stands out for it’s verticality (a skyscraper rescue), and level 5 for its difficult cave manoeuvres. The first level is a fine introduction. The remaining two are just filler really, which is a shame when the game is already so short.

Asterix (1991)

This one is closed to my heart as I spent a lot of time with it as a child. I’m pretty sure it was my first exposure to Asterix, and I ended up getting really into the comics and animated films. Even had several of the large plush toys they made of the characters, some of which were gifts from my grandfather.

The objective of this game is to rescue the druid Getafix (one of my big plush toys) from the Romans.

I remember this game being long and difficult. Well, the game gives you unlimited Continues, but without the capability for saving progress I was never allowed to play for long enough in one sitting to actually see it through to the end. The game has 20 levels, though they’re relatively short, and you can choose to play as Asterix or Obelix in each one. Asterix is smaller and more nimble, able to fit through some gaps that Obelix can’t. Obelix can break blocks with his fist, head (like Mario) and with his butt-stomp attack. Each level has an Asterix version and an Obelix version, tweaked to suit the abilities of each character, which is quite nice because you can switch to the alternate character and level if you’re getting stuck.

Like many games of its time, the levels are a grab bag of platformer tropes — moving platforms, lava, ice, quicksand, autoscrolling, underwater, avoiding stuff falling from the sky — which vary highly in level of frustration caused. Some levels are fun. The autoscrolling and underwater levels are the worst. One of the underwater ones has you avoiding obstacles while being periodically plunged into total darkness, and also has the most “screw you” mechanic ever — sometimes swimming off the bottom of the screen transitions to a new screen, sometimes it instantly kills you. These two possibilities exist side-by-side, are indistinguishable,^[1] and finding the non-fatal transitions is necessary to progress. The early levels also have bosses, but this is for some reason abandoned by the halfway point.

Liking the characters and IP goes a long way as a kid, even though most of the action has little connection with the source material. The most obvious thing missing is the magic potion — the source of Asterix’s strength.^[2] You could explain the absence in the game as “Asterix has no magic potion because Getafix has been abducted by the Romans”, but it’s not that you don’t find potions in the game — you find plenty, but they’re used for throwing to have various effects on the environment (such as exploding blocks, creating platforms, and so on). It would feel so much more like an Asterix game if you could find a magic potion that gives temporary superpowers like the star in Mario.

The sprites look decent enough, and the music ranges from catchy to irritating (the cheerful ones are nice, all the ones that try to sound perilous just sound shrill). The music for Obelix’s opening level works nicely for his bumbling, oafish character. Overall there are some fun bits but I’m glad I could put it down and save it when it got tedious. I sure wouldn’t enjoy having to play this whole game in one sitting.

Sonic The Hedgehog (1991)

Virtually forgotten in the shadow of its Mega Drive version,^[3] the Master System version of Sonic The Hedgehog deserves a little respect, if not love. Some real care went into bringing the Sonic experience to an 8-bit console. My grandfather never really cared for Sonic, preferring his predecessor as Sega’s mascot, Alex Kidd.

After the very slow and rigid platforming of Asterix, the speedy and smooth movement of Sonic was hugely refreshing.

On first booting this game, I was struck by two technical points. Firstly, being from a PAL region I had only ever played the game at 50Hz. On my retro handheld the game runs at 60Hz (as it would have done in North America), 20% faster than I was used to! So while Sonic on Master System would never be as fast as Mega Drive, it still felt pretty quick and not as painfully slow as I remember. The other thing I noticed was a lot of stutters and lag. At first I thought it was my device, and started trying to tweak settings to fix it. Turns out that no, the original also had a lot of stuttering and lag, but my little 7 year old brain was able to easily tune that out.

Anyway, what can I say? It’s Sonic, we all know the deal. Apart from being overall simpler and slower, the most noticeable missing gameplay feature in the 8-bit version is that Sonic can’t recover his rings after getting hit — the system just wouldn’t be able to handle animating all those rings. We get simplified versions of some levels, as well as some levels that are unique to the 8-bit version. The special zone is also noticeably simpler, basically a big course lined with springs and pinball bumpers to bounce through collecting rings, rather than the Mega Drive’s rotating level.

I have to admit, even though this game had a reputation for being short and easy compared to the Mega Drive version, I sure don’t find it easy, so I used a cheat code for unlimited lives in order to actually see the later levels I never reached as a kid (I never got beyond Labyrinth (zone 4), and usually got stuck on Jungle). The level design definitely still holds up today, with lots of quite precise platforming sections to make up for the lack of speed, size, and complexity forced by the low-powered Master System, and there are a couple of levels that are more maze-like and puzzly.

Anyway…

See you next time for some more 8-bit fun.

Possibly there is a way to tell, but it would be based only on recognising exactly how close you have to be to the edge of the screen to trigger a transition vs. dying. ↩︎
In the comics, Obelix is strong because he ingested enough potion as a baby to be permanently jacked, but Asterix gains superhuman strength in bursts by sipping from his supply of Getafix’s magic potion. ↩︎
Especially in North America, where it released right before they stopped selling Master Systems. ↩︎

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Weekly digest 63

theTangentSpace — Sun, 10 May 2026 21:52:26 GMT

Happenings

Looks like I’m going to be running an extra-curricular “advanced” maths club next year at school for some of my top students, something I did last year and really enjoyed. So I’ve started to prepare some notes and resources for that, this time experimenting with typst, an alternative to LaTeX. So far I’m really enjoying using it; the basic markup is quite markdown-like, and I love how much simpler a lot of the math symbols are to type (for example, you type a fraction with a/b and not \frac{a}{b}!^[1] And \mathbb{R} is just RR!). The package ecosystem seems like it has everything I’ll need.
Got some kind of chest infection, making me quite fatigued and waking up very chesty.
Pleasant weekend, spent time with friends and family.

Links

Not today I’m afraid, not browsed much except for reading about typst.

Playing

Plodding through Chrono Trigger and Shadow Of The Colossus. I want to like SotC more than I do. It’s beautiful, it’s bold in its design, the Colossi are stunning… but it’s frustrating. I don’t mind the long treks to find the Colossi (it’s usually enjoyable, only had one instance of being unable to find the way), but the actual encounters with the Colossi are sometimes very annoying. The controls can be frustrating, the swimming is tedious in the water-based encounters, and sometimes it’s just really not clear what you’re meant to be doing, or it looks like you’re meant to proceed in one way but it’s a dead end. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of the encounters have been epic and had the intended effect, but just a few have been a pain in the butt and put a bit of a downer on the whole thing.

Reading

Same as before, bit of The Score here, bit Republic there.

“But what about my quotient objects!?” cries the algebraic topologist. Chill out, it’s just G slash H, which okay it’s a few more keystrokes, but it’s very cognitively easy to type, and doesn’t require any use of the shift key. ↩︎

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Cal Newport's anti-brain rot rules

theTangentSpace — Mon, 04 May 2026 12:29:12 GMT

YouTube recommended me a segment from Cal Newport’s podcast lately with five rules for combating brain rot.^[1] Here’s a quick summary with some comments, minus Newport’s overly nerdy procedures for doing these things.

Read long-form writing every day. Not on a screen (except e-readers). Fiction or non-fiction; ideally a mix. Start small if necessary, but aim for integrating “hard” books into your rotation at least semi-regularly.
Write more, and don’t delegate writing to AI. As the cliche goes, “writing is thinking”. Even small writing tasks — such as an email — will help to prevent that skill from atrophying.
Go for “thinking walks”. I think any walk without your phone (or with your phone tucked away in a bag) is fine; it doesn’t have to be a “thinking walk”. You’ll do that naturally anyway. And if not, it’s probably quite a meditative walk and good for you anyway.
Leave your phone plugged in. Have a place in the home where you phone lives, so you have to get up and walk to it if you need to use it. It’s not that the phone is inaccessible or unusable. It’s about breaking the “always on/always on you” cycle that leads to twitchy phone anxiety or mindless media consumption.
Get a skill or hobby that requires focus and discipline. Could be a sport, a craft, an instrument, etc. As well as retraining focus, it also gives you something fun to do that’s not looking at your phone.

I like these rules because they’re simple, obvious, and accessible. Other than “read every day”, there’s no demand to follow a particular daily routine. There’s no rule for quitting certain apps or devices. You don’t have to buy a dumb phone.

I’m pretty good at 1 and 2. I could do 3 more often; too often I have a podcast or something while walking. 4 is the big one I’d like to make a habit. On days where I do this, my phone time is right down.^[2] But even on days that start well, it only takes one slip up to end up with business-as-usual, such as pocketing the phone to leave the house or using it as a music player and then not replacing it.

These five simple rules are better than a lot of Newport’s previous offerings on this topic, which were typically too full of systems and rules that just weren’t practical for a lot of people. I’m going to see how far these get me to stop stroking my phone so much, not least because I want to set a good example to my children.

Behold how subtly I am keen to let you know I am not the kind of nerd who regularly listens to Cal Newport’s podcast. ↩︎
I don’t say “screen time” here because I don’t think screen time is the problem per se. When I’m on my computer I’m usually doing something intentional. I’m also pretty intentional with my gaming. It’s the phone which leads to unintentional behaviours and “brain rot”. ↩︎

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Weekly digest 62

theTangentSpace — Sun, 03 May 2026 22:54:15 GMT

Happenings

Doesn’t feel like much has happened this week. Took the kids for a walk in the woods yesterday, a bit of cooking today. A new pizza place opened in my small town doing proper neapolitan-style pizza, and they do have some vegan offerings (a minor miracle). We tried it on Friday, it was excellent.

On this site

The Sun and the Air had an idea for inlining footnotes, and I liked it so much I added it to this site (I also emailed him a version that works on Bearblog). It’s a script that moves footnotes up to their references in the main body of the text. If you’re reading a post without JavaScript e.g. in RSS reader, it’ll remain as a regular footnote. You can try it here.^[1] If you’d like this on your site too, the script is right there in the page source. You’ll just have to tweak it to how your site formats footnotes.

Having never properly examined the page source of my actual site on the web (as opposed to locally), I never noticed Cloudflare (which hosts my site currently) is inserting a script into my pages. Supposedly, all it does is obfuscate my email address from bots (though since it’s minified JavaScript it’s hard to tell). I could turn this feature off, as I don’t really like the idea of Cloudflare adding stuff to my pages (and I do take some measures to obfuscate email anyway using just HTML+CSS), but at the same time, I don’t get any spam to thetangent.space, so perhaps I’ll just leave it there.

Playing

Not a lot, a small amount of progress in Chrono Trigger.

Reading

I finished The Right To Oblivion and started the next book in Jared Henderson’s technology reading list, The Score by C. Thi Nguyen. This is so far a much easier read, and very interesting, analysing how and why scoring systems tend to create good incentives in games, but perverse incentives in real life. It was such a chill and breezy read that I found time to pick up The Republic again, which I started last year but never quite got around to finishing.

Boo! ↩︎

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[book] What is privacy and why is it good?

theTangentSpace — Sat, 02 May 2026 22:11:00 GMT

The modern world is awash with privacy discourse. We’re constantly informed that “We (and the 967 partners we intend to share your activities with) respect your privacy”. Bringing new gadgets into the home often raises concerns concerns about data collection. And we have periodic debates about corporate surveillance and government policies that are supposed to protect chidren. However, rarely do we discuss what exactly we mean by privacy and why it is a good thing. This month I’ve been reading The Right To Oblivion by philosopher Lowry Pressly, which attempts to do just this.

Part of the problem is that privacy seems to have different meanings to different people. For some online privacy enthusiasts, privacy seems to mean total anonymity. For Facebook, privacy means controlling who gets to see what on your profile, while many privacy advocates would say being on Facebook at all is a threat to privacy. For others, advocating for privacy raises suspicion — that valuing privacy must mean one has something to hide. Advocates usually counter this by pointing to people who have legitimate things to hide, such as marginalised people (e.g. a gay child of homophobic parents), people living under oppressive governments, and investigative journalists.

What these views all have in common is that privacy is about restricting and controlling who has access to certain information about you. Pressly wants to challenge this conception of privacy, not least because on the “information control” model privacy really does have more value if you have things to hide. However, Pressly’s purpose is to defend the view that privacy is a valuable good for all well-lived lives and decent societies.

The book thus begins with a conceptual analysis of privacy. In philosophy, conceptual analysis is drilling down into exactly what we mean by a concept and distinguishing it from similar concepts. It can be rather dry and academic, but in this case we have the motivation of some real moral distinctions. For example, privacy vs. secrecy: it really does matter to me whether reading my wife’s text messages is off-limits because to read them would disrespect her privacy, or because she’s hiding secrets from me.

Pressly problematises the concept and ethics of privacy with a thought experiment he calls Voyeur. Imagine a hotel manager spies on his guest (this is based on the real life case of Gerald Foos). He does not witness anything incriminating, embarrassing, or secret. The guest just reads for a bit then goes to sleep. The manager doesn’t tell anyone or act on what he has learned in any way — perhaps he even forgets about it. Either way, the guest never finds out and experiences no consequences as a result of this event. The question, then, is why is this bad? We all feel some kind of wrong has been done here, but no one has been harmed in an obvious way. So what’s the issue?

Pressly’s solution is layered like an onion. For him, rather than protecting us from the consequences of specific information getting out or being used to harm us, privacy protects a state he calls oblivion, while oblivion itself protects several other values that are essential for a good life and a good society. Oblivion is not about witholding certain personal information. Rather, it is a state in which that personal information effectively doesn’t exist; there is only ambiguity. What goes on in the houses across the street, for example. My neighbours don’t go to any particular lengths to conceal what they are doing, and I don’t try to find out what they’re doing. As far as I’m concerned, there is nothing to learn here. Or perhaps as another example, when someone goes to use the loo, we generally do not try to find out what they are doing, or even allow the event to pass through our imagination. It is rather as if they have simply disappeared for a few minutes. No information about what they are doing — even false information — is created.

To use the bathroom example again (not one of Pressly’s, but it helped me to get my head around the idea). If I (for some strange reason) attempted to find out what they were up to, or even tried to imagine it, we would feel like this were a privacy violation, even if I didn’t succeed in gaining any information. This is also why being asked a personal question feels like a privacy violation, even if we don’t answer it, or give a false answer. The very act of acting like there is information to be learned here violates the state of oblivion.

Now to why Pressly thinks oblivion is a good thing that we all ought to have in our lives. He gives other benefits, but these are the ones that stand out to me:

It is a break from being biographed

Beyond the basic biological facts someone might know about us, our identities are constituted of biographical facts and judgements. When we have oblivion, we are free from our actions generating new biographical facts and judgements. I can, for example, put on some scruffy clothes, without “Sam is the kind of guy who wears scruffy clothes” becoming part of my biography in the minds of people (both acquintances and strangers) who see me.^[1]

When in public, we have to confront our existing biographical dimension and decide whether our actions today will affirm or deny that biography. Will I live up to the expectations of other people based on the judgements they have formed about me, or defy them? Either way, this is a burden we sometimes need respite from, which oblivion provides.

It is against fixity and for potentiality

Relatedly, Pressly is very keen on the idea of opposing “fixity” and embracing potentiality. When in public, our biographical dimension binds us in some sense — our public expects us to be a certain way. Oblivion give us space to change, space to try new things, space to be ourselves — or someone completely different.

This is also why Pressly is a strong advocate of the so-called “right to be forgotten”. This is the right to have old information about us removed from the web, for example, old social media posts and profiles. If others — especially new acquaintances — can easily search and make judgements about who we were many years ago, we lose the potential to define how we present who we are now to others. This the right to oblivion, projected into the past.

It builds social trust

Without privacy and oblivion, everything about us can be known, and hence we have no reason to trust one another. In a society with a healthy respect for privacy and oblivion, we are forced to trust the good character of people even when they are unknowable to us.

It creates depth

If everything about a person is known or knowable, then they have no hidden depth. A society without a healthy amount of oblivion available is one of flat persons and characters.

We experience this about our inner lives too — we don’t and can’t know everything about ourselves, and hence we are capable of learning more about and surprising ourselves.

Objections

I agree with Pressly that privacy is a good for all, and that oblivion is a good for all. However, I’m not entirely sure that the protection of oblivion completely captures the concept of privacy, or at least that the concept of oblivion needs some development to bring it up to that level. My objections are closely related, so forgive me if it seems that I repeat myself a little.

Firstly, oblivion as Pressly describes it seems to be an essentially binary state. The way we use the word privacy in everyday speech, however, seems to permit there to be degrees of privacy. And if the good of privacy is to protect oblivion (which I seem to either have or not), then what good is having partial privacy? I am thinking in particular about, say, when I am with only my wife at home. Clearly I don’t have as much privacy as when I completely alone, but it seems wrong to say that I don’t have privacy. However, by the way Pressly decribes it, I don’t seem to have the state of oblivion, since my wife is aware of me and expanding her biographical view of me. So what good is my partial privacy doing here?

This partial privacy thing goes further. I have some things which are private to some groups of people but not others. For example, my personal social life is mostly private to my work colleagues, but obviously and necessarily not private to my personal social circle. This blog, even, is not private to my readers (obviously), but I generally don’t share that it exists with my real-life acquaintances. In these cases, it feels like the way I use the term privacy has more to do with the “information control” model Pressly critiques rather than the “oblivion” model he advocates.

Possible responses to these objections I can see are that Pressly may simply say in some of these cases I’m making a conceptual error. My blog isn’t private from my work colleagues — rather, it’s a secret. Maybe, but that does seem to capture the relation of my social life to my work colleagues. My social life isn’t really secret; it’s just not shared. Perhaps a more promising response is to reframe oblivion not as a general state but as a relation between individuals and/or groups. My wife and I don’t have oblivion about each other when we’re alone together, but the rest of the world is oblivious to us. This has potential, but it does seem to have more in common with the “information control” model than perhaps Pressly would like, since now privacy becomes not about saying “yes” or “no” to certain bits of info being shared about us with different people, but “yes” or “no” about whether people will be oblivious about us in different contexts.

Anyway, this post is getting long enough. It’s a good book, plenty to think about and sharpen one’s ideas about what privacy is and what it’s good for. As Pressly mentions at several points, there is a significant philosophical literature on privacy, so it wouldn’t be wise to base all one’s ideas of privacy on this one book. But this is as good a place to start as any, and I did find real value in the concept of oblivion even if I’m not convinced it provides an exhaustive account of what privacy does for us.

I totally am though. ↩︎

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