We live in the age of total storage. Every photo, every message, every thoughtless remark in a forum can still be found years later with a few clicks. What has once been recorded digitally seems forever withdrawn from forgetting. One may at first regard this as a gain, and in some respects it is one: no letter gets lost any more, no birthday is overlooked, no politician's statement is forgotten. Anyone who does not want to rely on their notoriously unreliable memory simply outsources it.
Yet precisely therein lies an underestimated danger. For the machine to which we entrust our past knows no difference between the significant and the incidental, between what defines us and what merely slipped out once. It preserves everything with the same indifferent fidelity. Human beings, by contrast, have over millennia adapted to a memory that selects, condenses and lets things fade.
Forgetting has long been regarded as a flaw, as the failure of an organ that ought really to retain everything. Forgetting, however, is not a mere weakness of memory but rather one of its most important achievements. It allows us to set aside what is unimportant, to let slights fade and wounds scar over. Someone who could forget nothing would not be wiser but paralysed: every decision would have to hold its own against the memory of all one's earlier mistakes. Forgiveness, too, presupposes a certain amount of forgetting – not as denial of what happened, but as a renunciation of holding it against the other person again and again.
What holds for the individual holds all the more for societies. A society that no longer forgets anything threatens to suffocate under the burden of its own past. Someone who as a teenager posted a foolish comment online that resurfaces fifteen years later with every job application is pinned down to a person he has long ceased to be. The promise of modernity – that one can change, start afresh, get a second chance – thus imperceptibly loses its foundation.
None of this is a plea for repression. There are things a society must not forget, and remembering the injustice it has committed is among its noblest duties. But remembering is something other than storing: it selects, weighs and interprets. A culture of remembrance therefore needs forgetting as its counterpart, just as music needs the rest.
Against this background the much-discussed "right to be forgotten" also appears in a different light. It is not, as some critics believe, an instrument for censoring history, but rather the belated attempt to translate a profoundly human ability into the world of databases. Perhaps the right to be forgotten is, in the end, a right to a future.
