Seeking the Good and the Real in an Algorithmic Age
Please join us on February 20 for a conversation with the authors of two provocative new books about the nature of digital technology — its effect on our ability to find meaning in our world, and to make meaning in our lives.Â
Antón Barba-Kay is a Distinguished Fellow at the Center on Privacy & Technology at Georgetown Law and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Practical Ethics at UC San Diego. His book, A Web of Our Own Making: The Nature of Digital Formation, examines how online practices are reshaping our lives outside our notice. Barba-Kay argues that digital technology is a ‘natural technology’ — a technology so intuitive as to conceal the extent to which it transforms our attention. He shows how and why this technology is reconfiguring knowledge, culture, politics, aesthetics, and theology. The digital revolution is primarily taking place not in Silicon Valley but within each of us.
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 book, The Right to Oblivion: Privacy and the Good Life, argues that current debates about why privacy matters, focused on how personal data breaches violate individual freedom, have undermined our understanding of privacy’s real value. Privacy matters because it deepens our relationships with others as well as ourselves, reinforcing our capacities for agency, trust, play, self-discovery, and growth. Pressly argues that 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.
This event is co-hosted by the Privacy Center and the Department of Philosophy. Light refreshments will be served.
Accommodation requests related to a disability should be sent to privacy@georgetown.edu. A good-faith effort will be made to fulfill all requests made.