We Built the Permanent Record

M aybe if you were raised in the 1980s, you were occasionally threatened with the “permanent record.” A fight with a classmate might be put on your permanent record, and you dimly imagined that you would have to answer for this action for the rest of your life.

I remember the freedom I felt as it dawned on me that my permanent record did not exist. Not even during that particularly naughty time in fifth grade when I stopped doing my English homework for Mrs. Dunmore. I don’t know why, but for six months I just became a real brat about that. Colleges didn’t care about my elementary school grades anyway. In some dim way, there were “marketers” who cared what music I listened to. But they could not see the mixtapes I made. They couldn’t even really tell it was me buying any particular record, or how many times I listened to it at home. I eventually inherited my mother’s beat-up 1992 Saturn sedan, and although I had many memorable drives in it — times of exultation or moods of depression that I’ll remember for a lifetime — there is no record of these drives ever happening, beyond what exists in the infinite mind of God.

Increasingly, though, everything really is being put on the permanent record. There are ways to avoid some of it, but they are onerous and would mark you out as paranoid. I stream music, and so most of what I listen to is a matter of record. And it’s not just a record that exists for me, but it exists for Spotify, or any partner corporations. Soon, cars themselves will be equipped to know whether you are driving in a time of exultation or depression: They will have mandated sensors, reading your face constantly for signs of recklessness, for sleep-apnea-induced jitters. My phone is recording almost everywhere I go, how many steps I took to get there, and how many miles I drove.

My wife bought me an Oura ring because I’m taking steps to improve my sleep and general health. I’m genuinely anxious to use the data available to me through this intimate form of self-surveillance. Information is power. But it’s also a kind of leverage. Now, my sleep is part of a complex permanent record kept with my phone and with this other company. If I were in an accident someday, presumably it could be subpoenaed and presented in court. I know the data is sometimes inaccurate: I went to bed at 11 and nodded off lightly, but for some reason, it didn’t record my sleeping at all until 2 a.m. What do you expect? Even though he only walked 6,800 steps in that day, he was scrolling social media until late, and failed to sleep. It’s all part of my permanent record.

Your insurance companies will probably want to look at all this data. You may want them to do so because you are looking for better rates. What kind of food do you eat? What kind of food do you order from the grocer? What a good boy your permanent record says you are!

For some people, I think the fact that our digital devices make us shed more data than a sheepdog does hair will be comforting. They have nothing to hide. They are with the current thing, and the current thing is nice.

But, I’m not afraid to say, I do have things to hide. Or, at least, things I don’t want to broadcast. I have an interior life. Occasionally that interior life is stormy. I have renegade thoughts that cut against social orthodoxies. I have renegade thoughts against my own personal orthodoxies. Evidence for these thoughts is surely noticeable, if not entirely legible, in micro-expressions, ones that my phone and my car, and maybe even my insurance company, will soon keep on my permanent record.

Nobody decided that we would live like this. We all chose it because it was convenient, because it promised a handful of benefits, because we are curious about ourselves and so invite in this kind of hypervigilant CCTV into our lives.

So much that used to belong to my private life is now a shared record of my interactions with every corporation and server and Wi-Fi signal. This permanent record is a meaningful source of profit generation for corporations, and one day, perhaps, social control by governments or worse, by a public that can access this through data dumps.

I’m mourning a way of life that we’ve already lost: The one where all the miles my Saturn SL-2 put on Interstate 84 — when I was dreaming of being a professional writer, or courting my wife, or just reporting to my summer job at the mall — were only meaningful to me as my memories.