Books about electronic phenomena always risk becoming dated in the production gap-particularly large for university presses-between the writing and the printing, and in the first month of its publication, Ctrl + Z already has several broken links in its notes, and it was completed before a chapter could be formed from the Internet brouhaha of Hulk Hogan’s victorious lawsuit against Gawker.įor that matter, Jones’s book is a dull read: an over-documented and under-thought trudge through the topic.
This is the situation that has prompted Ctrl + Z: The Right to Be Forgotten, a new book by Meg Leta Jones, a communications professor at Georgetown University. Is there anyone who doesn’t know that this kind of thing is madness? That the Internet is a maw chewing us alive? Maybe on the shrunken staff of the newly bankrupted Gawker site, there are a few believers left, but the rest of the world knows that the Web really is a world-wide web: It’s sticky, prowled by spiders, and there’s no escape for anything it’s caught. Posted onto YouTube, a key scene animated as a GIF for Twitter, the gas-station snake-wrestling match might have received millions of views and spawned thousands of amused and snarky comments: the first Google result when employers, friends, or dates do an Internet search for his name for the rest of his life. Michael Joseph Calford’s 2015 mishap, however, would have been recorded-by the station’s security cameras, if not on some passerby’s phone. But if they had really happened, there is an easy prediction to make: Mary Martha Michelson’s 1985 breakdown would have left no lasting trace, fading into the darkness of lost memories. If you’ve never heard this pair of stories, that’s probably because I just made them up (although I based them on real incidents, changing the names to protect the poor idiots involved). Eventually, he managed to wrestle down the thrashing pump handle, but he had to pay for all the wasted gas-and, two weeks later, he received in the mail a ticket from the Weber County courthouse, fining him for spilling a prohibited substance into gutters that emptied into the local storm sewers. Across Michael Joseph himself, for that matter, when he slipped on the wet asphalt as he came running out to shut off the pump.
Unfortunately, the nozzle popped out of his gas tank, the rubber hose writhing like an injured snake as it sprayed gasoline across the station. When the ratchet wouldn’t hold the pump handle open, he jammed a small stick into the hand grip and walked into the station to buy a pack of gum. On July 2, 2015, exactly 30 years later, a 16-year-old named Michael Joseph Calford, just a few weeks after receiving his driver’s license, decided to stop at a gas station on the outskirts of Ogden, Utah. After a little conversation and some calming down, Mary Martha apologized to the clerk and was allowed to go her way. She’d dashed in to buy some beer, leaving her pocketbook in the car, and when the clerk demanded proof of age, she became unhinged: screeching obscenities, sweeping the counter clear of its magazine and chewing-tobacco displays, and storming out-only to run straight into a Montgomery County deputy sheriff, on his way in to buy a cup of coffee. On July 2, 1985, a 23-year-old woman named Mary Martha Michelson began screaming at a convenience-store clerk in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.
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