What a powerful political force nostalgia continues to be. If anything, it is becoming a more powerful force all the time. This should be surprising because, on the surface at least, there are many ways in which our lives seem to be getting better.

Take rights: surely we are now more free than at any point in history. It certainly seems that way, given how many new rights we seem to be accruing. Most recently we acquired the “right to disconnect”, legislated after the Greens pushed for it as their price for passing the government’s latest industrial relations bill. The thrust is that if a worker wants to switch off their phone or not look at their emails out of hours, nobody can penalise them for doing so.

Illustration by Jim PavlidisCredit:

The catch is that some of these rights are not quite as new as they seem.

Take another apparently new right, the “right to be forgotten”: the right to demand that facts or comments on our lives can be deleted from the internet forever. At first glance this is obviously new – until you realise it is just a dressed-up version of the older right to privacy. The investigative journalist Ava Kofman, drawing parallels between the two, argues that where privacy was once “a matter of spatial arrangements, of walls and property”, of being able to literally shut others out, we can see now that it is also “a function of time”. It is not only people we need to escape, but our own pasts.

In other words, to have a right to privacy that still means something in this day and age, it must take into account the new ways that our privacy can be breached.

Kofman was writing about a book by Kerry Howley on the improbably named Reality Winner, an NSA contractor imprisoned under America’s Espionage Act for leaking to the press – and the ways in which her internet history was turned against her in court. She quotes Howley: “We tend to think of privacy as the freedom to keep intentional secrets separate from public knowledge, but privacy has been the freedom to live as if most of what passes for experience will not endure.”

What strikes me about those last words – “as if most of what passes for experience will not endure” – is how easily we took this right for granted until recently. It was an assumption about the nature of existence. It was only when the nature of existence changed and our assumptions turned out to be wrong that we realised we needed to be protected from the new world coming at us. The same goes for the “right to disconnect”: we did not understand we needed it until it became possible always to be connected. We didn’t think of these things as “rights”: they were simply the way we lived.

And here we get to the significant feature of both these new-fangled-sounding, but actually quite old, rights. A few weeks ago I wrote about the nostalgia of businesses: wanting to return to a world of 10 or 20 years ago when they were taken more seriously than now. But here we are also seeing nostalgia, with two striking differences. First, this nostalgia is being turned against business. Second, it expresses a yearning for a time even further in the past: for a world before the internet.