How to Disappear

I was really excited for this book. I thought it would be a great follow on to How to Do Nothing, but unfortunately it wasn’t quite what I expected. How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency by Akiko Busch wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t quite what I thought it would be going in.

The introduction started out strong, she asked the questions I was hoping for answers to and then as I read on, she didn’t really answer them at all, but instead looked at different ways in which, during the course of our lives, we make use of invisibility. From children who have invisible friends to academics working on creating an invisibility cloak, Busch does a lot of research and talks with a lot of folks, but it always felt like she was talking around the true subject.

I was looking for more about the transparency that seems so inherent in our culture now and how we can get away from that and she never quite got there until the final chapter which ended with more questions than answers. But maybe that’s the point, maybe you can’t really answer these questions? I’m not sure but the book left me wanting something more. Something more about the fact that our current technology asks us to sacrifice a great deal of privacy in order to use it.