NEWS FLASH: World’s Library Sabotaged

What is anyone going to do about it? What can anyone do?

Power an corruption have been with us since humans existed it seems.

Correction is in order. How is this going to happen?

I usually “throw away” the first page of a google search as it is mostly advertising. Drilling down through pages gives you the feel for what is being manipulated and allows you to construct a better search, even to the point of using minus signs to specifically exclude certain items. My behavior has been trained in this area by the google environment. In my opinion google still has the most complete searches, they have just become weighted by SEO and biases of all kinds.

I got a wild hair in 2015 and wrote a short piece of techo dystopia fiction: The Time Rift of 2100: How We lost the Future It describes in retrospect a series of successive ‘innovations’, each a worthy improvement, but hidden in growing complexity a fragile thread weaves through everything. Probably the best and only story ever written about Network Time Protocol.

Google and The Cloud makes an appearance though not by name. As is happening now, paper was nil and everything — including essential documentation — was stored in ‘The Cloud’, a global storage array that was storage and index combined. An excerpt,

[…] A FEW RESPONSIBLE ENGINEERS of the era took the time to publish diagnostic procedures with which one could fix these amalgamations, should one have the patience to pull them apart to do so, like the SAMS Photofacts of old. Every piece had its own direct interface for configuration and in theory at least, one could fix problems or reconfigure the pieces by simply talking to them directly. They documented these diagnostic and configuration interfaces, often cribbed from the documents of other engineers, which were scarcely ever used now, probing them to discover the more primal pieces within to gather documentation on those too.

BUT IT WAS THANKLESS to do so, and these engineers found themselves out of work or forcefully retired. Their productivity paled besides younger geniuses who were simple hunter-gatherers, whose cleverness in assembling working prototypes was deft and swift. From concept to bubble-wrap technology companies had little interest in deep documentation. It was seen as a fetish. The thing works! Clone it and done. These hastily made things flooded the market and soon replaced other well-documented things. At times something failed and its inventors could not say why, they just assembled a new one or went bankrupt.

IN A SAD IRONY as to the supposed superiority of digital over analog — that this whole profession of digitally-stored ‘source’ documentation began to fade and was finally lost. It had became dusty, and the unlooked-for documents of previous eras were first flagged and moved to lukewarm storage. It was a circular process, where the world’s centralized search indices would be culled to remove pointers to things that were seldom accessed. Then a separate clean-up where the fact that something was not in the index alone determined that it was purgeable. The process was completely automated of course, so no human was on hand to mourn the passing of material that had been the proud product of entire careers. It simply faded.

THEN SOMETHING TOOK THE INTERNET BY STORM, it was some silly but popular Game with a perversely intricate (and ultimately useless) information store. Within the space of six months index culling and auto-purge had assigned more than a third of all storage to the Game. Only as the Game itself faded did people begin to notice that things they had seen and used, even recently, were simply no longer there. Or anywhere. It was as if the collective mind had suffered a stroke. Were the machines at fault, or were we? Does it even matter? Life went on. We no longer knew much about these things from which our world was constructed, but they continued to work. […]

So when you’re fixed on deliberate censorship and evil derrings-do, always remember the words of Einstein,

Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity.

the Enlightened is a very poor use as the Enlightenment sprung Freedom, Liberty, Capitalism as many of USA’s founders were of the Enlightenment. more accurate would be ‘the Progressives’ ‘the Left’ ‘the Liberals’ ‘the Socialists’