6 ms·

Intentionally or not this is -- exactly -- what 1984 is all about: changing our perception of history by rewriting or erasing previous writings. Unfortunately

Intentionally or not this is -- exactly -- what 1984 is all about: changing our perception of history by rewriting or erasing previous writings. Unfortunately alot of it from the article seems typical: blogs going off line as bloggers move to new technolgoies, social media companies going defunct or just not keeping old content. Alot of these things can happen in the west. Remember these books you could read? "The Feynman Letters", etc. I'm paraphrasing-- but its impossible now. Think of this: emails? A person dies and their laptop dies or is disposed of -- they're all gone. In the past the physicality of the letters would persist. Not so now. All this correspondence vanishes. Facebook, are you kidding me? If someone famous thought to export their data -- and it can be found on a laptop still working (and you have the login password), then maybe. See above. This repeats and repeats for each system we interact with for communication. Aside from the laptop scenario-- all this is lost. We live now in a blackhole of historical details of information, and soon to be replaced by a fabricated history hallucinated by LLMs perhaps. Those that love historical understanding should be very worried.

Cheer2171 2y ago
Another false equivalence. "Intentionally or not" actually really matters here. It took work to maintain archives in the pre-digital era, and it takes work to maintain archives in the digital era. So many of those physical letters were lost, rotted, burned, etc. This is a purge, not a failure to maintain archives. This is like when during the Cultural Revolution, they literally burned archives and letters by intellectuals.
- bloomingeek 2y ago
  I love your replay, your answer is the near perfect summing up of the issue! My view is some here in America are starting to get too lenient towards Russia and other authoritarian states. Do we not understand that these states want complete control and don't care how they get it? Information and educational purges are two of many ways this is done. After that, it gets dirty. Rule of thumb, if the Constitution says it stinks, it does. If we don't like something in it, work for a change. In China and Russia they don't have that right.
jimbob45 2y ago
Should the rewritten history still be preserved as history then?
demosthanos 2y ago
> Posted on Wednesday, May 22, He’s post had been removed from WeChat by the following day, yielding a 404 message that read: “This content violates regulations and cannot be viewed.” You don't get your comments censored by commenting about natural entropy on the internet. You do get your comments censored by drawing attention to the censors. I get very tired of people drawing false equivalences between organic human behaviors in the West and intentional abuse by central authorities in China. We can and should do more to preserve our history in the West, but we are already preserving orders of magnitude more data per person than any of our ancestors could have dreamed of. There's no comparison between emails getting lost when someone dies and centralized censors actively purging old content to make it easier to change the party's narrative.
- pessimizer 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - trealira 2y ago
    I don't see how your comment relates to the parent's comment; however, here's a reply. > All anyone has to do is farm a few accounts to flag the mildest mention of this out of existence, and to upvote the most obtuse, simplistic anti-enemy animus to the top. Have you considered that the negative sentiment against Russia and China is genuine? I know of no evidence that the DoD has shills or bots upvoting pro-US-government comments and downvoting other ones. People probably just read the news and form their opinions that way, and there's a variety of different news sources with many different perspectives, which don't get censored. > I'm jealous of the fact that Chinese people speaking out of the government-range just get deleted, rather than patronized. It's strange to be jealous of them not having protection from government censorship.
- WalterBright 2y ago
  I've love to have a single letter from some of my ancestors.
yterdy 2y ago
Recently: Google refuses to turn up old pages. I was recently searching for a person who used to have a notable web presence before passing away about a decade ago. I had to dig to find a few links, through DDG and Yandex.
- flir 2y ago
  Yandex is getting more and more of my web queries lately. There's a definite irony there.
  - netsharc 2y ago
    Google and Bing (so DuckDuckGo as well) seem to like searching for synonyms of search terms and returning the most popular results, thinking popular means relevant. I remember looking for something where I remembered the exact terms and not getting anywhere with them, but on Yandex it was the first hit.
    - amenhotep 2y ago
      Yandex shows what it thinks you want, Google shows what it thinks you should want.
jncfhnb 2y ago
I would guess that 99.9% of letters are destroyed
akira2501 2y ago
> In the past the physicality of the letters would persist I'm willing to bet that these physical letters have historically fared about as well as our digital letters are; otherwise, our world would be absolutely filled with the written detritus of the past. > Those that love historical understanding should be very worried. As humans we've always disposed of more than we've kept. It's just not worth the energy cost to operate any other way. Thankfully history is recorded as several overlapping collections and not as a series of single data points.
- loa_in_ 2y ago
  I inherited plenty of handwritten notes, etc. from my father. Not much from my mother. After I read them, keeping them doesn't serve much of a purpose... in short-term. That's why I keep them. What you describe as single data points is exactly what we want, but somehow we don't know that until it's too late. We cherish tablets about copper orders from times far past because somehow it's now more valuable. Who's to say yesterday's letters aren't going to be?
  - akira2501 2y ago
    > We cherish tablets about copper orders from times far past because somehow it's now more valuable. There were three discovered tablets and that was one of them. They were discovered in 1920 but only widely known about 100 years later. They're notable because they're described as the oldest found written complaint. They're mildly useful because they describe specific details of the commerce being conducted at the time, which comports well with other contemporary sources of the same information. This particular artifact was written in 1750 BC. Our oldest writings extend back to 3400 BC. They're not particularly "cherished" but they are a widely known "meme" thanks to the Guinness Book of World Records.
abecedarius 2y ago
Tangential, but what is "The Feynman Letters" here? I know of a book of some of his letters, but not about censorship/loss thereof.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- guffins 2y ago
  Perhaps referring to this? I’m not entirely sure. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/mail-censorship/ https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/mail-censorship/
  - abecedarius 2y ago
    Oh thanks, it's funny how I had censoring the mail in a different mental category from publication/archives.
Animats 2y ago
> Intentionally or not this is -- exactly -- what 1984 is all about: changing our perception of history by rewriting or erasing previous writings. Yes. China's current leadership is terrified of dissent. Even mild dissent. Even discussions within the party. There's no good reason to clamp down that hard. The current leadership is doing a reasonably good job. But they now have an Xi personality cult, which never ends well. Yes, China botched their housing bubble, but so did Japan and the US.
pennybanks 2y ago
one link of jack ma between that time period on badu? bro that cant be no accident. if the chinese govt didnt do this id be more surprised i mean there already censoring most of the internet

Cheer2171 2y ago

Another false equivalence. "Intentionally or not" actually really matters here. It took work to maintain archives in the pre-digital era, and it takes work to maintain archives in the digital era. So many of those physical letters were lost, rotted, burned, etc. This is a purge, not a failure to maintain archives. This is like when during the Cultural Revolution, they literally burned archives and letters by intellectuals.

bloomingeek 2y ago
I love your replay, your answer is the near perfect summing up of the issue! My view is some here in America are starting to get too lenient towards Russia and other authoritarian states. Do we not understand that these states want complete control and don't care how they get it? Information and educational purges are two of many ways this is done. After that, it gets dirty. Rule of thumb, if the Constitution says it stinks, it does. If we don't like something in it, work for a change. In China and Russia they don't have that right.

jimbob45 2y ago

Should the rewritten history still be preserved as history then?

demosthanos 2y ago

> Posted on Wednesday, May 22, He’s post had been removed from WeChat by the following day, yielding a 404 message that read: “This content violates regulations and cannot be viewed.” You don't get your comments censored by commenting about natural entropy on the internet. You do get your comments censored by drawing attention to the censors. I get very tired of people drawing false equivalences between organic human behaviors in the West and intentional abuse by central authorities in China. We can and should do more to preserve our history in the West, but we are already preserving orders of magnitude more data per person than any of our ancestors could have dreamed of. There's no comparison between emails getting lost when someone dies and centralized censors actively purging old content to make it easier to change the party's narrative.

pessimizer 2y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- trealira 2y ago
  I don't see how your comment relates to the parent's comment; however, here's a reply. > All anyone has to do is farm a few accounts to flag the mildest mention of this out of existence, and to upvote the most obtuse, simplistic anti-enemy animus to the top. Have you considered that the negative sentiment against Russia and China is genuine? I know of no evidence that the DoD has shills or bots upvoting pro-US-government comments and downvoting other ones. People probably just read the news and form their opinions that way, and there's a variety of different news sources with many different perspectives, which don't get censored. > I'm jealous of the fact that Chinese people speaking out of the government-range just get deleted, rather than patronized. It's strange to be jealous of them not having protection from government censorship.
WalterBright 2y ago
I've love to have a single letter from some of my ancestors.

yterdy 2y ago

Recently: Google refuses to turn up old pages. I was recently searching for a person who used to have a notable web presence before passing away about a decade ago. I had to dig to find a few links, through DDG and Yandex.

flir 2y ago
Yandex is getting more and more of my web queries lately. There's a definite irony there.
- netsharc 2y ago
  Google and Bing (so DuckDuckGo as well) seem to like searching for synonyms of search terms and returning the most popular results, thinking popular means relevant. I remember looking for something where I remembered the exact terms and not getting anywhere with them, but on Yandex it was the first hit.
  - amenhotep 2y ago
    Yandex shows what it thinks you want, Google shows what it thinks you should want.

jncfhnb 2y ago

I would guess that 99.9% of letters are destroyed

akira2501 2y ago

> In the past the physicality of the letters would persist I'm willing to bet that these physical letters have historically fared about as well as our digital letters are; otherwise, our world would be absolutely filled with the written detritus of the past. > Those that love historical understanding should be very worried. As humans we've always disposed of more than we've kept. It's just not worth the energy cost to operate any other way. Thankfully history is recorded as several overlapping collections and not as a series of single data points.

loa_in_ 2y ago
I inherited plenty of handwritten notes, etc. from my father. Not much from my mother. After I read them, keeping them doesn't serve much of a purpose... in short-term. That's why I keep them. What you describe as single data points is exactly what we want, but somehow we don't know that until it's too late. We cherish tablets about copper orders from times far past because somehow it's now more valuable. Who's to say yesterday's letters aren't going to be?
- akira2501 2y ago
  > We cherish tablets about copper orders from times far past because somehow it's now more valuable. There were three discovered tablets and that was one of them. They were discovered in 1920 but only widely known about 100 years later. They're notable because they're described as the oldest found written complaint. They're mildly useful because they describe specific details of the commerce being conducted at the time, which comports well with other contemporary sources of the same information. This particular artifact was written in 1750 BC. Our oldest writings extend back to 3400 BC. They're not particularly "cherished" but they are a widely known "meme" thanks to the Guinness Book of World Records.

abecedarius 2y ago

Tangential, but what is "The Feynman Letters" here? I know of a book of some of his letters, but not about censorship/loss thereof.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
guffins 2y ago
Perhaps referring to this? I’m not entirely sure. https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/mail-censorship/ https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/mail-censorship/
- abecedarius 2y ago
  Oh thanks, it's funny how I had censoring the mail in a different mental category from publication/archives.

Animats 2y ago

> Intentionally or not this is -- exactly -- what 1984 is all about: changing our perception of history by rewriting or erasing previous writings. Yes. China's current leadership is terrified of dissent. Even mild dissent. Even discussions within the party. There's no good reason to clamp down that hard. The current leadership is doing a reasonably good job. But they now have an Xi personality cult, which never ends well. Yes, China botched their housing bubble, but so did Japan and the US.

pennybanks 2y ago

one link of jack ma between that time period on badu? bro that cant be no accident. if the chinese govt didnt do this id be more surprised i mean there already censoring most of the internet