“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past…. The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc.”
—George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
From Tessa Leena:
My dissident librarian friend was talking about this for years, how libraries were intentionally messing up—removing, throwing away, and hiding offsite—physical books, under pressure from tech companies, to the point of being complicit in eliminating books. She says that it is all on purpose, so that people have no other place to go to but online, and online information can be “updated” or removed at will. I thought it was possibly less than a coordinated effort (or at least in part incompetence), but wow.