"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.