He who controls the present, controls the past.

“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.”
— George Orwell

Its a quote from Orwells bloody Scary 1984 and when reading the book it sounds far off. (Actually 1984 isnt all that scary, the scary part is seeing parts of it bleed into our world, from the acceptance of corporate doublespeak to the endless wars on anything – terrorism, drugs and the new, scary but highly fictitious cyberwar.) When first reading the book, I figured there is Too much information floating around, Too much redundancy. No chance of anyone ever being able to influence the global vat of knowledge in this world.

Such a shift in power isnt possible in a day, the people just wouldnt stand for it. And as always, this would have to happen gradually.. Though it does, in the end, still feel like SciFi even while I’m typing this.

Yet reading this Violet Blue article about people dicking around with her article archives sounds exactly like the start of what he was talking about.. Will the last one at SF-Gate / San Francisco Chronicle please turn out the lights

And it might merely be a single newspaper altering their own history; its a wake up call. The wikipedia isnt set in stone and the many separate repositories of knowledge around the interwebs arent even guaranteed to exist next year. We re moving our collective knowlege off the paper into the internet, trusting a plethora of instances with our past; and making the nightmarish image of the Ministry of Truth technically possible.

Another slippery slope, file it together with our rights, our privacy and yeah, why not freedom. And it sounds so much like paranoia; scifi.. yet to paraphrase Baudelaire – la plus belle des ruses du diable est de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas! (source)