https://archive.md/xZzed
"The deletions began shortly after Donald Trump took office. C.D.C. web pages
on vaccines, H.I.V. prevention, and reproductive health went missing. Findings
on bird-flu transmission vanished minutes after they appeared. The Census
Bureau’s public repository went offline, then returned without certain
directories of geographic information. The Department of Justice expunged the
January 6th insurrection from its website, and whitehouse.gov took down an
explainer page about the Constitution. On February 7th, Trump sacked the head
of the National Archives and Records Administration, the agency that maintains
the official texts of the nation’s laws, and whose motto is “the written word
endures.”
More than a hundred and ten thousand government pages have gone dark in a purge
that one scientist likened to a “digital book burning,” and which has proved as
frightening in its imprecision as in its malice. Racing to comply with
executive orders banning “D.E.I.” and “gender ideology extremism,” agencies
have cut materials on everything from supporting transgender youth in school to
teaching children about sickle-cell disease, which disproportionately affects
people of African descent. But they have also axed records having little to do
with the Administration’s ideological priorities, seemingly assisted by A.I.
tools that flag forbidden words without regard to context. A recently leaked
list of pages marked for deletion on military websites includes references to
the Enola Gay—not, as it turns out, a member of the L.G.B.T.Q. community but,
rather, the B-29 bomber that nuked Hiroshima.
Oblivion menaces every scrap of information that doesn’t spark joy in the Oval
Office. “It’s gone,” Trump said of “wokeness,” during his recent address to
Congress, in almost motherly tones. “And we feel so much better for it, don’t
we? Don’t we feel better?” But on this front, at least, the Administration is
facing well-organized resistance. It comes from a loose coalition of archivists
and librarians, who are standing athwart history and yelling “Save!” They
belong to organizations such as the Internet Archive, which co-created a
project called the End of Term Web Archive to back up the federal web in 2008;
the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, or EDGI; and libraries at
major universities such as M.I.T. and the University of Michigan. Like the
Encyclopedists of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation”—who race to compile a collapsing
empire’s accumulated knowledge—they’re assembling information arks to ride out
the chaos."
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
