The Memory Hole  

(This post is only tangentially related to peak oil, in that it refers briefly to a previous post - if you're just looking for peak oil information there's nothing to see here).

I'm not sure if I've just become steadily more disgruntled by this sort of thing (and thus more attuned to it) but it seems that the stream of propaganda that discharges through the media is getting larger and larger.

The "War On Terror" is obviously the biggest driver of all this fear inducing drivel, with the latest outrage being the over-the-top celebrations over the capture of Al Qaeda's "number 3 man" recently. Except it turns out the guy wasn't particularly important at all. Read the whole story - its good for a few mordant laughs as you ponder the mysterious super-powers of Osama and al-Zarqawi - but not to worry - there's always another "number 3" out there that we can catch (and if he turns out to be some unfortunate illiterate cleaner a few months down the track, no one will notice).

Even as Tim Russert solemnly announced on Meet the Press Sunday that the "Number three man" in the entire Al-Qaeda network was now under lock and key, the world edition of The Sunday Times quoted European intelligence as saying that Abu Faraj al-Libbi was not only NOT number three, he is not even a blip on the terrorist radar screen.

According to The Times, "No European or American intelligence expert contacted last week had heard of al-Libbi until a Pakistani intelligence report last year claimed he had taken over as head of operations after Khalid Shaikh Mohammad's arrest. A former close associate of Osama Bin Laden now living in London laughed - "What I remember of him is he used to make the coffee and do the photocopying."

But Bush and his minions, joined by their Pakistani counterparts, would not be denied their public victory dance, complete with back-slapping and high-fives. "A critical victory in the war on terror," Bush crowed, and added that the capture of this "major facilitator and chief planner" for Osama bin Laden "removes a dangerous enemy who is a direct threat to America and for those who love freedom."

Elsewhere, AlwaysOn has a blog entry on "Creeping Creationism", which has an interesting reference to some historical revisionism that is taking place at the Lincoln Memorial, as well as noting the steadily increasing political influence religious fundamentalists are gaining in the US.

After strident debate, the powers that run Grand Canyon National Park are allowing an unconventional book to remain in the gift store. Entitled Grand Canyon: A Different View, the book tells the story of how the canyon was built by God sometime around nine o'clock in the morning on Tuesday, October 25, 4004 BCE, because that is when the earth was created and the Grand Canyon with it.
If a book like this sneaked into the store it would merely be funny. The idea that it is there after a reasoned debate makes it sinister. The directive to keep the book on the shelves comes from the top. Keep in mind, this a federal park. This is the same federal government that recut a video being screened at the Lincoln Memorial. This film has been recently scrubbed of its unpleasant parts by excising references to anti-war protests and gay rights demonstrations which took place at the Memorial, and substituting footage of Christian rallies which did not take place there.

Dan Gillmor has recently noted that there will be a cost associated with this national regression back to the dark ages:

The New York Times reports advocates of "intelligent design" - a code phrase for creationism - are pushing Kansas toward classroom teaching designed to undermine Darwin's incredibly well-supported theory of evolution. Unsurprisingly, people testifying in favor of this idiocy - and the Board of Education member leading the charge - haven't fully read the proposal. They're apparently taking it on faith.

Meanwhile, India and China and other nations are training young people to understand science and math at levels U.S. kids don't begin to approach. As America fiddles, replacing science with religion, our future may go up in the smoke of self-inflicted ignorance. Our international competitors must be laughing at us.

We are faithless to our children when we put them at such a disadvantage.

Moving back to my original topic of reliability and longevity of information, it has been brought to my attention that the Rigzone article I linked to recently on CO2 injection no longer exists - presumably an example of a piece of content being placed into the memory hole by some diligent modern day Winston Smith.

For a while there (forgetting my high school study of Orwell) I had thought "The Memory Hole" was just the name of the site where Russ Kick collects a wide range of material.

I had a Homer Simpson moment recently though while listening to the BBC's radio play of 1984, Doh ! , the memory hole is, of course, where Winston Smith disposes of information the Ministry of Truth has decided is no longer true. (1984 seems to be popping up all over the place lately - its even being performed as a musical in London's west end).

In the walls of the cubicle there were three orifices. To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages, to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating. This last was for the disposal of waste paper. Similar slits existed in thousands or tens of thousands throughout the building, not only in every room but at short intervals in every corridor. For some reason they were nicknamed memory holes. When one knew that any document was due for destruction, or even when one saw a scrap of waste paper lying about, it was an automatic action to lift the flap of the nearest memory hole and drop it in, whereupon it would be whirled away on a current of warm air to the enormous furnaces which were hidden somewhere in the recesses of the building.

Of course, our modern day memory holes aren't as efficient as Orwell's. The various Freedom Of Information Acts provide a mechanism for retrieving government information, and most things published on the internet can also be retrieved from repositories such as the Google Cache (for example, the aforementioned CO2 Injection article).

Google's cache isn't the only one of course, for example, Alexa periodically donates "snapshots" of the Web to the Library of Congress. Another good one is Archive.org's Wayback Machine. Google's cache also has other uses, such as routing around censorware. There are quite a few references out there on how to mine the cache, such as this one.

Out in the non-virtual world, a related concept is WorldChanging's "Participatory Panopticon", which describes a world where not only does Big Brother watch everything we do, but the reverse as well.

Soon -- probably within the next decade, certainly within the next two -- we'll be living in a world where what we see, what we hear, what we experience will be recorded wherever we go. There will be few statements or scenes that will go unnoticed, or unremembered. Our day to day lives will be archived and saved. What’s more, these archives will be available over the net for recollection, analysis, even sharing.

And we will be doing it to ourselves.

This won't simply be a world of a single, governmental Big Brother watching over your shoulder, nor will it be a world of a handful of corporate siblings training their ever-vigilant security cameras and tags on you. Such monitoring may well exist, probably will, in fact, but it will be overwhelmed by the millions of cameras and recorders in the hands of millions of Little Brothers and Little Sisters. We will carry with us the tools of our own transparency, and many, perhaps most, will do so willingly, even happily.