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Understanding and identifying retconning is a critical capacity for media literacy & the ability to navigate the excessive propaganda (corporate & governmental) we receive from large institutions.
Changing the interpretation of the past is critical to controlling the future.
1/ Understanding and identifying retconning is a critical capacity for media literacy & the ability to navigate the excessive propaganda (corporate & governmental) we receive from large institutions. Changing the interpretation of the past is critical to controlling the future.
History can weigh like a millstone; archaic distinctions and practices can drag upon our freedom and agency. But detachment from the past has its own pitfalls. It means that the past that survives is a default genealogy, a mere reflection of the status quo, fixed and irrelevant. It loses its living value, its capacity to help the current generation
... See moreLizzie O'Shea • Future Histories: What Ada Lovelace, Tom Paine, and the Paris Commune Can Teach Us About Digital Technology
we live in a world where even the most intimate realities are mediated to us through the content strategies of others.
Vibes Are Not Enough
But as the digital age drowns us in exponentially increasing rates of new content—most of which is trivial and ephemeral—it is becoming clear that almost everything more than a few years old gets buried by incoming content. This is a serious problem for the continuity of any civilization if most writing and ideas propagate laterally (from peer-to-p
... See moreTo paraphrase Orwell, without a quantitatively accurate record of the past you cannot control the future, in the sense that your control theory literally won’t work.
Balaji Srinivasan • The Network State: How To Start a New Country
If we allow those who control the present to control the past then they control the future. That’s George Orwell. We need to know what came before. Because the web flips on and off, actually most of the best of the web is already off the web.
Recode Staff • Full transcript: Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle on Recode Decode
The result is a paradoxical sense of stasis—paradoxical because there is a real appetite for change; and, for better or worse, some kind of change seems all but inevitable.