re: #291 Syrah

I want to encourage you to be of good cheer.

Freedom is not like some electronic book on a kindle. They can’t just go in and zap it out of existence.

Rome did not burn in a day. It will take them a while to destroy everything.

I have a very worrying thought about Kindle and this recent business of 1984 (of all books) vanishing from people’s Kindles—

Everyone writing about it talks about the Orwellian memory hole, the place in the Ministry of truth where uncomfortable facts are ‘disappeared’

But part of Winston Smith’s job at Minitru was rewriting the old newspaper archives— not just ‘disappearing’ data, but changing it.

So here is my nightmare Orwellian scenario: what if Amazon decided to use Kindle not to ‘disappear’ info, but to change it? So the famous book you downloaded (like the Federalist Papers) one day is suddenly a diatribe in favour of socialism.

I don’t think this is ever going to happen, mind you, but if we’re considering information storage in the Internet age, this is the way totalitarian governments would go.