Opinion by: Phil Mataras, founder and chief executive officer in AR.IO
Let’s stop pretending that the data is just missing. No. It is RemovedRemoved, buried and more often than not, accidentally made.
Each time a new administration gains power, priorities are reshuffled. This is expected, but what is unacceptable is the silent, coordinated loss of information to the public. It can be seen again, especially in the United StatesAnd at a speed that should alarm anyone who cares about the truth.
From public health dashboards to economic indicators, whole data swathes are taken offline without a press release or explanation. Nothing. It is not home care or protection; Revisionism in history occurs in real time.
The deterioration of digital memory
The Internet is meant to be a great balance – an extensive public knowledge ledger used for more good – but this ideal is not translated into reality. Instead, it is metastic in a digital mirage. Extensive in appearance, but fragile in reality.
When the websites are gone, the archives fold, or quietly pull the files … There is no library to ask, no phone calls, and there is usually no explanation of why. The centralization of information has become the greatest weakness – a system designed for convenience rather than being permanent.
Let’s not sugarcoat: it’s dangerous. Power cannot be fulfilled without accessing its actions, and as such, justice, policy and reform cannot be pursued if the data that supports them has been removed.
The facts are lifeless on the shelf, but in the current system, they can also come on an expiration date.
Consider World War II and the Holocaust -the dread that opens up in silence and the evidence gaps that allow deniers to crawl in cracks. If the tools available today exist then – tools to record, store and distribute without censorship – how much can change?
Continue in 2021, when independent news outlets such as Apple Daily are forced to be offline for a few hours in Hong Kong. A 26-year archive of journalism was not accessible almost overnight, as the servers were closed and digital notes were killed from public reach. Hopefully changed After cyber activists begin to back up in censorship-proof articles, permanent blockchain Arweave.
Fast forward now in Spain, and we see the same problem years later. The isps are blocking the whole part of the Internet Under pressure from interests to corporate sports – no vote cast, no public conversation, only censorship wrapped in legal.
Don’t mistake the silence for peace. Silence is control.
Maintenance of public data
Erasure is no longer a crude gesture of destruction. It has been a quiet, legalistic, bureaucratic process that has been sharpen for decades. While the threat to maintaining public data is true, so are the responses.
Recently: US govt. sets AI policies across the agencies
Nonprofit initiatives, such as the Internet Archive, have silently back -up billions -billions of web pages in recent years, effectively cautious against digital decay. These types of open-source archives operate independently by governments because no single administration should handle the keys to the public record.
Blockchain data storage solutions also offer censorship and tamper-proof alternative storage solutions-unlike today’s dominant cloud providers, which allows and even acts in the removal and manipulation of data.
Each deleted article, each missing data set and each broken link is a bitter taken on the foundation of the public reality. Without data, the truth becomes subjective. When the truth is subjective, the power speaks the last (and strongly).
Losing information is the loss of history, and as solutions exist, they are not the point of this article. This is not a commercial – this is a warning.
Keeping data as a rebellion
Maintaining public data is no longer a technical challenge – it is a civic obligation. Not everyone can make labor law or rule out protest movements, but everyone can save a copy. For every archive and every witness, there is protection of the truth, not only for what is happening but, most importantly, for what.
George Orwell wrote, “This is a good thing, the destruction of words.” That is fiction, but now, this approach is because the future is not built into dreams – it is built on the records.
When public memory is inmath of systems that can be edited, purchased or removed, what remains non -history -this is a version of history, written by the last person in power standing. This is the real danger. Not incorrect information but ‘un’information: a void in which only a blank slate remains – where liability should exist.
The front option is simple: let the removals continue or fight for permanentness and reality.
The record must exceed the regime, and the facts should be released by people who fear them. Without it, current generations will not only lose their history; They will also lose their future.
Opinion by: Phil Mataras, founder and chief executive officer of AR.IO.
This article is for general information purposes and is not intended to be and should not be done as legal or investment advice. The views, attitudes, and opinions expressed here are unique and do not necessarily reflect or represent the views and opinions of the cointelegraph.
