Comment by smhinsey | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smhinsey | Hacker News Reader

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I don't know about this. One thing that has really struck me about the kind of behavior on display is that a lot of it seems to be under the assumption that getting away with it initially means getting away with it forever, but in reality, we live in one of the most well documented periods of time in history. Information is everywhere and it's nearly impossible to suppress. Not everything happens in internet time, but the truth is going to catch up to a lot of people eventually.

There will probably be dozens of books solely about the topic of what has been said by the executive branch on Twitter. (How clever will all those snappy quips and one liners seem 15 years from now on the pages of the next David McCollough?)

It's usually the case that those who aren't passionate about history will primarily be familiar with the big picture marquee events without fully getting the nuance of the experience, but there are troves of evidence here for extraordinarily rich future histories.

> Information is everywhere and it's nearly impossible to suppress.

I've noticed a disturbing trend recently where this is becoming less true than we'd like to believe.

Try searching for news articles about GWB's 2nd term. Try to find opinion pieces about it. Try to name (and cite) a dozen different important events directly related to his administration.

It's doable, but it's not easy. Google's got a really short-term memory these days (unless, of course, you're trying to debug a problem in Linux, in which case these forum posts from 2010 are sure to help...).

It's a big part of why I take the time to maintain the bookmark database I've got: I don't trust that I'll be able to find articles like this one in the future.

> It's a big part of why I take the time to maintain the bookmark database I've got: I don't trust that I'll be able to find articles like this one in the future.

I go further than that - and I assume many do: For stuff I think I'll want to reference in the future, that I find important - I'll take a copy of it; ctrl+s or ctrl+p for basic stuff, other things I'll take the time and space to mirror (using wget or something similar).

Given that we've seen major portions of the internet literally shut down or "destroyed" over the decades, this isn't something one should find odd or overkill.

I too keep a huge bookmark stack, but sometimes I don't properly sort things, and just put them in a "general" location. Recently I started going back thru these bookmarks, just to organize some of them - and many of them were no longer valid; 404s were the norm. That said, in many cases having the bookmark name or description (and even the old URL) was useful to find a copy of the information, where it moved (if it did) or maybe somebody archived it. But in some cases, it simply vanished.

I do agree with your assessment, though - Google and the internet has this "short term memory" problem; a big part of that is the (now) dynamic nature of websites, which doesn't allow for easy crawling by some systems (like the wayback machine), as well as allowing the data to move or vanish at a whim.

Speaking of W. The people that are complaining about the Justice department getting politicized have completely forgotten that W already did that by firing a lot of people for political reasons. See Alberto "I do not recall" Gonzales' testimony. None of this is really new. That is why the GOP is complicit. They are getting exactly what they want.

I really hope future historians are not relying on Google's public index. I do hope they do stuff like systematically read (or at least manually scan) the op-ed archives of several major newspapers over the time periods they're studying. In this area, google-fu seems mostly like an exercise in confirmation bias.

We have been increasing "true positives" of documentary evidence, but nuch more rapidly increasing "false positives" of lies and spin and fake news. It's not clear that we are overall better informed now than 10 years ago.

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