With Good Intentions

"Kerensky - Dr. Kerensky was President of Russia after the Tsar was overthrown and before Lenin came along. He is still living, in Palo Alto. I was unable to find anything about Kerensky in any Russian museum. I asked about him, and yes, they had heard of him - and changed the subject. He is becoming an unperson... as soon as there is no one left alive who remembers him. All visible traces of him are gone. Trotsky - Lenin and Trotsky were a team, like Khrushchev and Bulganin, in the early years of the U.S.S.R. While we were there the U.S.S.R. was holding a great Lenin celebration; among other exhibits were hundreds and hundreds of news photographs from the early days of Communist Russia. I looked them all over carefully trying to find Trotsky’s unmistakable face, searching especially in group pictures of the Central Committee, pictures of the various ministers on official, occasions. Not one picture - Trotsky is an unperson. He exists only in the memories of those old enough to remember the early twenties. 

[...]
But I wonder what our own history will be, say fifty years from now? Will it turn out that there never was a Cold War, never was a Korean War - and that the United States and other free countries voluntarily joined up as people’s republics immediately after Mother Russia’s glorious and unassisted victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1940-45? Will Plymouth Rock and Jamestown be dropped out of history books in favor of the Russian colonies which in fact existed in California and Alaska? What new unpersons will there be? Edison? Einstein? Eisenhower?
I don’t know, I can’t guess. I simply know that when the government controls every word that is printed, every idea that is taught in school, history is no longer a record of the past but is a changeable thing, whatever is convenient to the government. And I am strongly of the opinion that our most likely future is a Communist World State. This is not a certainty - but it is the strongest of the probabilities.
[...]
The ultimate weapon was invented in pre-history. It is a kitchen knife in the hands of a determined man - who is fed up."

 

Robert Heinlein - The Future Revisited, speech given in Seattle, 1961

 

 

 

The upcoming Chinese expansion will mean the destruction of the vast majority of ideas, culture and art, as any dictatorship exterminates anything which might give the lower classes a hint that anything can exist outside the state's propaganda. But no need to wait that long for rampant revisionism. We already occupy a milieu in which The Lord of the Rings has been rewritten as a story about dwarf lesbians who do everything better than men, and nobody ever said the word "nigger" while rafting down 1840s' Mississippi, and Fahrenheit 451 is a movie about a black martyr striking back against a white villain. That one particularly grates, as the core of Bradbury's argument, the spark of brilliance which set his apart from more popular dystopias, was spotting the anti-intellectual undertow inherent in mass appeal and instinctive, bottom-up tribalism, that it is precisely demands from various political lobbies for revisionism which legitimizes censorship, repression and oppression. You can bet when the coming dictatorship (whether fascist, corporatist or just plain woke) skins you alive, it will do so in the name of "human rights" - because no matter who you are and how benign, someone somewhere has branded you a villain. "Everybody's someone else's 'nigger'" after all. I wasn't born with enough middle fingers.

 

I remember a webcomic from the Internet's early exponential spread... late '90s, early 2000s maybe? Certainly is was a quitessentially "goth" '90s affair. A teenage boy with demonic powers (who, if memory serves, went by the bombastic name of 'Azrael, angel de la misericordia!') tread a black-and-white night in a sinful city where nobody believes his stories about devils, culminating in a scene where he prostitutes himself to curb his own pride at his AWESOMAH POWAH but ends up getting assraped without lube. I lost track of it afterwards and was never able to find it again, not that I tried very hard. Can't even remember its official title. Still, for all its largely unoriginal, unskilled and crass adolescent posturing, puerile shock value, I remember spotting an endearing earnestness in that weird little mess of a comic. Certainly I don't think it deserved to fill textbooks alongside Raphael's School of Athens... but it deserved to exist. At least five or twelve of Beyonce's billion fans would spend fifteen minutes better by clicking through that comic than on her Twit feed.

 

The internet has created an illusion of permanence (you can still find the dancing hamsters) but webcomics especially, with their rather ephemeral hosting services, trapped in a no-man's land between the low cost of text and the high advertising revenue of video, make a bitter counterpoint. Just visit TheWebcomicsList or The Belfry sometime and count the dead links. When a visually intriguing if philosophically overinflated little quasi-surrealist affair called Age of Clay ended, I may have even contributed by one of my characteristically snarly comments to the author's decision to take it offline just days later - too soon for the Internet Archive to have captured its last chapters for posterity.

While we're at it, don't count on the Internet Archive. Not only has every single power structure in the world already painted a bullseye on them, but we are headed into societal collapse and no centralized, high-visibility target survives long under such conditions. Save your favorites. Whether in preparation for Sino-Imperialist repression, or corporatist suppression of independent communication, or climate-driven mass starvation and a century of economic nullity, or merely the general attrition of entropy gradually erasing your memories, save a bit here and there of what you can save. Not just the universals. Ten billion copies of Hamlet will serve no better than ten million. Save the little bits of someone's soul you've run across: a joke, a rant, a stupid stunt caught on video, a transcript, a few dozen pages of drawings, that old novel your book club argued over that one evening. Fill a few thumb drives and secret them away in a waterproof backpack somewhere. Print Nietzschean aphorisms alongside your favorite forum flame-war in eight point font double-sided and just toss the pages in a folder, easy to hide under a car seat when the firemen come for your house. They may not seem in need of saving... but then I doubt that kid with the goth comic would've expected some middle-aged nerd to reminisce about it twenty years after he gave up the project.

And when it comes to the big names, save the originals, because revisionists will torture them before murdering them. An un-redacted copy of Huckleberry Finn will be an albino tiger twenty years from now - and just as dangerous to hold onto.

Above all, stop counting on the internet to do your remembering for you. Fahrenheit 451 has proven the most prophetic of the old warnings. Remember how it ended, and be ready to become a walking book.