My first take was going to be from the Movie "No Way Out", when they added the gift to the registry of the State Department or something like that. But 1984 clearly is the better analogy. Nonetheless, watch No Way Out. Great Costner flick.
The Ministry of Truth, as George Orwell so presciently (is that a word?)
observed, was not a place of malice; it was a place of professional pride.
Winston Smith did not view his daily toil (the systematic vaporization of
inconvenient facts down the memory hole) as a crime. It was a craft. It was the
delicate, rectifying art of ensuring that yesterday’s news perfectly aligned
with today’s policy, ensuring the public mind remained as smooth and
unblemished as a freshly buffed bowling ball. Never mind that the average
person would need a chiropractor after contorting themselves into aligning with
the current positioning. Winston would have fit right in at the IT Dept at the
Department of Justice.
The DOJ recently set about tidying up its digital
storefront. Specifically, they began quietly scrubbing their public website of
the vast,
meticulous database detailing the criminal undertakings, charges, and
convictions related to the January 6th Capitol riot.
To Winston Smith, the intrinsic satisfaction of the job
lay in the messy, intricate details, combined with the physicality of his
alterations. When the Party changed the production quotas for the Ninth
Three-Year Plan from a deficit to a surplus, Winston didn’t just scratch out
the old number; he completely re-authored the past to make the current
abundance seem inevitable, logical, and mathematically beautiful. A work of art.
One can see the same artistic dedication at play within
the contemporary deep state. Maintaining a massive, searchable index of over a
thousand American citizens charged with everything from seditious conspiracy to
defecating in a building is just so cluttered. By evaporating the landing
pages, the tables of pleas, and the mugshots, the modern data-management clerks
aren't destroying information; they are merely "curating the narrative
workspace." They are bringing harmony to the timeline.
The beauty of the internet was supposed to be its
permanence, a decentralized fortress where facts could hide from the sticky
fingers of politicians. But government, in its infinite majesty, has discovered
that the digital age actually makes revisionism vastly more efficient. In the
old days, Winston Smith had to use pneumatic tubes, razor blades, and a fiery
furnace to destroy physical copies of The Times. It was exhausting, blue-collar work that
left ink stains on the fingers.
Today, the Ministry of Justice can achieve the exact
same historical rectitude with a couple of keystrokes, a modified robots.txt
file, and a server migration. Presto! The past is corrected, and nobody even
gets up to get a fresh cup of fair-trade coffee.
Winston Smith took pride in his work because he
understood that if you control the past, you control the future. Similarly, if
the DOJ website no longer carries the dense, legal footnotes of a multi-year
domestic insurrection investigation, then did it ever really happen in quite
that way? The edges soften. The memory blurs. The event transforms from a hard,
documented legal reality into a partisan Rorschach test, malleable enough to
fit whatever political schlock is being peddled during the next election cycle.
The true comedy—or tragedy, is that the bureaucratic
mind never changes, whether it’s trapped in the grim, grey dystopia of Oceania
or air-conditioned in the sleek corridors of Washington, D.C. The bureaucrat’s
deepest desire is always a clean desk and an obedient public.
Winston Smith went to his downed his cheap vodka proud
that he had helped keep the record straight by twisting it into pretzels. The
tech-savvy compliance officers at the DOJ can sleep easy tonight knowing
they’ve done the same. History is far too important to be left to the messy,
stubborn custody of actual facts.
