This is old news but I’ve only really gotten a big buzzing bumble bee in my bonnet about it recently. Possibly because of the SouthPark debacle. I’m sure some readers, including Miles, have a skeleton or two in the closet. What if you could change the past or just make everybody forget about whatever activity/aspect of yourself you find embarassing. Well the good old church of scientology has adopted a very pragmatic approach to this particular dilemna. A few years back it sent a nasty C&D letter to google telling them to censor search results linking to sites which discredit scientology. Now let’s be nice and impartial about that. This was an act of pure unadulterated evil. Thanks to Dan Brown it seems half the world thinks they’re personally related to Jesus but the scientologists have to censor Google. The approach of messrs. Brin and Page was masterful (microsoft-like?) in it’s acrobatics, ensuring that the reason for censorship is out in the open through the innovative ChillingEffects website. Here’s a full list of the scientologist’s gripes, generally focussing on copyright infringement on material relating to their technologies.
What I missed at the time (cos I’m so s-l-o-w) was that the archives of various scientologist debunking pages such as Xenu.net have actually been expunged from the Internet Archive. So when future generations examine what the opinion was in the greater digital community in 2006 about Scientology, large swathes of negative opinion will not be available.
This is awfully sinister. Remember Orwell’s 1984 anyone? From the Internet Archive’s own pages.
The Internet Archive is working to prevent the Internet — a new medium with major historical significance — and other “born-digital” materials from disappearing into the past. Collaborating with institutions including the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian, we are working to preserve a record for generations to come.<
The Internet Archive is opening its collections to researchers, historians, and scholars. The Archive has no vested interest in the discoveries of the users of its collections, nor is it a grant-making organization.
There’s little point in maligning a group of well meaning academics who run a not-for-profit organisation. About as much point in making them censor their archive, suppressing (that greatly abused word in scientology) dissenting voices. But there you go, all’s fair in love, war and cultdom.
I have little problem with any religious belief. Most can be made to appear silly when subjected to cold and rational scrutiny. This in itself does not make any article of faith untrue, it just means that it’s something that cannot be proven and is taken on faith. After all atheism is a belief structure. It’s intrinsic to humanity to believe in something even if it’s the absence of a god, dog or a flying spaghetti monster. Intuitively it’s a divisive rather than a spiritual path to censor those with a different opinion to your own. I guess I’d like to grow old in a world where the Internet enables safe freedom of thought and expression. A little bit of anarchy keeps the asylum a safe place, without it the pressure builds up and leads to lawlessness & war. Think of the internet as a democratic safety valve.