Brownstone Institute
WHO IHR Modifications Were Illegally Approved
From the Brownstone Institute
By
The 77th meeting of the World Health Assembly concluded Saturday, June 01, 2024. This particular Assembly meeting, the first following the Covid crisis, failed to achieve agreement on the wording or passage of a proposed World Health Organization (WHO) pandemic “treaty,” also referred to as an “agreement.” In parallel to the treaty, the World Health Assembly (in close cooperation with the US HHS/Biden administration) has been working on “updating” the existing (2005) International Health Regulations (IHR) agreement, which historically functioned as a voluntary accord establishing international norms for reporting, managing, and cooperating in matters relating to infectious diseases and infectious disease outbreaks (including “pandemics”).
In blatant disregard for established protocol and procedures, sweeping IHR amendments were prepared behind closed doors, and then both were submitted for consideration and accepted by the World Health Assembly quite literally in the last moments of a meeting that stretched late into Saturday night, the last day of the meeting schedule.
Although the “Article 55” rules and regulations for amending the IHR explicitly require that “the text of any proposed amendment shall be communicated to all States Parties by the Director-General at least four months before the Health Assembly at which it is proposed for consideration,” the requirement of four months for review was disregarded in a rush to produce some tangible deliverable from the Assembly. This hasty and illegal action was taken in direct violation of its own charter, once again demonstrating an arbitrary and capricious disregard of established rules and precedent by the WHO under the leadership of the Director-General.
There was no actual vote to confirm and approve these amendments. According to the WHO, this was achieved by “consensus” among this unelected insider conclave rather than a vote; “Countries agreed by consensus to amend the International Health Regulations, which were last changed in 2005, such as by defining the term “pandemic emergency” and helping developing countries to gain better access to financing and medical products,” a WHO statement reported, continuing that “countries” agreed to complete negotiations on the pandemic accord with the year, “at the latest.”
Representatives from many WHO member nation-states were not in the room, and the ones that were there were encouraged to keep quiet. After the non-vote, there was giddy celebration of this achievement, clearly demonstrating the lack of somber maturity, commitment to both rules and careful diplomatic consensus, and absence of serious intent and purpose warranted by the topic.
This was clearly an insider clique acting unilaterally to circumvent normal process and mirrors a similar process used to confirm the re-appointment of Tedros Ghebreyesus to the Director-General position. This unelected WHO clique of “true believers” clearly signals that it believes itself above any requirements to comply with established international norms and standards, including its own. By their actions you will know them; the giddy arrogance of these actions predicts that WHO decision-making will continue to be arbitrary, capricious, and politicized, and will continue to reflect the will of various insider interest groups (and nation-states) rather than anything even approximating a broad-based international consensus.
Here in the United States, these unilateral actions, backed by an executive branch and bureaucracy that repeatedly demonstrates a deep disdain for the rule of law and the US Constitution, may require that individual States pass legislation to reject the WHO Amendments to IHR based on the illegality of the process and violation of Article 55. Similar discussions are occurring in the UK and across many WHO member states, adding momentum to the emerging WHO-exit movement.
For those not familiar, the current WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus is neither a physician nor a trained public health or epidemiology specialist, but rather is an Ethiopian microbiologist, malaria researcher, and politician.
The hastily approved IHR consolidates virtually unchecked authority and power of the Director-General to declare public health emergencies and pandemics as he/she may choose to define them, and thereby to trigger and guide the allocation of global resources as well as a wide range of public health actions and guidances. These activities include recommendations relating to “persons, baggage, cargo, containers, conveyances, goods and postal parcels,” but based on earlier draft language of proposed IHR amendments and the WHO pandemic “accord” are likely to extend to both invasive national surveillance and mandated public health “interventions” such as vaccines and non-pharmaceutical interventions such as social distancing and lockdowns. Not to mention the continuing weaponization of public health messaging via censorship of dissenting voices and liberal use of the fear-based tactics known as information or psychological bioterrorism to mobilize public opinion in favor of WHO objectives.
The IHR amendments retain troubling language regarding censorship. These provisions have been buried in Annex 1,A.2.c., which requires State Parties to “develop, strengthen and maintain core capacities…in relation to…surveillance…and risk communication, including addressing misinformation and disinformation.”
The requirement that nations “address” “misinformation and disinformation” is fraught with opportunities for abuse. None of these terms is defined in the document. Does “addressing” it mean censoring it, and possibly punishing those who have offered divergent opinions? We have already seen how doctors and scientists who disagreed with the WHO narrative under Covid-19 were censored for their views – views that turned out to be true. Some who offered protocols not recommended by the WHO even had their licenses to practice medicine threatened or suspended. How much worse will this censorship be if it is baked in as a requirement of the International Health Regulations?
The “surveillance” requirement does not specify what is to be surveilled. The IHR amendments, however, should be read together with the proposed Pandemic Treaty, which the WHO is continuing to negotiate. Article 5 of the most recent draft of the Treaty sets forth the “One Health Approach,” which connects and balances human, animal, plant, and environmental health, giving a pretext for surveillance on all these fronts.
Meanwhile, Article 4: Pandemic Prevention and Public Health Surveillance, states:
The Parties recognize that environmental, climatic, social, anthropogenic [climate change caused by people], and economic factors increase the risk of pandemics and endeavor to identify these factors and take them into consideration in the development and implementation of relevant policies…” Through the “One Health” approach, the WHO is asserting its authority over all aspects of life on earth, all of which are apparently to be surveilled.
Regarding the IHR, Article 35 details the requirements of “Health Documents,” including those in digital format. The system of digital health documents is consistent with, and in my opinion a precursor to, the Digital IDs described by the World Economic Forum. According to the attached WEF Chart, people will need a Digital ID to:
- Access healthcare insurance and treatment
- Open bank accounts and carry out online transactions
- Travel
- Access Humanitarian Services
- Shop and conduct business transactions
- Participate in social media
- Pay taxes, vote, collect government benefits
- Own a communication device [such as a cell phone or a computer]
In other words, individuals will need Digital IDs to access almost every aspect of civilized society. All of our actions, taken with the use of Digital IDs, will be tracked and traced. If we step out of line, we can be punished by, for example, being severed from our bank accounts and credit cards – similar to what happened to the Canadian Truckers. Digital IDs are a form of mass surveillance and totalitarian control.
These Digital IDs are currently being rolled out by the World Health Organization in collaboration with the European Union. Most of us will agree that this is not the way forward to make the world safer but rather is a path leading towards a techno-totalitarian hellscape.
To support decision-making, the IHR authorizes the Director-General to appoint an “IHR Expert Roster,” an “Expert Committee” selected from the “IHR Expert Roster,” as well as a “Review Committee.” However, although the committees may make recommendations, the Director-General will have final decision authority in all relevant matters.
To further illustrate the point, the revised IHR directs that “The Director-General shall invite Member States, the United Nations and its specialized agencies and other relevant intergovernmental organizations or nongovernmental organizations in official relations with WHO to designate representatives to attend the Committee sessions. Such representatives may submit memoranda and, with the consent of the Chairperson, make statements on the subjects under discussion. They shall not have the right to vote.”
The approved amendments redefine the definition of a “Pandemic Emergency;” include a newly added emphasis on “equity and solidarity;” direct that independent Nations (“States Parties”) shall assist each other to support local production capacity for research, development, and manufacturing of health products; that equitable access to relevant health products for public health emergencies including pandemics shall be facilitated; and that developed nations shall make available “relevant terms of their research and development agreements for relevant health products related to promoting equitable access to such products during a public health emergency of international concern, including a pandemic emergency.”
The amended IHR also directs that each nation (“States Parties”) shall “develop, strengthen and maintain core capacities” for “preventing, preparing for and responding to public health risks and events,” including in relation to:
- Surveillance
- On-site Investigations
- Laboratory diagnostics, including referral of samples
- Implementation of control measures
- Access to health services and health products needed for the response
- Risk communication, including addressing misinformation and disinformation
- Logistical assistance
The amended IHR also includes copious new language, terms, and conditions relating to the responsibilities of “States Parties” to perform surveillance and transparent timely reporting of information relating to infectious disease outbreaks. This includes multiple references to information gathering, sharing, and distribution, including the need to counter the distribution of “misinformation and disinformation”.
There is the appearance that some of this new text may be informed by the recent failure of China (PRC/CCP) to provide timely and complete reporting of events and information relating to the initial SARS-CoV-2 outbreak. Unfortunately, this failure to inform in a timely manner was not unique. There is a long history of repeated, chronic problems with transparent national reporting of infectious disease outbreaks. A variety of adverse economic and political impacts are associated with infectious disease outbreaks, and this creates a strong incentive for both local politicians and public health officials to minimize initial reporting of unusual infectious disease signals or findings.
The amended IHR frequently refers to “scientific principles as well as the available scientific evidence and other relevant information” as a key factor in guiding decision-making. However, the IHR does not acknowledge the diversity of opinion surrounding what are considered sound and valid “scientific principles” or “scientific evidence,” and there is no indication that the World Health Assembly or the WHO recognizes how readily “scientific principles” and “scientific evidence” were manipulated or otherwise biased during prior public health crises, and the likelihood that this will continue to happen on a regular basis unless reforms designed to respect diversity of opinion and interpretation are implemented. There seems to be a complete lack of self-awareness of the rampant groupthink that chronically characterizes WHO decision-making during both the Covid crisis as well as prior public health events of concern.
Although many of these revisions are generally reasonable and aligned with good and practical international public health norms and actions, and in some cases are greatly improved relative to prior draft language, the recent history of WHO mismanagement and actual WHO spreading and amplification of mis- and disinformation regarding SARS-CoV-2 virology, immunology, and pathophysiology, pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions for SARS-CoV-2 raise legitimate concerns about how these words will be interpreted and implemented.
Furthermore, the pattern of repeated arbitrary, capricious, and scientifically unjustifiable decisions regarding Covid and monkeypox suggests that expanding the authority of either the Director-General or the WHO is unwise at this time. Rather, more mature, thoughtful, and prudent evaluation of that recent experience argues for reduced rather than expanded authority, and for a more decentralized, multilateral model for the management of global and regional public health risks and events. The world does not need more condescending authoritarianism from those entrusted to facilitate international cooperation in public health.
Just speaking in terms of best practices, it is clearly inappropriate to rely on administrators with such a vested personal interest in the outcome to be so intimately involved in crafting sweeping international policy changes. This revision process should have been managed by an independent commission of seasoned, objective experts who were carefully vetted to minimize potential conflict of interest.
The hasty willingness to bypass its own charter by unilaterally and arbitrarily jamming these changes through on extremely short notice raises further concerns regarding the reliability, maturity, and competency of the WHO, the World Health Assembly, and the Director-General to provide the calm, steady hand so sorely needed after the mismanaged major public health catastrophe and global trauma which all have experienced over the last four years.
The world, its inhabitants, those who work to provide medical care, and the overall world health enterprise deserve better.
Brownstone Institute
If Trump Wins
From the Brownstone Institute
By
How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process?
Trump enjoys the momentum. Four of the most recent major national polls show him up 2 to 3%, while Democratic-friendly outlets like the New York Times and CNN both show a TIE race in their final surveys. The 2016 and 2020 elections were razor close even though Clinton (5%) and Biden (8%) had solid polling leads at this point. We need to contemplate a Trump win not only in the electoral college but also in the popular vote.
Here are some thoughts:
- JD Vance ascendant, obviously. Big implications for the Republican trajectory.
- Will Trump replace Fed chairman Jay Powell? Or merely jawbone for a change in policy? In a new CNBC interview, former Fed governor Kevin Warsh argues that the Fed has juiced both the stock market and inflation. Would reducing inflation, which Trump has promised, automatically therefore lead to a stock market correction and economic slowdown? Not necessarily. If Trump unleashes productive economic activity and Congress ends the fiscal blowout, the Fed could normalize monetary policy without causing a major economic slump.
- Will Trump impose the broad and deep tariffs he proposed? Or will he mostly threaten them as a bargaining tool with China? I’m betting on some of the former but more of the latter. We notice, however, Trump allies are floating a trial balloon to replace income taxes with tariffs. As impractical and improbable as that may be, we’re glad to see the mention of radical tax reform reemerge after too long an absence from the national discussion.
- How will he organize the “deportation” of illegal migrants? In the best case, it will be difficult. There will be scuffles and chases. Critics will charge the new Administration as cruel and worse. How much stomach will Republicans have for a messy process? One idea would be to offer a “reverse amnesty” – if you leave peacefully and agree not to return illegally, we will forgive your previous illegal entry(s) and minor violations. This would incentivize self-identification and quiet departure. Plus it would help authorities track those leaving. Would migrant departures truly hit the economy, as critics charge? We doubt large effects. Substantial native populations are still underemployed or absent from the workforce.
- We should expect a major retrenchment of regulatory intrusions across the economy – from energy to crypto. Combined with recent Supreme Court action, such as the Chevron reversal, and assisted by the Elon Musk’s substance and narrative, it could be a regulatory renaissance. Extension of the 2017 tax cuts also becomes far more likely.
- Trump has never worried much about debt, deficits, or spending. But he’s tapped Elon Musk as government efficiency czar. It’s an orthogonal approach to spending reform instead of the traditional (and unsuccessful) Paul Ryan playbook. Can this good cop-bad cop duo at the very least return out-of-control outlays to a pre-Covid path? Can they at least cancel purely kleptocratic programs, such as the $370-billion Green Energy slush funds? Might they go even further – leveraging the unpopular spending explosion and resulting inflation to achieve more revolutionary effects on government spending and reach? Or will the powerful and perennial forces of government expansion win yet again, sustaining a one-way ratchet not even Elon can defeat?
- What if the economy turns south? One catalyst might be the gigantic unrealized bond losses on bank balance sheets; another might be commercial real estate collapse. Although reported GDP growth has been okay, the inflation hangover is helping Trump win on the economy. But many believe the post-pandemic economic expansion is merely a sugar-high and has already lasted longer than expected. A downturn early in Trump’s term could complicate many of his plans.
- How will NATO and its transatlantic network respond? Or more generally, what will the neocon and neoliberal hawks, concentrated in DC and the media, but little loved otherwise, do? Does this item from Anne Applebaum — arguing Trump resembles Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin all rolled into one — portend continued all-out war on prudent foreign policy? Or will they adopt a more sophisticated approach? If the neocons move wholesale and formally (back) into the Democratic fold, how long will the coalition of wokes and militarists hold? On the economic front, Europe, already underperforming vis-a-vis the US, will fall even further behind without big changes. Reformers should gain at the expense of the transatlantic WEF-style bureaucrats.
- Can Trump avoid another internal sabotage of his Administration? Before then, if the election results are tight, will the Democrats seek to complicate or even block his inauguration? Can he win approval for his appointees in the Senate? Can he clean house across the vast public agencies? How long will it take to recruit, train, and reinvigorate talented military leadership, which we chased away in recent years? And how will Trump counter – and avoid overreacting to – taunts, riots, unrest, and lawfare, designed to bolster the case he’s an authoritarian?
- Will the Democrats reorient toward the center, a la Bill Clinton? Or will the blinding hatred of Trump fuel yet more radicalism? Orthodox political thinking suggests a moderation. Especially if Trump wins the popular vote, or comes close, pragmatic Democrats will counsel a reformation. James Carville, for example, already complains that his party careened recklessly away from male voters. And Trump’s apparent pickups among Black and Latino voters complicate the Democrats’ longstanding identity-focused strategy. Other incentives might push toward continued belligerence and extreme wokeness, however, and thus an intra-party war.
- Will the half of the country which inexplicably retains any confidence in the legacy media at least begin rethinking its information diet and filters? Or has the infowarp inflicted permanent damage?
- Will big business, which shifted hard toward Democrats over the last 15 years, recalibrate toward the GOP? Parts of Silicon Valley over the last year began a reorientation — e.g. Elon Musk, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, and before them, Peter Thiel in 2016. But those are the entrepreneurs. In the receding past, businesses large and small generally lined up against government overreach. Then Big Business and Big Government merged. Now, a chief divide is between politically-enmeshed bureaucratic businesses and entrepreneurial ones. Does the GOP even want many of the big guys back? The GOP’s new alignment with “Little Tech” is an exciting development, especially after being shut out of Silicon Valley for the last two decades.
- Industry winners: traditional energy, nuclear energy, Little Tech. Industry losers: Green Energy, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Big Food. Individual winners: X (nee Twitter), Elon Musk, RFK, Jr.
- How will the Censorship Industrial Complex react? A Trump win will pose both a symbolic and operational blow to governmental, non-governmental, old media, and new media outlets determined to craft and control facts and narratives. It will complicate their mission, funding, and organizational web. Will they persist in their “mis/disinformation” framing and their badgering of old media and social media companies to moderate content aggressively? Or will they devise a new strategy? A.I. is pretty clearly the next frontier in the information wars. How will those who propagandize and rewire human minds attempt to program and prewire artificial ones?
- How will Trump integrate RFK, Jr. and his movement? Will RFK, Jr. achieve real influence, especially on health issues? Big Pharma and Big Public Health will wage a holy war to block reforms in general and accountability for Covid mistakes in particular.
- Trump has promised to end the war between Russia and Ukraine. On one hand, it should be easy. Despite what you hear from DC media and think tanks, Ukraine is losing badly. Hundreds of thousands are dead, and its military is depleted and faltering. Ukraine should want a deal quickly, before it loses yet more people and territory. Russia, meanwhile, always said it wants a deal, even before the war started, focusing on Ukrainian neutrality. Why Ukrainian neutrality should bother the US was always a mystery. And yet even critics of the West’s support for Ukraine, who want an agreement, think it will be difficult to achieve. The Western foreign policy establishment has invested too much credibility and emotion. It will charge “appeasement” and “betrayal” and make any deal difficult for Trump. Russia, meanwhile, has secured so much territory and now has Odessa and Kharkiv in its sights. Putin will not be eager to accept a deal he would have taken in 2021 or before. The far better path for all involved was a pre-war agreement, or the one negotiated but scuttled in April 2022.
- What if A.I. launches a new productivity boom, enabled by an agenda of energy abundance, including a nuclear power revival? The economic tailwinds could remake politics even more than we currently see.
- Can Trump, having run and won his last campaign, consolidate gains by reaching out and uniting the portions of the country willing to take an extended hand?
Republished from the author’s Substack
Brownstone Institute
They Are Scrubbing the Internet Right Now
From the Brownstone Institute
By
For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
Instances of censorship are growing to the point of normalization. Despite ongoing litigation and more public attention, mainstream social media has been more ferocious in recent months than ever before. Podcasters know for sure what will be instantly deleted and debate among themselves over content in gray areas. Some like Brownstone have given up on YouTube in favor of Rumble, sacrificing vast audiences if only to see their content survive to see the light of day.
It’s not always about being censored or not. Today’s algorithms include a range of tools that affect searchability and findability. For example, the Joe Rogan interview with Donald Trump racked up an astonishing 34 million views before YouTube and Google tweaked their search engines to make it hard to discover, while even presiding over a technical malfunction that disabled viewing for many people. Faced with this, Rogan went to the platform X to post all three hours.
Navigating this thicket of censorship and quasi-censorship has become part of the business model of alternative media.
Those are just the headline cases. Beneath the headlines, there are technical events taking place that are fundamentally affecting the ability of any historian even to look back and tell what is happening. Incredibly, the service Archive.org which has been around since 1994 has stopped taking images of content on all platforms. For the first time in 30 years, we have gone a long swath of time – since October 8-10 – since this service has chronicled the life of the Internet in real time.
As of this writing, we have no way to verify content that has been posted for three weeks of October leading to the days of the most contentious and consequential election of our lifetimes. Crucially, this is not about partisanship or ideological discrimination. No websites on the Internet are being archived in ways that are available to users. In effect, the whole memory of our main information system is just a big black hole right now.
The trouble on Archive.org began on October 8, 2024, when the service was suddenly hit with a massive Denial of Service attack (DDOS) that not only took down the service but introduced a level of failure that nearly took it out completely. Working around the clock, Archive.org came back as a read-only service where it stands today. However, you can only read content that was posted before the attack. The service has yet to resume any public display of mirroring of any sites on the Internet.
In other words, the only source on the entire World Wide Web that mirrors content in real time has been disabled. For the first time since the invention of the web browser itself, researchers have been robbed of the ability to compare past with future content, an action that is a staple of researchers looking into government and corporate actions.
It was using this service, for example, that enabled Brownstone researchers to discover precisely what the CDC had said about Plexiglas, filtration systems, mail-in ballots, and rental moratoriums. That content was all later scrubbed off the live Internet, so accessing archive copies was the only way we could know and verify what was true. It was the same with the World Health Organization and its disparagement of natural immunity which was later changed. We were able to document the shifting definitions thanks only to this tool which is now disabled.
What this means is the following: Any website can post anything today and take it down tomorrow and leave no record of what they posted unless some user somewhere happened to take a screenshot. Even then there is no way to verify its authenticity. The standard approach to know who said what and when is now gone. That is to say that the whole Internet is already being censored in real time so that during these crucial weeks, when vast swaths of the public fully expect foul play, anyone in the information industry can get away with anything and not get caught.
We know what you are thinking. Surely this DDOS attack was not a coincidence. The time was just too perfect. And maybe that is right. We just do not know. Does Archive.org suspect something along those lines? Here is what they say:
Last week, along with a DDOS attack and exposure of patron email addresses and encrypted passwords, the Internet Archive’s website javascript was defaced, leading us to bring the site down to access and improve our security. The stored data of the Internet Archive is safe and we are working on resuming services safely. This new reality requires heightened attention to cyber security and we are responding. We apologize for the impact of these library services being unavailable.
Deep state? As with all these things, there is no way to know, but the effort to blast away the ability of the Internet to have a verified history fits neatly into the stakeholder model of information distribution that has clearly been prioritized on a global level. The Declaration of the Future of the Internet makes that very clear: the Internet should be “governed through the multi-stakeholder approach, whereby governments and relevant authorities partner with academics, civil society, the private sector, technical community and others.” All of these stakeholders benefit from the ability to act online without leaving a trace.
To be sure, a librarian at Archive.org has written that “While the Wayback Machine has been in read-only mode, web crawling and archiving have continued. Those materials will be available via the Wayback Machine as services are secured.”
When? We do not know. Before the election? In five years? There might be some technical reasons but it might seem that if web crawling is continuing behind the scenes, as the note suggests, that too could be available in read-only mode now. It is not.
Disturbingly, this erasure of Internet memory is happening in more than one place. For many years, Google offered a cached version of the link you were seeking just below the live version. They have plenty of server space to enable that now, but no: that service is now completely gone. In fact, the Google cache service officially ended just a week or two before the Archive.org crash, at the end of September 2024.
Thus the two available tools for searching cached pages on the Internet disappeared within weeks of each other and within weeks of the November 5th election.
Other disturbing trends are also turning Internet search results increasingly into AI-controlled lists of establishment-approved narratives. The web standard used to be for search result rankings to be governed by user behavior, links, citations, and so forth. These were more or less organic metrics, based on an aggregation of data indicating how useful a search result was to Internet users. Put very simply, the more people found a search result useful, the higher it would rank. Google now uses very different metrics to rank search results, including what it considers “trusted sources” and other opaque, subjective determinations.
Furthermore, the most widely used service that once ranked websites based on traffic is now gone. That service was called Alexa. The company that created it was independent. Then one day in 1999, it was bought by Amazon. That seemed encouraging because Amazon was well-heeled. The acquisition seemed to codify the tool that everyone was using as a kind of metric of status on the web. It was common back in the day to take note of an article somewhere on the web and then look it up on Alexa to see its reach. If it was important, one would take notice, but if it was not, no one particularly cared.
This is how an entire generation of web technicians functioned. The system worked as well as one could possibly expect.
Then, in 2014, years after acquiring the ranking service Alexa, Amazon did a strange thing. It released its home assistant (and surveillance device) with the same name. Suddenly, everyone had them in their homes and would find out anything by saying “Hey Alexa.” Something seemed strange about Amazon naming its new product after an unrelated business it had acquired years earlier. No doubt there was some confusion caused by the naming overlap.
Here’s what happened next. In 2022, Amazon actively took down the web ranking tool. It didn’t sell it. It didn’t raise the prices. It didn’t do anything with it. It suddenly made it go completely dark.
No one could figure out why. It was the industry standard, and suddenly it was gone. Not sold, just blasted away. No longer could anyone figure out the traffic-based website rankings of anything without paying very high prices for hard-to-use proprietary products.
All of these data points that might seem unrelated when considered individually, are actually part of a long trajectory that has shifted our information landscape into unrecognizable territory. The Covid events of 2020-2023, with massive global censorship and propaganda efforts, greatly accelerated these trends.
One wonders if anyone will remember what it was once like. The hacking and hobbling of Archive.org underscores the point: there will be no more memory.
As of this writing, fully three weeks of web content have not been archived. What we are missing and what has changed is anyone’s guess. And we have no idea when the service will come back. It is entirely possible that it will not come back, that the only real history to which we can take recourse will be pre-October 8, 2024, the date on which everything changed.
The Internet was founded to be free and democratic. It will require herculean efforts at this point to restore that vision, because something else is quickly replacing it.
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