Brownstone Institute
The Most Important Meeting in the History of the World That Never Happened
From the Brownstone Institute
BY
There was a brief moment in Spring 2020, just a few days into “15 Days to Slow the Spread,” when we had a chance to change our trajectory. A distinct inflection point where if we had done just one thing differently, and caught the crazy COVID coaster before it got locked in its tracks, things could have turned out very differently over these last three plus years.
In the third week of March a secret emergency meeting was scheduled to take place between President Donald Trump, the COVID Task Force, and eight of the most eminently qualified public health experts in the world. This elite group of scientists was slated to present the highest-level decision-makers in our government with an alternative POV to lock down; a much-needed second opinion on national turtling.
We didn’t know it at the time, but this would have been the most important meeting of the COVID-19 era. But it never occurred.
What happened?
This has been a nagging question ever since July 27, 2020 when BuzzFeed News broke the news in an article by Stephanie M. Lee: “An Elite Group Of Scientists Tried To Warn Trump Against Lockdowns In March.” In her article Ms. Lee framed this aborted meeting as a dodged bullet, and the scientists as unhelpful meddlers, but for many of us the fact that there even was an attempted meeting like this was extremely heartening.
Because for months we had been led to believe that this novel, authoritarian response was unanimous, that “the science was settled” and yet here we find out that some of the most famous scientists in the world didn’t quite agree with “the science.” Not only that, but they had major issues with the process, they questioned the data, and they were extremely concerned about the downstream, long-term effects to our society from locking down. But Lee’s article didn’t even attempt to answer the one big glaring, nagging question left in her article: “Why?”
If you remember back to Late Winter/Early Spring 2020 the entire connected world went from “Hey, no big deal,” to “Hey, what’s going on in Italy?” to “Holy shit, we’re all gonna die!” in a matter of just a few weeks. COVID mania quickly captured us all, and by early March we were suddenly armchair experts on cytokine storms and case counts, and even your aunt Glenda posted that “Flatten the Curve” Washington Postarticle on Facebook and suddenly we found ourselves on March 15, 2020 watching in slack-jawed horror as Trump, Fauci, and Birx stood up there, telling us their bright idea was to shut down the entire country. For just two weeks they said. To protect our hospitals from “the spike” they said. If we didn’t, they said, two million people would surely die.
And who were we to argue? They had a powerpoint presentation with logos and charts, the laughable Imperial College London model, and of course the force of government behind them.
The national reaction was… curious. Some of us, but not nearly enough, were horrified; viscerally and vehemently opposed to this entire concept on scientific, moral and legal grounds. But we were grossly outnumbered. The vast majority of the population was really scared, and poll after poll indicated they were in favor of these unprecedented, draconian measures. Some of our fellow humans even seemed downright giddy at the prospect of hunkering down indefinitely, until it was “safe” to come out; whatever the shifting daily definition of “safe” was, and whatever the ultimate societal cost.
Although lockdown was presented to us that day as a fait accompli, some of us were undeterred. We spoke up to our friends, families, and coworkers and spoke out on social media, writing letters, holding protests, doing whatever we could to to reason, educate, even plead with our local representatives, leaders and opinion-makers not to continue down this novel path. But to no avail. “Shut up,” they said.
We were just normies, after all, and at the time there were very few actual “experts” on our side. Luckily for us, one of those few was John Ioannidis, an immensely respected physician, scientist, statistician, mathematician, Stanford professor, and writer who was renowned for his works in–get this–epidemiology and evidence-based medicine. Ioannidis was the perfect voice to counter the runaway COVID-19 pandemic response narrative.
And speak up he did. On March 17, 2020 Ioannidis published a groundbreaking STAT article “A fiasco in the making? As the coronavirus pandemic takes hold, we are making decisions without reliable data.” He asked aloud what many of us were wondering privately: would this fiat public health response be a “once-in-a-century evidence fiasco?”
In his article Ioannidis pointed out that all the COVID data to date was actually “of very bad quality,” and we were making monumental decisions daily based on dangerously unreliable information. He also pointed out that the chances of dying for those infected (the Infection Fatality Rate) had to be be much lower than the ridiculous 3.4 percent Case Fatality Rate (CFR) publicly announced by the WHO; his working theory being that many more people had been infected without noticing it, or without being tested.
Ioannidis’ rational and well-reasoned POV in STAT ran squarely against the official narrative, and garnered immediate pushback from “the establishment.” Thankfully, John Ioannidis is a rare brave person, so he promptly ignored the narrative police and submitted his case directly to the top: President Donald J. Trump.
In his letter to the White House Ioannidis warned Trump against “shutting down the country for a very long time and jeopardizing so many lives in doing this” and he requested an emergency meeting to provide all the key stakeholders in the Executive Branch a much-needed second opinion, delivered from a “diverse panel of the top experts in the world.”
This was his letter:
“Dr Ioannidis (bio below) is assembling a group of world renowned scientists who can contribute insights to help solve the major challenge of COVID-19, by intensifying efforts to understand the denominator of infected people (much larger than what is documented to-date) and having a science- and data-informed, targeted approach rather than shutting down the country for very long time and jeopardizing so many lives in doing this. The aim is to identify the best way to both save more lives and avoid serious damage to the US economy using the most reliable data, since the infection rate may be off by a very large factor versus the number of currently documented cases. The scientists are willing to come to the White House personally or join by video conference.”
The proposed panel consisted of:
Jeffrey Klausner, MD MPH – Professor of Clinical Population and Public Health Sciences at USC currently (was Professor at UCLA in 2020).
Art Reingold – Professor of Epidemiology in the School of Public Health at Berkeley.
Jay Bhattacharya, MD, PhD – Professor of Medicine at Stanford University, research associate at the National Bureau of Economics Research.
James Fowler, PhD – Professor of Infectious Diseases and Global Public Health at UCSD
Sten H. Vermund, MD, PhD – Dean of the Yale School of Public Health (2017-2022)
David L. Katz, MD, MPH – founder of Yale University’s Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center.
Michael Levitt, PhD – Nobel Prize Winner, Professor of Structural Biology at Stanford.
Daniel B. Jernigan, MD, MPH – Director of the Influenza Division in the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases (NCIRD) at CDC.
On amazingly short notice, Ioannidis had managed to assemble a literal COVID dream team. These scientists were the real deal: actual bonafide “experts” in a landscape of cosplayers and clout chasers.
When I asked Ioannidis about his historic effort to have an open dialogue with the White House and COVID Task Force in March 2020 he replied to me by e-mail:
“The effort was to create a team with top scientists in epidemiology, public health, health policy, population sciences, social sciences, social networks, computational modeling, healthcare, economics, and respiratory infections. We wanted to help the leadership and the Task Force. The Task Force had stellar, world-caliber scientists like Fauci, Redfield, and Birx, but their otherwise amazing expertise did not cover specifically these areas.”
To that end, John Ioannidis didn’t just pick names out of a hat, he curated this group for maximum positive impact. This was not only an extremely talented group, it was an extremely diverse group. They didn’t all agree on what the response to COVID should be, either. But in the interest of faithfully representing all possible angles and views, Ioannidis insisted they take part. In fact Reinhold and Vermund were recruited by Ioannidis precisely because they didn’t agree with him on how to handle things, and none of the eight were political actors. Despite insinuations to the contrary.
“I have absolutely no clue what the members of the team voted! And it really does not (should not) matter.”
The idea of an emergency White House meeting like this was especially radical because at that time any discussion to the contrary was considered taboo. But lockdown was the most important public health decision in modern human history: one that would potentially affect the future of the entire planet. So why not take a moment to hash it out, with some of the smartest and most qualified people on the planet, and make sure we were making the correct decision?
As of March 24, 2020 the calendars had been aligned and this landmark meeting seemed to be a “go.”
“Request has gone in officially, waiting to hear…”
Then… nothing.
Radio silence.
Finally, on March 28 Ioannidis emailed the group:
“Re: meeting with the President in D.C. Have kept asking/putting gentle pressure, I think our ideas have infiltrated the White House regardless, I hope to have more news on Monday…”
Although Stephanie M. Lee of Buzzfeed News insinuated this was Ioannidis’ way of claiming victory, when asked about it he was keen to clarify:
“I am self-sarcastic here, as it was apparent that we were NOT being heard and other people in the team were also self-sarcastic in saying that our proposal had hit on a wall and bounced.”
So that the heck happened between March 24 and March 28? How did this historic meeting go from “on” to “Oh, never mind?”
What on earth could’ve nuked it?
Or… who?
“I initially communicated myself with a White House person, there is no need to create trouble for that person by naming, I believe that person made a well-intentioned effort, even if it did not work. I don’t know if the message did reach Trump or not and I have no clue who cancelled the meeting and why it came to naught.”
A benign answer could simply be that “Shit happens.” After all, people cancel meetings all the time, especially Presidents and their handlers in the middle of a political and public health maelstrom.
But the meeting could have also been canceled for a host of other reasons, especially political ones, and there were in fact a few key events that occurred in those key 4 gap days that may have had an impact:
March 24, 2020 Trump murmured his famous “Open by Easter” viral bite in a walking ‘n talking interview with Fox’s Bill Hemmer. Which, interestingly, is often confused with Trump wanting to open “early,” when in fact Easter 2020 landed on April 15: a full 15 days past the promised end of the first official “15 Days.” So in effect Trump was already promising to extend the lockdown:
TRUMP: …I’d love to have an open by Easter. Okay?
HEMMER: Oh, wow. Okay.
TRUMP: I would to have it open by Easter. I will — I will tell you that right now. I would love to have that — it’s such an important day for other reasons, but I’ll make it an important day for this too. I would love to have the country opened up and just raring to go by Easter.
HEMMER: That’s April 12th. So we will watch and see what happens.
TRUMP: Good.
Also on March 24, 2020 India officially declared a national 21-day lockdown, which was longer than our puny #15Days, and their lockdown would affect over 1.3 billion people as opposed to our few hundred million. This was framed as “India takes COVID super-seriously,” of course.
On March 25th, 2020 the US Senate passed the CARES Act, a stonking $2.2 trillion economic “stimulus bill” which promised to go directly to adversely affected individuals, businesses, schools and hospitals and never ever ever be wasted, misappropriated, or brazenly stolen by ne’er-do-wells.
Prince Charles tested positive for COVID-19 on March 25th, 2020 as well. And he died. No, wait, my bad, he experienced mild symptoms and self-isolated with servants at his residence in Scotland.
On March 26, 2020 three pretty big-deal things happened. One, the US Department of Labor reported that 3.3 million people filed for unemployment benefits, making it the highest number of initial jobless claims in American history at the time. It was a big story at the time. But what also happened on March 26, 2020is that the US became “the country with the most confirmed COVID cases,” officially surpassing China and Italy for that coveted top spot.
March 26, 2020 also featured the WHO’s virtual “Extraordinary Leaders’ Summit on COVID-19” where World Health Organization Director-General Tedros announced:
“We are at war with a virus that threatens to tear us apart – if we let it. Almost half a million people have already been infected, and more than 20,000 have lost their lives. The pandemic is accelerating at an exponential rate…Without aggressive action in all countries, millions could die. This is a global crisis that demands a global response…Fight hard. Fight like hell. Fight like your lives depend on it – because they do. The best and only way to protect life, livelihoods and economies is to stop the virus…Many of your countries have imposed drastic social and economic restrictions, shutting schools and businesses, and asking people to stay at home. These measures will take some of the heat out of the epidemic, but they will not extinguish it. We must do more.”
Could any of these happenings have caused the Trump camp to say, “We’re good. Thanks for the offer anyway, nerds?”
Who knows.
But the next explanation is far more interesting, and more conspiratorial: was there someone in or near the White House that put the kibosh on this thing? Did Fauci and/or Birx convince Kushner to tell Meadows to tell Trump to tell his secretary to nix the meeting?
Hmmmm. If only there was a way to find this out.
“Indeed, I would be the first to love to know what happened!”
In the aforementioned BuzzFeed article “An Elite Group Of Scientists Tried To Warn Trump Against Lockdowns In March” author Stephanie Lee presented only a select few “obtained” emails, to make her case.
So I “obtained” the same emails via FOIA to the public universities, and, really, there’s nothing in those emails than a group of mutually-respected peers desperately trying to coordinate and contribute to this burgeoning national disaster; these were all people desperately trying to do the right thing for the country, and the world. They just wanted to help.
For what it’s worth, these emails are an incredible time capsule documenting the events and societal tenor of that important time, and are presented here, in their entirety. Whatever caused this critically important meeting to be canceled, it’s now quite apparent that it would’ve been better had that meeting taken place.
Because even under the most gracious definitions of “lockdown” our public health reaction to COVID was a colossal mistake. A massive abysmal failure, based on any neutral metric. Lockdown failed on stopping the virus, it failed on overall health outcomes, it failed on the economy, it failed on “equity,” it failed our kids and perhaps most tellingly it failed our principles. In the future there will be entire sections of libraries dedicated to the mind-boggling extent of the destruction caused by these panicked, pseudoscientific public-health decisions. Decisions that were forced on us, without even so much as a show vote.
Much less a proper discussion. And that’s what this meeting would have been: a discussion. An opportunity to expose the Leader of the Free World to a different and better set of ideas on how to handle the COVID-19 pandemic. The fact is that, in the third week of March 2020, we were all unceremoniously denied a basic medical, human right: an informed second opinion.
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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