This is not what it seems, if it seems like I might be railing against the BBC. No, the details are incidental. It is the access to internet history that is the real subject here.
I’ll explain = I was scrolling through Twitter and saw someone complaining about the use of words in a BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) article. The headline ran,
“Gloomy in Looe as fishermen reflect on Labour coup.”
Looe is a town on the south coast of Cornwall, and beyond that I am not sure what point the writer was trying to make. It’s not important. What annoyed a person on Twitter was the use of the word ‘coup’.
It was not a coup, said the person on Twitter – Labour were duly elected in a General Election of the United Kingdom.
When I mentioned it to Tamara she thought the writer was aiming for assonance between ‘Looe’ and ‘coup’.
And she is probably right.
And now here is the thing. When I clicked the link to read the article, it read
“Gloom in Looe as fishermen reflect on Labour win”
What happened to the coup?
And that is where the WayBack Machine, the Internet Archive comes in. I went to it and put in the URL for the BBC article that said ‘win’ – and then looked back to an earlier capture – and there it is – ‘coup’.
`This is the benefit, the huge benefit of this service that as it says allows anyone to “Explore more than 866 billion web pages saved over time”
So with this all said, here is the earlier and original version of the BBC article
All kinds of parallels can be drawn here. Soviet Russia famously altered photographs and texts retrospectively to promote whatever the dominant message was. I recall seeing a photo in a book on propaganda that showed a man standing next to Stalin. And then a later photograph of the same scene, and the man had been airbrushed out because he had fallen out of favour with the regime.
Then the original photograph was discovered, and it showed that the man standing next to Stalin had never been there at all. So first he was added in, and then taken out again.
And then there is wholesale alteration of history in George Orwell’s 1984. I read that quite recently, never having got around to it before. And it crushes like a tank crushes bodies.
That brings me up to date and the talk about whether Biden should run. The arguments are whatever the arguments are. But the people making the arguments – who trusts them? Who knows what manipulated slant of the truth they are trying to insinuate into the minds of people.
We know that even audio and videos can be manipulated with AI.
Nothing is trusted in a world in which we cannot escape one another and trust is the ultimate currency.
Woe on us for the mess all around us.
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