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“The current political situation is a situation of constant surveillance. Not only are we constantly watched and monitored, we are also constantly being recorded. Any collection of data becomes a treasure trove of information. A target.”
A long time ago, Sunil Shah convinced me that Kept Pages are better than keeping old revisions of wiki pages forever. This is unlike a source code repositioned. We don’t need version control software for conversation.
oddmuse.org/wiki/Kept_Pages
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“In computer science, it’s easier to keep everything. It just costs space on a disk. Forgetting is hard. And thus, being lazy, we decide to build a world that makes it easy to undo all our mistakes, to prove all our mistakes, to keep all our records, and so the road to the police state is paved with good intentions.”
As software developers, we often find that designing humane software is harder then ignoring human needs. But it’s what we need.
oddmuse.org/wiki/Kept_Pages
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Alex Schroeder 🐝 @kensanata

@dredmorbius writtes about the same issue under the title “data is liability”.
reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comme
I recently thought about this again in relation to “eternal messages” and Secure Scuttlebutt (). Why are we designing software to model conversations as a set of contracts? “I don’t like to design a system that doesn’t allow for any take backs. Human lives, our legal systems, or social conventions – they all allow for take backs wherever possible.”
alexschroeder.ch/wiki/2018-06-
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@kensanata @dredmorbius This is a really interesting thread. There is an interesting tension between the desire/need for archival and erasure. It seems like we need a clear definition of what should be archived and who should control those archives.

Pre-Internet letter archival makes for an interesting model.