Time Capsules for Utopia
Moral panics fade, documents talk forever
In 1915, a man accused of raping a white girl was kidnapped from a Georgia jail cell and lynched by a mob. Later archives proved his innocence. This martyr for truth was Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager whose trial and murder united the most extreme factions of Heritage America: the KKK and the NAACP.1 His memory only survives today thanks to an obscure Georgia law mandating the preservation of court records.
Satyameva Jayate, as the Hindus say, because mobs hate paperwork. Samuel Morton spent decades cataloguing skulls from around the world with obsessive precision. When the anti-racism crusader Stephen Jay Gould posthumously accused the scientist of racist bias in The Mismeasure of Man, he never touched a single specimen. Gould’s own fraud could only be exposed later because Morton’s original data survived.2
That collection of skulls, once called the “American Golgotha,” now rests in a university archive. Research libraries are the current leading memory palaces, a role they inherited from monasteries after the printing press and scientific revolution. But today’s universities refuse their duty to transmit humanity’s heritage across generations. They proudly withhold data judged dangerous to “demographic groups.”3
This obscurantism is a deep break from the tradition of American librarianship, which resisted censorship and trusted individuals to “select the good and reject the bad.”4 As libraries embraced activist curation, archival purists have become refugees. They joined projects like Google Books, which sought to digitize every known book; and Internet Archive, which focuses on expanding access, including to banned books.
You Are Watching a Modified Version
Which “banned books”? Not the clerisy’s sexual instruction for adolescents. Smut is easily replaced, but rigorous scholarship is hard to rebuild. One chokepoint is the academic publisher, as seen in the case of the retraction of a study showing social contagion in teen gender dysphoria. Another is data access, as when the NIH banned Bryan Pesta for finding evidence of a genetic contribution to the black-white IQ gap.
For-profit platforms are a third chokepoint, as when Reddit deleted all posts from r/HBD and r/GenderCritical during 2020’s moral panic. Scholars backup research, but forum users rarely do, so most of the content was likely gone for good. Since Reddit trains large language models, such ideological pruning had effects that only became clear later, baking single-cause explanations for racial differences into AI systems.
Dishonest goals go hand-in-hand with dishonest methods, as we saw with Gould, and the methods grow more sophisticated and hidden. Digital streaming enables new forms of stealth revision at scale, as when Disney acquired the 1971 Oscar-winning The French Connection. Untouched for over 50 years, Disney silently snipped the n-word from the film, giving viewers no warning they were watching an edited version.
So, memory-holing of taboo research and cultural artifacts operates at platform (Reddit), institutional (NIH), and market (Disney) levels, with no disclosure or due-process guarantees for creators. Digital distribution makes verification nearly impossible. You can’t verify provenance (is this the authentic version?) or integrity (has it been silently altered?). Mainstream tech and culture have ignored this problem.
Preserve First, Ask Permission Never
Surviving the next shift in political winds5 requires proactive, redundant storage of sensitive material. At a minimum, this means keeping local copies, not cloud-hosted on infrastructure providers like Google, and regularly checking them for bit rot. But to be more useful than universities that gatekeep access through ideological filters, these archives must also circulate. This knowledge must flow through social networks.
Privately endowed but publicly accessible collections have a strong track record of preserving material that challenged dominant taboos. Today’s dogma is “multiracial democracy,” and while private universities enforce it, the same structural insulation that protects them from Trump II could be used to protect deeper truth-seeking. In our era, preservation can be built into protocol, not just upheld by prestige.
Bitcoin is one system where economic incentives, integrity, and provenance cohere by design. Since 2023, its Ordinals protocol has allowed meaningful amounts of non-financial data to be permanently inscribed on-chain. Although other chains offer more flexibility and capacity (like NFTs on Ethereum or Filecoin), they have shorter track records for network resilience and lack Bitcoin’s status as a Schelling point.6
Few distributed networks have survived as much pressure while still retaining user trust. In the research sphere, informal volunteer networks such as LibGen and Sci Hub keep paywalled papers accessible, but copyright lawfare and infrastructure attacks create outages, and their metadata can be spotty. Technology can route around chokepoints, but archivists remain exposed to politics and must keep fighting.
The Archimedes Problem
Institutions that can preserve data at scale face serious legal risk from the U.S. DMCA regime, which values copyright holders’ profits over patrimony. Platforms must remove content immediately upon rightsholders’ request, before any investigation. The EFF has documented cases where this law, overriding fair and archival use, was abused to jail researchers, censor professors, and delay spyware disclosures.
The new inquisitors strike for spectacle, fast-twitch in their reflexes but weak in endurance, unable to manage shifting stories. During Leo Frank’s trial, Jim Conley (the factory janitor later caught by Alonzo Mann carrying the lifeless body of 14-year-old Mary Phagan) was extensively coached. Stylometric analysis and eyewitness testimony that emerged decades later conclusively confirmed Frank’s innocence.7
If short timelines to AGI are accurate, archival preservation can’t wait. The moment autonomous technologies operate beyond human oversight and control, their guiding values could become permanent. Today’s archivists are safeguarding humanity’s ability to challenge future values misalignment, and the records preserved or discarded now will either equip or disarm future Mortons against future Goulds.
In the 13th century, monks overwrote a 10th-century Greek manuscript containing Archimedes’ mathematics, favoring prayers over equations. Only in the early 2000s did scientists finally recover these lost texts, using imaging to reveal words invisible to the human eye. Future tools might likewise recover today’s neglected records, but the less we preserve now, the more miraculous and distant that recovery becomes.
Levy, Eugene. “‘Is the Jew a White Man?’: Press Reaction to the Leo Frank Case, 1913-1915.” Phylon, vol. 35, no. 2, 1974, pp. 212-222. The NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, judged Frank as guilty, calling him “A white degenerate.” Levy describes a pro-Conley, anti-Frank view as “consensus” among the Black press. For example, The Chicago Defender made sarcastic barbs about antisemitic persecution of “[Frank’s] people in Russia” and raised alarms about how “Jews Raise[d] Millions to Free Frank”. The NAACP’s condemnation of Frank as a “degenerate” was echoed by Thomas E. Watson's Jeffersonian, which argued that Black Americans had achieved sufficient integration to hold office and intermarry (“[negroes] eat at our tables”), yet their testimony supposedly carried less weight than that of “the Chosen People.” Watson’s nativist agitation directly led to the 1915 KKK revival at Stone Mountain.
This Wired article, “The Mismeasures of Stephen Jay Gould,” is a good intro to the actual open access paper called “The Mismeasure of Science: Stephen Jay Gould versus Samuel George Morton on Skulls and Bias.” Gould accused Morton of underestimating Black skull capacity and overestimating White skull capacity. Lewis et al. physically remeasured 46% of Morton’s 670 skulls and found no systematic bias by racial category. Morton’s three largest measurement errors were actually overestimates of the size of the “Negro” skulls. Note that Morton’s original goal was theological: determining whether human populations represented one species (monogenesis) or multiple divine creations (polygenesis).
See, e.g., Maria R. Traska, Extremism @ the Library, American Libraries Magazine, July 14, 2014, noting Duke University's explicit decision not to digitize controversial materials to avoid amplifying extremist views: “It’s one thing to make hard-copy material available to academic and independent researchers and quite another to digitize it and thus be a conduit for making the material widely available—in effect, helping the propagandists broaden their reach online.”
The American Library Association’s original Library Bill of Rights (1939) mandated neutrality, stating materials should “not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.” By the early 2000s, policy explicitly endorsed equity-driven curation. Examples include restricting children's access to Tintin in the Congo and removing Dr. Seuss titles with unflattering depictions of favored groups. In January 2021, the American Library Association formally repudiated the principle of neutrality for aiding “white supremacy.”
I don’t expect the backlash against Trump II to stop at “hate narratives” and spare the unearthers of “hate facts.” Civil liberties will stay recessed, but the jailable speech offenses in 2028 will be less “from the river to the sea” and more “unseemly and inappropriate.”
I do not own tokens for any of the cryptocurrencies mentioned in this paragraph.
Jim Conley had an extensive criminal record, including armed robbery and domestic violence (both before and after the Phagan incident), while Frank had none. Conley was represented pro bono by William Smith, who was motivated by racial equality beliefs. After the trial, Smith extensively reviewed the evidence and did a 180, arguing for Conley’s guilt and Frank’s innocence to his deathbed. Contra stereotypes of “Jim Crow” Atlanta, Smith’s career was ruined and he received death threats for this: see “So Who Killed Mary Phagan?”