The way people of later times view a dark age is…not at all the same as the way people living in such an age view it. – “Nightfall”
If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to live in a dark age, wonder no more; you are in one now, at least the early part of one. As I wrote last year,
…a dark age is one lacking reliable records, so historians cannot be certain of what actually happened. Of course, censorship is typically part of that; if a government or religion burns books, anything recorded in those books is not available to future historians…20th century tyrants could never hope to find and destroy every copy of a banned book, film, recording, etc, but when physical media are no longer the norm, universal censorship of a work enters the realm of the possible. And now that it has become child’s play to flood the world with computer diarrhea presented as fact, even electronic records which somehow escape a purge will be lost in a vast fecal sea, making it difficult for even experts to know what is real. And if the techlords get their way, there will be a lot fewer experts in the future to attempt it or even care about it…
There is little point in my using the occasion of Banned Books Week to write about this any longer; besides the fact that I’ve written about it every year since 2011 and the old columns are all still there for your perusal should you desire, many news columns every month include items on various forms of censorship. So this year I’m simply going to call attention to the fact that the book-banners and book-burners are no longer satisfied with the pretense that they merely want to keep “obscene” (defined in whatever fanciful and impossibly-broad way suits them) books and other media from “children” (defined in such a fanciful and impossibly-broad way it includes all high school students and even many university students) everywhere in the civilized world; they are even now attempting to prevent people everyone agrees are adult from seeing any books or electronic media any government anywhere in the world has any objection to, via a combination of banning physical books, internet censorship, mass surveillance, flooding the world with garbage, and enticing the intellectually-lazy majority into never, ever thinking for themselves. And this combination has the potential to create an age so dark, it will make every previous dark age look like the Enlightenment in comparison.
