Recently someone asked me to remove an article of theirs from The Inner Swine's web site. This is the first time anyone has ever asked that something they'd already contributed to the zine be removed; I've occasionally had contributors get cold feet prior to publication, but never a years after the fact. Here's part of the email they sent me:
 
 

They went on to also point out that they had changed, and what they thought was cool a few years back had changed too. I guess it all boiled down to them being embarrassed by this piece they'd written for me. I don't often ask people to write for me, and I hardly ever publish unsolicited pieces, though people still insist on sending them to me from time to time, so this isn't something that has or will come up very often - most of TIS, print or otherwise, is all me, all of the time, and if I start getting embarrassed about it then the whole operation is doomed. So I don't have too much experience with people suddenly experiencing life changes and deciding that perfectly humorous essays written in the past no longer get listed on the ole' C.V.

In the end, we compromised. I think the person in question is being dumb, but hey, they asked nicely. So we came up with a mutually acceptable deal. End of story, and I certainly don't go to sleep at night crying over it.

The episode did point out to me a difference between print and Internet publishing, a difference which I guess should have been obvious, but about which I've never thought. When something appears in print, you have to seek it out. No one who wasn't already reading The Inner Swine would have seen this particular article, and I guess that's why it didn't bother the author that the article appeared at all, or still lurked in a back issue. At least people picking up a back issue, an actual physical copy, could be assumed to have more than a passing interest in TIS and therefore to be pretty much on the same wavelength. But, the Internet is different: search engines don't care about context. Search for this person's name, and no matter your sensibilities every instance of their name will pop up. Used to be if you wrote an article for Swank magazine about proper use of dildos you could be reasonably sure that casual acquaintances wouldn't know about it unless they were readers of Swank - in other words, your kind of people. Nowadays, write an article for Swank and anybody with a browser can find out about it, possibly by accident.

The same with TIS: Every idiotic thing I've written in that zine is now up here on the web site. Maybe not forever, depending on my ability to pay the server bills, but certainly for the past years and for now. Thinking about it that way, it is a little disconcerting. What if I ever decide that half of what's in those old issues is hurting my life? I mean, most of the pre-1997 issues were pretty crappy, with a few minor exceptions, but mostly it's just bad writing and lack of focus, not me admitting to plotting to kill the President or bomb the Oklahoma City Federal Building or something. But what if my perception changes? Will I ever decide to pull the archives, to protect my good name?

If I play my cards right, kids, I won't have any good name to protect, and that's the honest truth.

In the mean time, I'm disappointed by this episode but it won't hang too heavily over my day. It isn't censorship, because it was a reasonable request independent granted by me. The article remains intact in the print issue, and will. But now, consider that we are a digital world, moving inexorably towards a digital relationship with knowledge. E-books are a-coming, or so they tell us, and while you and I might never cozen to the idea of curling up with a fucking E-book, what happens when your local high school ditches printed book altogether and hands every student an E-book, or, worse but cheaper, a web archive of all texts?

At that point may be the moment that history as we know it ends. While not exactly carved in stone today, it is pretty difficult to just change history. Too many printed sources floating about out there, too easy to check up on. What happens when all the sources are simply dynamic XML documents on the web? Someone decides that the story of Columbus is racially offensive, and the story is edited down to a blip - or deleted - and a generation of kids learn nothing about him. How could we prove otherwise?

It's a frightening, and most likely impossible, scenario. In the book "1984", George Orwell saw the mutability of history as a key component in controlling the masses - and he had no idea how easy it might be, assuming that we would need an army of clerks to keep on top of the changes. Surprise! We just need three people tending a server farm. The rest is just code.

ON that happy note, I'll leave you to your brooding. If you'd care to guess which article has been altered, feel free, but no peeking - that would be cheating! Anyone who guesses within the next 24 hours will get a surprise in the mail. Oooh, yeah.

New column in about two weeks. In the meantime, please feel free to drop me a note.