Future historians will need to have ways to sort the real from the fake… But it’s not something the profession hasn’t done before. Contextual framing can be very helpful. They’ll have to go in with an understanding that “fake news” was a major issue during this period, hence, go in with the proper tools to sort through the material.
But it also opens up the door for future historians to also purposefully distort the record, based on their own political ideologies.
Of course, it’s still a question how much of our digital discussions will be around in the future too. Given how much of it is controlled by private corporations and how little such institutions care about preserving their own history, that’s not a guarantee. All it takes is someone turning off some servers and all that material is just gone. The internet archive and the national archives are doing what they can to preserve as much as they can, but it’s an overwhelming job that should be a major undertaking in all of our archival organizations, private and public.
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Interesting events during which to allow it. Seems to me that viewers of both would have a higher proportion of MAGAts than just about any other programming.
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Well, let’s hope it won’t be the imperial court historian of god emperor Barron VI.
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“Precious bodily fluids…”
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Ah yes, the same genius who’s going to convince Tromp that vaccines should be banned. 
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Marla Maples fell down some stairs.
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I hope that there is some big building somewhere that has been printing out selected shorts from the internet onto archive-quality paper. A backup of the Internet Archive or something.
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“We didn’t get the answer we wanted from traditional polling, so we used ChatGPT and it just tells us what we want to hear! It’s amazing!”
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I don’t think there’s enough trees for that.
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I mean, yeah, I’d like that very much, as a historian. At the very least back up the servers multiple times and put some drives in a fireproof vault and preserve some computers that can read them, and ensure they get onto updated technology…
I don’t think people think about how much time and effort it takes to preserve the raw materials of the past. It isn’t automatic, and we have no idea just how much of the past has already been lost and all our technology isn’t going to do that if we don’t invest in the means to do so, especially the expertise.
To bring it back to the election, fascists understand how critical it is to control our view of the past. They’ll gut an independent national archive and Library of congress. Public universities will lose funding for their archival programs, especially those that represent marginalized people… I think smaller, privately held archives would soldier through a fascist regime, but if a nation-state is to remain democratic (or become more democratic) then a neutral archive is necessary to tell the stories of all us…
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Most of the national polls have reported (or engineered) their results are within the margin of error (“They’re neck and neck!!”). Yet they have to report some-sort of motion, and all they’ve got left (by design?) is to suggest that within their margin of error it has become even more within the margin of error? (“It’s gone from inconclusive to inconclusiver!!” …so you-all don’t know so profoundly that you can nullify conclusivity from your immediate surrounds?)
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