Hypothetically, if governments wordwide just suddenly became authoritarian and deleted all records of history, you and some survivors escape to a remote area outside of government control, they all can’t remember much from history (either didn’t pay attwntion in class, or suffers memory loss from the governemtn attacks) and so you are designated as this community’s official historian. How much can you remember? What’s gonna be the official narrative of your little rebel community?
This is why books are so important. Real, physical, paper books. The scenario you are proposing is precisely what Fahrenheit 451 is about.
Funnily enough RB, the author of F451, insists that everyone else is wrong, and that book is actually about falling literacy rates due to television viewership.
The book is prescient as hell. He saw the natural consequences of that reality and followed it to it’s logical, inevitable ends. He may not have intended for the book to be about censorship, but censorship is an unavoidable, inevitable outcome for a society in which most people are uneducated, uninformed, ambivalent ignoramuses. There will always be someone to take advantage of them and to make sure that advantage is defended.
How do I print the 100GB English Wikipedia?
How do I even transport something that big without the authoritarian governmwnt noticing?
“Print”?
I mean, you’re in a fascist global dystopia and you’re gonna get picky about formats? I can carry a copy of Wikipedia in a SD card the size of my pinky nail, and I know because I have one. Who are these hipster kids that look at my Wonder Phone of Truth and go “well, this would be a lot easier on my eyeballs if you got me a paperback edition”.
the catch is that the Fahrenheit 451 scenario nowadays just require a storage device to fail… very ecological, Greta must approve it