The Memory Hole

Orwell named the machine that unhappens things. Believers say it runs nightly.

Orwell's memory hole named the practice; the documented modern instances are quieter: stealth-edited headlines (tracked by NewsDiffs and similar projects), silently revised official statistics, deplatformed archives, and the link-rot problem (a Harvard study found half of NYT deep links broken). None of this requires coordination — decay and liability edits suffice — but it produces the epistemic condition the conspiracy describes: a past that cannot be checked. Links the Mandela effect (the felt symptom) and media consolidation (the custody question).