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?
The government doesn’t control all the information. I’ll still have my offline copy of Wikipedia, on my phone, that contains a lot of the world’s history. Apart from that I just remember some mythology, some stuff about the Sumerians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Incas, British, Americans, and Indians, plus a reasonable understanding of WW2 and the holocaust, plus various historical events that have happened in my lifetime.
This hypothetical is assuming you are in an active warzone (think like 1984’s world) and have no time to find your stuff, or you just accidentally drop it while running away from government troops.
You just had to run until you find a safe place (like a secret underground bunker or something) and have nothing on you beside your memories.
While I understand it doesn’t quite fit the scenario, it does strike me as a good way to preserve “lost information” in a similar situation. Pair that with a solar charger (or even improvise something like a pedal charger), and you’re pretty set for a lot of basic information people would struggle to reconstruct.
Some ebook readers have a microsd card slot, so you could fit an offline copy of Wikipedia on a device with half a year of battery life (in airplane mode)
Congratulations, you’ve just written a quarter of the plot of the Book of Eli with Denzel Washington
A lot less than I think I could
That’s the ending of Fahrenheit 451!
For me, the risk is remembering things that are factually wrong. With no one to correct me, I would be worried about getting stuff wrong the whole time
And the beginning of A Canticle for Leibowitz!
Amazing book
“Look kid, all you need to know is that up until 2016 the world was simpler, but then they killed a gorilla which lead to the rise of fascism in 2025”
RIP Hambe. He was the best of us.
Dance off for hambe
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
I’d remember that the Undertaker threw Mankind off the top of Hell In A Cell and through the commentator’s table.
In 1998 no less. Also, he plummeted 16 feet! Bah God!
This is not much of a hypothetical scenario. History is being written with a bias or outright misrepresentation and has been forever.
I literally have multiple copies of Wikipedia offline. Including one on a USB stick.
I don’t think it would ever be possible to delete all records of history short of blowing up the entire planet at which point its quite moot.
rotates chair to glance at collection of hard copy encyclopedias & encyclopedic dictionary
Me personally?
A lot but summarized to hilarious extent. Example:
So mosses was like “guys I found a stream!” And god was like “the fuck you find?” And Moses was like “I mean god provided me a stream”
God was like “yeah it’s fine… the book i gave you described me as a chill god right? Not a jealous vengeful god… this is totally settled”
Then they arrived at the promised land and god was like “you can all stay here! Except mosses… he can fuck off to the stream he totally found”
Anyway my point is it wouldn’t be one person remembering all of history. It would be like f 451 where everyone remembers one book or one bit of history.
If you think the tale of mosses is real history then we really are screwed.
It’s not necessarily a real historical event, but an incredibly important story about liberation of the oppressed that influenced countless real historical movements.
Herodotus’ histories is mostly fictional but you wouldn’t want to forget it. Same with the Iliad/Odyssey, Epic of Gilgamesh, etc
Fair, but the context that they are not real historical events is critical.
I’d argue if you taught someone history and never mentioned the Bible you’ve left out an important chunk of history.
Besides it’s about as whimsical and fantastical as all history of that time period was.
I can’t wait to read the New Aeao Version of the Holy Bible.
I thought of making a YouTube series where I summarize the whole bible like that lol book by book.
I also regularly summarize history to my kids like that. You should hear my Texas independence story lol
The clear soda craze was the defining point of the 1990s. That’s about it.
There were troll dolls too.
Truly the age of enlightenment
And garbage pail kids
I have a stack of Encyclopedia Britannica in my parents storage.
All records of history have been deleted.
Like others, I question the ability to delete a book. And while a regime would be able to change digital literature easily, and educational literature like school books being a close second; changing a book in someone’s storage unit is a lot harder.
It also handwaves away the other ways we keep history as well. Would people’s family photo albums be deleted? What about a great grandma’s diary? In some rural areas the family bible has some insanely well kept family records.
You can’t delete a book
“Hypothetically”
Quick question - did you have breakfast this morning?……
That’s missing the entire point of this hypothetical question.
You can’t delete a book
nonsense, raise it’s temp to 451f and it’ll delete easily.
I have a stack of the Animorphs in my attic. Yours is just speculative fiction.
…huh?
How would you prove that your books reflect the true history?
Ok, I see what you mean. Counterpoint: how could/would anyone? If someone wanted to have “faith” enough they could feasibly handwave away anything that didn’t jive with what they wanted the past to be. And in a situation where cross referencing would be nigh on impossible? I mean…I’ve got nothing. “Trust me bro.”
Yeah, I have curated my library to be focused on the history of science, with special focus on the sorts of books which include information necessary to bring society to the technological equivalent of the age of reason (with extra chemistry and medicine). At that point, it’s mostly practical, and the practicality of the source speaks to the likely authenticity of other texts within the collection.
Quite a bit actually as I’m a history nerd. But, it would come bits and pieces at a time because that’s how my mind works. Even if I sit here thinking about even Americas history, I’ll leave holes in the story, and like a week later, “oh yeah this should have been part of that” so I’d have to write it all down in notes and compile it later to write a book, only then would I be able to teach anybody. Because nobody’s learning much by riding my train of thought.
Also the TV show friends will never be spoken of again.
I could probably recite Bill Wurtz’s “History of the entire world i guess”. And go into some more detail if someone asked.
There were Romans (basically Greek cosplayers), some dude with elephants who may or may not have been a cannibal. Then some dude got nailed to some lumber for trying to tell people to chill and love eachother. A few thousand years of fighting about that. Columbo sailed to India but found Aztecs instead. The cubs finally won… And that about brings us up to date.
