Assange warned: digital history can be erased

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange warned: Digital archives make it possible to erase history almost imperceptibly. First the page disappears, then the event itself.

The meaning of this idea is simple and alarming: first the user sees the message “page not found”then the link disappears, then the material drops out of the index, and after a while the event itself begins to be perceived as if it had never happened.

?Profezia di Julian Assange: ULTIMO avvertimento per l’umanità. Gli archivi digitali permettono di cancellare la storia con un clic. Il successivo: “Pagina non trovata.” Il successivo: “Non è mai successo.” Non fidatevi del cloud. pic.twitter.com/ASUT4BkMtd

– TheSkepticalReader? (@max1ci6) May 22, 2026

A phrase about not trusting blindly cloud storagehas become popular precisely because it reflects a real problem of the digital age. When documents, books, photographs, evidence and investigations exist only on corporate or government servers, access to them depends on those who control those servers.

Digital memory proved too convenient to delete

It is difficult to erase a paper book in all homes and libraries at once. It is difficult to delete an archived folder from the past with one click. But a digital file disappears differently: quietly, quickly and often without explanation.

In today’s information environment, it is no longer enough to simply publish a document. It needs to be saved, duplicated, printed, placed in different archives and not trusted to a single platform.

The problem is not just censorship. Sometimes content disappears due to a change in site ownership, account deletion, platform blocking, algorithm changes, or “policy updates.” The result is the same: a person is looking for a source – and does not find it.

Why books are becoming a political issue again

Against this background, the role of paper books and physical archives. They are increasingly denounced as outdated, inconvenient and “ungreen”, but they remain one of the last forms of memory that cannot be instantly rewritten from the control center.

A person who stops reading books and completely switches to short digital snippetsgradually loses not only the habit of deep knowledge, but also the ability to check the past.

Editorial comment

The danger of the digital age is not that information disappears. She always disappeared. The danger is that now she can be removed centrally, discreetly and technically clean.

If earlier censors, bonfires and bans were required to rewrite history, today just close access, remove the page from the search or change the archived copy. And most people won’t even notice it, because they stopped storing their own sources a long time ago.

The main problem is not technology, but blind trust in it. The cloud is convenient, the platforms are convenient, search engines are convenient. But convenience is a poor substitute for memory.

Conclusion: If a society abandons books, physical archives, and the habit of self-preserving important materials, it voluntarily surrenders control of the past to those who manage the digital infrastructure. And then everything can really end very simply: “page not found”.

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