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by TeMPOraL 920 days ago
Except for the artifice that is copyright, things don't work like that for anything else. Reality doesn't work like that.

> Once someone posts something, you don't have a right to it in perpetuity

On the contrary, once someone posts something, they don't have control over it anymore. You can't make me unsee what you wrote, or unhear what you said. You have no right to stop me from writing it down, and even if you can stop me from republishing it verbatim right now, you generally don't have the right to do it indefinitely.

> And once I don't or change my mind you can't.

To be clear, I'm not dogmatically firm about it, but I believe that a word in which you get to distance yourself from past views, or mark them mistaken, and people accept it, would be much better than the world in which you're free to gaslight everyone else by pretending that something never happened, even though it did.

(All that on top of the usual point that it's neither the author nor their audience that can judge what's archive-worthy - only future people can.)

2 comments

I think the core issue is that you have no rights over other people's labor. If I want to share something in an ephemeral way, I should be able to - and have the power of the state to support me

If you create something physical, say a popup art installation, it's trivial to dismantle it and it stops existing (other maybe in some photos or video). When it comes to text the same isn't as simple and it requires a social compact (ie laws)

As for gaslighting, you can archive things without redistributing them. You can just publish hashes of what people published and only redistribute/republish in the context of proving someone said something

Brilliant argument/username combo :)