In the opening pages of Neuromancer Gibson describes Night City – the dystopian criminal enclave his protagonist finds himself in at the beginning of the story – as, “a deranged experiment in social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button.” Wikipedia is the same way, a fast-forward experiment in the social selection of information, the processes of inscription and deletion that Derrida tells us build the Archive running at hyper-speed. Along the way things are lost, and often these losses are for the best. Nonetheless, some of the deleted material is funny, charming, even thought-provoking. Deletionpedia documents many of these lost pages. In the course of my research, I’ve stumbled upon other bits of deleted commentary and even vandalism that struck me as funny or interesting. Just for fun, I’d like to share some of them here:
- The Beginnings of the Great Eye (an inexplicable article deleted only minutes after its creation, archived on my Data blog)
- An apparent attempt by a US Navy Submariner to criticize his commanding officers (look towards the end of the first section of the article)
I’ll be blogging more of these as I come across them…