Start Keeping a Paper Diary

From dailykos.com

By Steven Strauss

Why AI-mediated search and word processing make analogue records matter

For the past twenty years, traditional search engines returned links to outside sources you could inspect yourself. Yes, governments sometimes distorted results (e.g., China’s Great Firewall), but the basic model still pointed you to the source document. And your word processor was just that — a tool for writing — not a channel for surveillance or control.

We’re now in a world of AI-mediated search, synthesis and writing. Many people ask chatbots to find information or draft summaries. That convenience carries a risk: Outputs can reflect what powerful actors — governments, billionaires, platforms — prefer you to see. Orwell understood that controlling the past meant controlling the future. Today’s AI systems offer unprecedented efficiency in doing exactly that.

The threat operates on two levels. First, there’s the historical record itself. Stalin famously airbrushed purged officials out of photographs and the written record, but it was a painstaking manual process. With AI, rewriting history becomes much easier and quicker. Digital archives and publications can be altered at scale, with the original versions ‘disappeared’ down the memory hole (as China is trying to do with the Tiananmen Square). Second, there’s real-time filtering of what you’re allowed to access right now. Whether it’s Grok spreading conspiracy theories, X (AKA Twitter) boosting right-wing content, extreme content and politicians X owner Elon Musk favours, or Chinese AI models refusing to acknowledge Tiananmen Square: Tools reflect their masters’ priorities.

Today’s word processors are increasingly connected to AI systems that could potentially encourage, or discourage, certain kinds of writing. As these tools become more deeply integrated with AI assistance, the possibility grows that they might subtly shape what we write — to align with the preferences of those who control them. And perhaps, if we don’t take the hint, our word processor will report us to Big Brother — a remote possibility in the US, but more likely in China.

In the United States, the Trump administration is tightening its grip on media and technology companies through threats, litigation, regulation, and encouraging ownership by its allies. It’s also actively concealing the historical record — scrubbing mentions of the January 6th riots and recasting the January 6, 2021 insurrection as the work of “peaceful patriots”. Project this forward: Into a world where AI is ubiquitous and even more deeply embedded in our everyday tools, where the Trump administration has had time to even more tightly control the media and tech companies — and where consequently, objective truth might be hard to find.

Imagine it’s 2028, and you’re an ordinary American trying to write an email — critical of Trump and the GOP — to your friends. Your AI-enabled search engine presents two sides to the January 6th riots — suggesting maybe it wasn’t as bad you remember. You ask a chatbot about the 2020 election, and while it tells you Biden won — it casts doubt on the legitimacy of Biden’s election, and so on. You try to gather economic information to compare Biden’s and Trump’s policies, but the results are cherry-picked to make Trump look better. Your word processor’s “helpful” suggestions and AI search results nudge you toward Trump and the GOP’s approved narrative, returning “facts” that support it. You begin to doubt your own memory — after all, this wonderful technology is remembering things differently.

If this seems farfetched, recall that Trump in 2024 — with just his bully pulpit, amplified by Fox News — had convinced over 1/3rd of Americans that Biden’s 2020 win was not legitimate. Imagine what he’ll be able to do to truth with even more influence over the media and tech giants. Keep in mind that to win an election, the GOP doesn’t need to fool everyone — just a few percentage points will probably do the trick.

In theory, digital records offer protection. They can be backed up, distributed, and cryptographically signed. But how robust will those safeguards really be when governments and platforms work in concert? Yes, paper records can be destroyed through book burnings and house searches — history shows us this. At the moment, people (at least in the US) aren’t at risk of government persecution for their private notes, or the physical books and articles they keep.

Start keeping a paper diary. Not necessarily because you’re documenting state secrets, but as a personal reality check — a record of what you actually saw, thought, and believed before the algorithms rewrote yesterday. It’s evidence for your future self, and perhaps for future historians.

“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” — 1984, by George Orwell

In Orwell’s novel, 1984, keeping a diary could result in torture, forced labour, or death. The state viewed it as an act of resistance — because the act of keeping an unmediated record mattered. In an age when software can revise yesterday by lunchtime, ink on paper is a quiet act of civil resistance. For the moment, at least in the United States, it doesn’t bring with it the risk of bodily harm, and it might help you keep your sanity going forward.

If you found this essay helpful, maybe print a copy — because by 2028, the algorithms might not return it in search results.

This essay was originally published on my blog on November 15th. 

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/12/18/2358976/-Start-Keeping-a-Paper-Diary