The destruction going on at U.S. government sites is bad news for us all

12/05/2024, 7:43 AM
fastcompany.com

Earlier this week, a doctor friend told me about a frustrating new obstacle he’s facing at work. In normal times, he’s relied on websites operated by the U.S. federal government for practical information on everything from vaccine side effects to advice for families traveling to exotic areas. But the Trump administration’s move to strip sites of material relating to “gender ideology” and other topics the new president and his allies find objectionable has resulted in many pages disappearing from the web.

My friend has been making do by consulting versions of the pages stored at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. But that’s hardly a long-term solution. For one thing, those cached copies may be out of date. For another, it’s not a given that the Internet Archive will always be available when we need it.

A New York Times article by Ethan Singer details the scale of the purge. More than 8,000 pages have been wiped away on subjects ranging from the Department of Health and Human Services’ Head Start program to avoidance of IRS penalties to telltale signs of dementia. Just the deletions relating to census data—one of the federal government’s most vital resources—have affected 3,000 pages.

As pages have continued to vanish, others have returned, and the only explanation has come in the form of vague sitewide banners such as “CDC’s website is being modified to comply with President Trump’s Executive Orders.” As with other elements of the administration’s rush to reshape how the federal government works—or doesn’t work—the chaos may be the point.

All of this is alarming even before you consider what a government online presence rewritten to Donald Trump’s specifications might look like. Reportedly, it involves excising not just references to “diversity,” “equity,” and “inclusion,” but also a bevy of other terms, including apparently controversial concepts such as “belonging,” “empathy,” and “fairness.”

For more than a quarter century, the web has been a primary interface between citizens and their government. It may be more critical than its physical counterpart—or at least I can’t remember the last time I had to visit a federal office in person. By taking its language policing more seriously than the duty to provide information to the public, the new administration is failing at one of its most basic responsibilities.

That raises a new specter that hadn’t been on my list of things to worry about: tactical removal of pages from government sites as a tool for impeding knowledge. For example, I hate to think about a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention vaccination website full of information created under the imprimatur of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. But simply eliminating the current site’s information and replacing it with . . . nothingness might do nearly as much damage as spreading RFK Jr.’s cherished misinformation on the subject. It could be done with a few clicks—a much simpler task than shutting down entire government departments, which is also part of Trump’s plan for the nation.

I’m not saying that an even more sprawling, permanent site-scrubbing is definitely going to happen. As with many things about current events, Trump’s own comments on the edits (“I don’t know. That doesn’t sound like a bad idea to me.”) don’t make clear he’s paying attention, and leave him infinite wriggle room if he is. All we can do is keep paying attention, maybe with a newfound appreciation for a government benefit that has been quietly essential and easy to take for granted—until now.

Yes, you can have too much storage

Recently, I bought a 16 TB hard drive. It cost about $270, which—unadjusted for inflation—is a little over half what I paid for a drive I remember buying in the 1990s. That one had 500 MB of space, or 1/32,000th the capacity of the drive I just got.

1990s me, who was thrilled to add an entire half-gigabyte (!!!) of space to my PC would have been ecstatic to know that storage would continue to get ever vaster and cheaper. Oddly enough, though, my new 16 TB drive, which I added to a server that sits on my home network, has not brought me unalloyed pleasure. Instead, maxing out the space I already had made me question whether I should concentrate on deleting files rather than making room for more.

Not that digital hoarding isn’t tempting. Unlike its physical counterpart, it’s unlikely to result in the new stuff overwhelming the old: I do a fairly respectable job of organizing it all into folders, part of a broader storage strategy that also involves several cloud services. I’m grateful to have enough room for a precious archive of family photos and letters, as well as ancient Word documents I still reference (for articles such as this one) and email that dates to 1994. I even ditched almost all the printed copies of magazines I’ve written for—hundreds of issues—and replaced them with PDFs.

Still, like Scrooge McDuck filling his money bin with 3 cubic acres of cash and then burrowing through it like a gopher, I may have gone overboard. I use a wonderful piece of software called Channels to record streaming TV and over-the-air stations directly to my home network. These videos are mine, all mine—a comfort in an era when Netflix has only five movies made before 1980—and tough to part with. Yet they represent the single most voracious disk-space gobbler in my life. And even if I had infinite time on my hands, I wouldn’t use it to binge all the TV and movies I’ve preserved.

Another thing that haunts me: An unknown but significant percentage of my disk space is devoted to files that are duplicates, triplicates, or beyond. How I ended up with so many redundant ones, I’m not sure. But they multiply like Tribbles, and eliminating all the redundant ones might feel like getting a new hard disk for free.

After mulling all this over, doing some housecleaning, and finding I was still low on available space, I took the easy route by purchasing that new drive. It’ll surely get me well into 2027, and maybe way beyond. By the time it’s full, even more mammoth disks should be available for even less money. It would be nice, however, to think I’ll be more disciplined by then—a little less Uncle Scrooge, a little more Marie Kondo. If you have any tips on digital self-restraint, I’m dying to hear them.

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