Institutional destruction of inconvenient records, so that the past becomes whatever the present requires.
Orwell's 1949 device. The institutional version needs no shredder — a retired report, an unindexed archive and a broken link accomplish the same thing without anyone deciding to destroy anything.
In practice
- A regulator's consultation responses from 2011 sit on a server nobody can log into, and the position they recorded is now unarguable in either direction.
- An organisation that migrates its intranet and does not carry over the old decision log has changed its own past without a policy.
- Further reading
- Wikipedia
- Subject
- Organizations & Bureaucracy
- Essay
- The folklore of office life