We know, of course, that history didn’t start with us, but I think sometimes we forget a little. For all the many wonders of the Internet, it’s probably only increased the cultural amnesia, loading us down with so much information that it can obscure the past even as it makes it easier for us to learn about the past. 

The opening of a (gated) 1975 Garry Willis New York Review of Books piece about a collection on U.S. government spying called The Abuses of the Intelligence Agencies:

“This is a dizzying computation of all the snoopings, publicly known so far, performed by our public servants upon their putative masters. With admirable restraint the report attempts to collect and document every instance of illegal activity undertaken by our various intelligence agencies. It gives the defense offered by the agencies, the authority under which each agency operated, and the statutes apparently infringed. It is a very useful and complete handbook on official crime. We can surmise that the tally is not complete, since it arose from spot investigations, odd suits, and accidental confession. But already the count is almost self-defeating. The hundreds under surveillance, the thousands photographed, the hundreds of thousands filed. The ‘watch lists’ in readiness for emergency detention. The blacks. The kids. Hit lists. Enemies. The ‘enemy within’ is us. The deadpan recital of it all tends to dissolve in the mind. Everett Dirksen claimed, ‘A million here, a million there—in time that adds up to real money.” It doesn’t, of course, That kind of addition turns—magically, at some unthinkable number—into subtraction. We know fairly well what we are getting for $1.98. But not for forty billion. Much the same thing happens by the thousandth wiretapping or break-in recorded here.”