Quote:August 11, 2025 / Joseph P. Farrell

If you've been around this website long enough, you'll know I have this love-hate relationship with our less-than-wonderful-world of digital technology. On the "love" side of the ledger, I like the convenience and ease that computers have made of word processing, and the ease with which they make formatting books and book publication itself possible, especially for people like me whom "traditional publishers" would never have even looked at, gatekeepers for "official narratives" that they are. On the "hate" side of the ledger, if you're a regular reader here through the years, you'll know I abhor the lack of security and integrity in cyber systems. For one thing, I early learned that allowing my books to appear as ebooks merely allowed people to copy and paste my research, and indeed, the complete text of several of my books, in toto, absolutely free on the internet. The other thing that ebooks did was to change the formatting and pagination of my books, making all my attempts to preserve careful scholarship and citation moot.

But my largest concern with ebooks - and hence my prohibitions to my publishers for any future ebooks - was the implied ability to simply delete or change text or formatting that "They" did not like. Amazon did not choose its name "Kindle" for its ebook platform for nothing: it is about burning books, about getting rid of that troublesome hard copy. Hence my other stricture: the only canonical form or version of any of my books is the actual printed hardcopy of the books - warts, typos, formatting errors and all - and not any ebook version.

All this prelude brings me to the fugue on that theme of the day, a story which in various versions many of you spotted and passed along, and when I read it, I can see why, because it confirms everything I've been saying - and warning about - for years with ebooks and digital "texts" as "canonical" copies of a text: they are not, nor can they be, secure, and must always be checked against a textual hard copy archetype. Here's the version of the story that E.E. and many others of you saw and passed along (with our gratitude). There's two paragraphs - or rather, two sentences - in it in particular that leapt off the page at me, and I am relatively confident you will spot it as well:

Quote:Key sections of the US Constitution deleted from government’s website

And here are those sentences, in their context:

Quote:Several Reddit threads identified the changes in Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution: Large parts of Section 8 have been removed, and Sections 9 and 10 have been deleted altogether. In the screenshot below, you can see the archived version of the site on the Wayback Machine on the left, and the current site on the right — the text highlighted in yellow has been removed.


These sections largely relate to the powers that Congress has and does not have, as well as limitations on the powers of individual states. The removal includes sections relating to habeas corpus, the powers that protect citizens from unlawful detention.


Some of the sections’ text appears to be missing, as indicated by a trailing semicolon at the end of Section 8, where text used to follow.

In a tweet posted on Wednesday, the Library of Congress said the sections were missing “due to a coding error” and expect it to be “resolved soon.”

The Library of Congress later told TechCrunch that the coding error was due to a missing XML tag in the web page and has since been corrected.

Changing the U.S. Constitution’s text on the website does not change or have any effect on U.S. law, but it nevertheless follows senior Trump administration official Stephen Miller’s threats earlier this year to suspend habeas corpus.

In other words, a mere "coding error" ended up deleting key portions of the text of the Constitution, which, thankfully, we're reminded does not have an effect on law...

...or does it? Imagine the following high octane speculation scenario: all it takes to alter the interpretation of a "canonical text" - be it the constitution, or what have you - is an interruption, a neglect, of the course of performance(or better, of the stare decisis) of the interpretation of that text and its key components. Plop that text down in the middle of a tribe of bushmen with a smattering of knowledge of the English and virtually no experience or connection with the tradition of Roman and Anglo-Saxon law, and you'll end up with a very different interpretation of that text, possibly to the extent that it would look nothing like what we would regard as "correct".  In short, to change the interpretation of that text, you need to alter, or eliminate, the historical memory as relates to that text altogether, and replace it with different versions of the text via deletions, repetitions, added new (and spurious) texts, and so on.  There is always a symbiotic relationship between any kind of canonical text, and its interpretive tradition. One cannot have the tradition without the text that gives rise to it, nor any understanding of the text without a grounding in how it was understood in its interpretive tradition. (After all, judicial activism and papalism always grow on the fertile ground of textual and interpretive chaos, and the latter only happens when the interpretive tradition or "mentality" is deliberately abandoned or critically and fatally altered in some fashion.)

Which  brings us to the second component of today's high octane speculation: what if that "coding error" which produced the deletions - one might think of it as a version 2.0 of the standard Gnostic tactics of textual subversion - was not unintentional, but intentional? What happens when those artificial intelligences that we've been hearing so much about, writing their own "code" and making threats or eliminating databases they do not "like", are suddenly unleashed on texts? In a world without the hard copy, but only digital copies, there will soon be a manuscript chaos (and of course, new "scholarly theories" of their relationships and origins making the historical de- and re-constructions of Wescott and Hort look like kindergarten play). In that wonderful digital "archive", the hard copy version must simply be eliminated if the wishful thinking of Gnostic reconstructions is ever to survive. And so must all references and interpretations and witnesses of those hard copies also be eliminated from the record.

It's the latter, for the moment, that are preserving the text, until the "coding error" gets ahold of that too, and the hard copy casebooks - or to complete the analogy, the patrologies, the Federalist and Anti-Federalist expositions of that text - are eliminated too.  And then the game changes - just like Wescott and Hort intended - from preservation of authentic copies (apographa) to recovery of lost originals (autographa), and once one starts playing that new game of "recovery", the process can never end, as the process of recovering "the original text" replaces the text itself, and "scholars" (the "recoverers) replace scribes and copyists (the preservers).


To put it country simple: there is one thing that can never be replaced: the hard copy, the library of commentary, and the people who know how to use both without the aid of digital gatekeepers.

See you on the flip side...