Damn I wish the waning of US soft power felt like a positive thing to me; the CIA, along with the DEA, has been one of the more powerful criminal networks on the planet since its inception in the mid 20th C.
It doesn't feel like the US gov is moving away from the soft-power/understated action stuff because the US gov is somehow committed to being less evil.
It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.
> It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.
They do feel that way, but I think they're wrong. Pervasive soft power is a lot better for building stable systems of oppression than more overt shows of force. They're either really bad at, or not interested in (probably both) building anything. I don't think this period of brutal oppression they're gearing up for is going to last very long. People in the US react very poorly to roving bands of State goons.
How much do we believe the current administration values "intelligence"? For the most part, the truth is trump's enemy. as far as he can control it, it's better for his to be the only authoritative voice. If he says Australia is full of muslims and bad hombres, he doesn't need the CIA contradicting him.
> How much do we believe the current administration values "intelligence"?
Broadly? A lot. Donald Trump is wickedly smart. So is Stephen Miller. Susie Wiles. Hegseth is an idiot, but he's Chip 'n' Dale to Marco Rubio. (Our planes aren't falling off our carriers any more. And the raid on Caracas was executed flawlessly. That isn't something numpties can pull off.)
It gives me hope that Trump will replace the top generals and a few layers down with yes-men who will spend the military budget on coke and then the US will be less of a threat to the rest of the world. Another Russia is not a good thing, but it's better than a mad man at the top of the most powerful military in history.
We're definitely going in the direction of "might is right". The "palantirization" of data stores (not just those for surveillance) is going to be an enabler of the "hard power" you're alluding to. This whole platform is probably a dragnet for identifying intelligent people with dissident views. Expect things to get uglier and stranger as well.
I mean, my hope is that the kids at the CIA read all my dumb postings here, report them to their old-men quattos, and try and flip me :D
But I'd think that the folks with their hands on the big levers probably care less and less about that kind of thing; I'd imagine it's harder and harder to find the Foucault readers who might even care to collect and monitor dissident views because the newer folks figure all us stupid nerds will show up on flock and get nabbed once they've run out of brown folks to kidnap.
Power also needs to be justified. Hitler is an example of "unjustifiable might." And all fools who want to promote Darwinism need to know that causing one's own extinction is far easier than causing one's own evolution. Evolution is merely a survivor bias, and Darwin's On the Origin of Species didn't analyze the patterns of extinction.The evolutionary pattern should be that only when you yourself are perfectly rational can you eliminate the irrational enemy. Some people are inherently irrational, yet they try to use Darwinian "survival of the fittest" as their belief to eliminate rational beings, ultimately leading only to their own extinction. This is what happened, is happening, and will happen.Might makes right is not an Rights; Rights are Rights. Might is might, and Right is Right. The statement "might makes right" is rife with literary folly.
> It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.
Soft power is a hard power amplifier though. I don't think it's incompetence and ignorance about how to maintain and use power, I think it's intentional deconstruction of power so that others can fill the vacuum.
But in some ways publishing your opinions on other countries might be the equivalent of sharing your hand at the poker table, right? So this arguably strengthens the soft-power method as well. (OTOH, to your point: how you describe other countries is itself an exercise in soft power, so your point is well taken in that respect.)
Shouldn't the DEA be the weakest agency? Now that the drug problem requires the involvement of the Department of Homeland Security, the War Department, and the U.S. military, shouldn't the DEA be shut down?
It’s the incompetence and low-intelligence of our leaders that scares me most. We need actual clever people in office coming up with decentralized systems that work rather than the mentally deficient demagogues and liars coasting along collecting rent. Californian independence is the best way forward for us.
FWIW both of these books were written about western societies. 1984 was about Orwell’s experience writing propaganda for the BBC during WW2. Oceania is explicitly modeled on the U.S. + Britain; “air strip one” is his tongue-in-cheek name for the British isles. Fahrenheit 451 is based on the second red scare and McCarthyism in the U.S. It’s explicitly set in America, and the inspiration for it was actual calls to ban books in the U.S.
They not only could happen here, they did happen here. It’s a testament to the power of propaganda that people view them as a hypothetical rather than as a lightly fictionalized documentary where the countries were changed to prevent the authors from going to jail.
Those events and times inspired those books, but they didn't actually happen in those countries.
There is a core message about the nature of not just ingsoc but the other governments of the world as well, and their relationship with each that gets left out when talking about 1984. The overbearing surveillance capital state is all people think about, that's part of it, but why that state exists, the motivations of it's leadership, the sheer and terrifying brilliance of the architecture of their government. in many ways, I'm glad the leaders of major countries and political movements don't grasp 1984 well (or at all).
But I agree that in 1948, Orwell's frustration and experience was not just that there was a world war, but that it was the second one in his life time. War-time mentality does approximate the levels of repression he mentions in the book, but in any country, it doesn't quite get there. But it could!
That's the scary part, things like "facecrime" weren't possible in 1984, now not only is it possible, it can be done without humans being involved too much. We have all the surveillance, more than he could have even imagined. But not only that, we have the means to analyze all the surveillance data in real time and do something about it. The capability to implement a world much worse than the one in 1984 exists. The villains of our times and the people they rule over just haven't managed to negotiate the imagination and sophistication of a strategy to abuse it yet.
This is what I mean. just random people are doing the spying parts already. [SPOILER] a very similar scene is in 1984, except with the government behind the cams.
While it’s true that the day-to-day misery and bureaucratic absurdity of 1984 were heavily shaped by Orwell's time at the BBC, he primarily wrote the novel as a cautionary warning against the rise of totalitarianism and the dangers of a centralized, surveilled state.
Having witnessed the horrors of Nazi Germany, the rise of Stalinist Russia, and the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wanted to expose the mechanisms of oppression and propaganda.
Eh, orwell got his fare share of socialisation with socialism in spain and became a ardent anti-communist (more anti-totalitarian after seeing what this "experiment was all about" when it betrayed the anarchists).
Its like animal farm a staunch criticism of the communist experiment and the societies it would form. The history rewritting was actually a typical socialist society pehnomena, going so far that china basically erased its whole past permanently. Its a incredible young country (barely 70 years old) and had to reimport a ton of its culture from taiwan!
Orwell lived through the hyper akward year, where hitler and stalin where allies and best friends - and thus saw the moscow controlled part of the international defending facists as best friends for a year, right after they stabbed the anarchists in the back in spain.
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
― George Orwell, 1984 (2026?)
Just wait until the AI "layer" gets fast enough to rewrite the web in real time. Text, Photos, Videos, even real time phone calls will soon be in the grasp of the corporations. Forever locking us into our own personal prisons, controlled silos of information perfectly crafted and tailored to extract the maximum value where truth is not just hard to know but is imposable to know.
Brave New World always gets overlooked. I understand why we gravitate towards 1984, however it sure seems like we are much closer to BNW. What is TikTok (read: all of the addictive parts of the internet/smartphones) if not a gramme?
> If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
I think it's the idea of the boot that is stamping on this human face. We're in an open society, 1984 makes up for a good contrast that pushes us in the right direction.
I feel that way everytime I go for a walk in a well populated neighborhood, and there's nobody around. Or at work hearing about how people spend hours with their glowing walls of faces that talk endlessly about nothing, they say soon the faces will be able to talk back to!
“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”
― George Orwell, 1984
Having said that, there is nothing there that isn't public information. I guess the CIA's name added some weight but this could easily be published by any public institution interested in foreign affairs.
Brunhilde Pomsel, Joseph Goebbels’s former personal secretary, said something like "even when we heard about atrocities, we didn't believe it, because come on, Germany was the most civilized, most developed country in the world, we couldn't do such things".
But these are publications written by the CIA. Factbook was a name given to the book by the CIA, nobody is banning facts, that's just what they called it. It presumably just doesn't make sense anymore for the CIA maintain an encyclopedia, and I'm surprised they haven't sunset the program sooner.
I think the lament is the rise of the "facts are the enemy" stance is a step towards dystopia.
I recently learned that if we converted all the land we use to grow corn for ethanol (not food) into solar farms the US would produce 84% more energy than it currently produces (from all sources) [1]. Of course that's a huge undertaking, but we're not even talking about it because pesky things like facts are swept aside in lieu of punchy counters like: panels are expensive (they're not), we don't have the land (we do), what about the batteries (solved problem with today's--let along tomorrow's tech), the corn best doesn't get enough sun (it does), etc.
Real reason to remove the facts and archive of the records is so that they're not cited in deportation litigation and government lawyers don't have to argue against the facts the government holds true
Did we read the same book? Wasn't Winston fixing historical records? Sure he just directly rewrote them, but that's not a job. A job makes it look like you aren't fudging the numbers. But the result is the same.
The CIA has a long history of lying with statistics to push political agendas. Who remembers the "war on drugs" or LA in the 90s? I don't recall seeing CIA working with contras in the duckbook.
That's because it's a tool of propaganda. It's not suitable for the current restructuring so they got rid of it.
One only believe it's useful insofar as the people in power reward you for believing it. Regardless of what you believe for example writing the word stable next to a country doesn't make it so. It's a common misconception people have about religion.
There is always a tradeoff. For the utility gained by the factbook you carry increasing cognitive dissonance. You are stuck in a system radically reinterpreting labels, becoming increasingly brittle and cruel.
It was certainly one perspective that was valuable to have: I imagine everybody understood that it was by CIA (it was in the name!) with everything that implies even with "fact" in the name.
There were still actual facts in there, and when there was controversial stuff, you knew that it was coming in with US-tinted glasses, so if that supported with any claim an "adversarial" point, you could trust it to be true (eg. if it confirmed rising GDP and per-capita increase for China and matched Chinese figures, you'd be fine trusting it).
Everyone ran towards this Brave New World based on media fueled populism.
To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words.
Provenance such as "this is what I want to do with my life" are poor justification for enabling it.
> To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words.
Religion = doing what your boss told you. Got it, that makes sense why so many people are religious.
This drips of sarcasm. While the parent comment is low quality, it can be seen as merely noise. your comment actively makes this site toxic. Please refrain from such comments in the future.
I used the CIA factbook so much in college in the early 2000's when looking at so many things. When researching countries to support and travel to it made sense to vreview it beforehand. Its insane that this as a resource would be taken down.
It gets cited a lot in immigration litigation as well (eg in asylum arguments) because it's an unimpeachable factual source that the government's lawyers can't reasonably dispute.
One consequence: The World Factbook is often used in immigration applications as a "you won't get hassled" source of information about conflicts, involvement with the military, etc. (The same is true about State Department assessments of human rights violations.)
This is surely just the tip of the iceberg of what is going on in the CIA at the moment. Senator Ron Wyden just sent a mysterious public letter about concerns about what they are doing.
Whenever there's a mystery, apply the scientific method to investigate it. Form a hypothesis, an experiment or test , then record the results and check if they support.
Hypothesis: CIA is hacking reporters to determine their government sources.
If we start seeing more government sources exposed, we haven't proven it but it supports the hypothesis.
Hypothesis: State election systems are being compromised for federal monitoring and control.
If we start seeing more improbable results in one direction, that is support for the hypothesis.
The CIA's primary remit is outside of their own country. If the CIA is turning their focus inward, that's actually good news for the remainder of the civilized world.
This will not/hardly save any money.
And this was a source of US soft power (deciding which facts to list, how to report on them, etc, allowed to shape an opinion.)
Alternatively, they dont like to be fact-checked. One of donalds favorite activities is denying he ever said/did things he is recorded on video as saying/doing.
The facts are inconvenient. Immigrants were citing them at deportation hearings, and the government couldn't dispute them because they came from the government.
Really don't like this engagement-bait style "suddenly stops" / "have quietly" and all this stuff. It's no wonder it works. The headline from the CIA is far more staid and off the front page in comparison https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/
Is it engagement-bait to say that they suddenly stopped publishing and removed the archives if they suddenly stopped publishing and removed the archives?
used it extensively in high school as a more approachable way to learn about countries without the daunting amounts that wikipedia pages tend to have.
come to realise down the line the "writer's biases" in the latter half of the articles. almost comical to see how nuanced situations are distilled down to "our perspective". recall how you could "learn" about the drug trade situation in almost any country, regardless of how you perceived the country's safeness before reading the page.
There was a website redesign under the Biden administration that lost a lot of important historical information as well. For example, the CIA in-house historian had a book review about the overthrow of the Mosaddegh government in Iran in the 50s, and the CIA/MI6 role in that coup.
Why? It's an excellent recruiting tool. I used to read it as a kid (along with every other paper or digital encyclopedia I could get my hands on), and it certainly made me interested in the CIA.
Because intelligence agencies generally have a vested interest in spreading subtle propaganda, such as by distorting facts.
Now, I have yet to see any cases of the CIA doing this to the World Factbook, since that would tank its credibility, but I also don't browse the Factbook too often.
I know this isn’t a popular opinion, and yeah, I will also miss it, but I’ve always thought the World Factbook was a strange thing for the CIA to be publishing in the first place.
Not because the information is false, but because the act of choosing which facts to publish is itself an opinion. Once you accept that, you’re no longer talking about neutral data; you’re talking about the official position of the United States government, whether that was the intent or not. pro tip: I'm sure it was, esp during the Cold War(tm)
That creates problems, especially in diplomacy. Negotiation depends on what you don’t say as much as what you do. Publicly cataloging a country’s political structure, demographics, or internal conditions may feel benign, but it can complicate discussions that are already delicate, and sometimes existential.
It also gives away more than anyone would like to admit. It signals what we know, what we think we know, and what we’re willing to put our name behind. Even basic statistics like population or religious composition can become leverage or liabilities in the wrong context, and you can’t realistically scrub or redact them every time you enter into a diplomatic negotiation or whatever.
The core issue is simple: this isn’t a private research group or a tech company publishing an open dataset; it’s literally the largest intelligence agency (if you exclude NSA I think) of the United States government publicly describing other nations. That isn’t neutral.
Also, once an agency like the CIA is ideologically skewed, even subconsciously, objective facts become directional. Not by falsifying GDP or population, but by emphasizing governance scores, freedom indices, demographic categories, or economic structures in ways that subtly reinforce a worldview. That kind of torque is harder to detect and harder to challenge than obvious propaganda.
During the Cold War, that might have made sense. Actually, it probably makes sense all the time, but my guess is that the current administration thought (rightly or wrongly) that the editorial team was no longer objective, or they decided there were better avenues to get their message out there.
However, the fact that it no longer even maintained archives since the Biden administration (2020), though, says something else, at least to me: it says that the current admin was in agreement with the previous administration, which means it might have been a bi-partisan view that either it was no longer needed or (really, it seems) no longer wanted or at least valued by either administration.
It was updated weekly. Constantly writing and maintaining so much information is almost certainly very expensive. Coupled with the fact that you have to be very careful before releasing each edit to make sure that no accidental personal beliefs or theories slip by (as that would be a diplomatic catastrophe), I reckon the cost of maintaining the thing could be very high.
I would wager that they're still going to maintain their own version of the World Factbook, and just simply not share it. This would allow them to cut out the very costly review step that I talked about.
Now whether that's a good decision or not is a completely different question.
Your definition of "very high" costs likely don't align with what you think of when you think of "very high" government spending. NASA's 25 billion dollar budget for 2025 was a paltry ~.4% of the total government budget.
Wikimedia foundation's operating budget is 207 million a year - a drop in the ocean of federal budgets, if Factbook was similar.
$100,000,000,000 budget for ICE in a year. Average $400,000,000,000 a year in tax cuts for the wealthy. Those expenditures don't pay for themselves. Gotta cut useful services, medical care for the working class, and devalue the dollar some.
Damn I wish the waning of US soft power felt like a positive thing to me; the CIA, along with the DEA, has been one of the more powerful criminal networks on the planet since its inception in the mid 20th C.
It doesn't feel like the US gov is moving away from the soft-power/understated action stuff because the US gov is somehow committed to being less evil.
It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.
That feels a little horrifying to me.
> It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.
They do feel that way, but I think they're wrong. Pervasive soft power is a lot better for building stable systems of oppression than more overt shows of force. They're either really bad at, or not interested in (probably both) building anything. I don't think this period of brutal oppression they're gearing up for is going to last very long. People in the US react very poorly to roving bands of State goons.
this isn't 1820 -- most people's perception is via social media, and failing that, legacy media.
which is why the big tech bros and the openAI execs donated money to Trump; "kiss the ring".
it's why Larry Ellison desperately wants to buy CBS.
recent posts show that 1/3 of the US electorate will still, in all likelihood, vote Republican, again, even after everything that has happened.
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How much do we believe the current administration values "intelligence"? For the most part, the truth is trump's enemy. as far as he can control it, it's better for his to be the only authoritative voice. If he says Australia is full of muslims and bad hombres, he doesn't need the CIA contradicting him.
> How much do we believe the current administration values "intelligence"?
Broadly? A lot. Donald Trump is wickedly smart. So is Stephen Miller. Susie Wiles. Hegseth is an idiot, but he's Chip 'n' Dale to Marco Rubio. (Our planes aren't falling off our carriers any more. And the raid on Caracas was executed flawlessly. That isn't something numpties can pull off.)
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It gives me hope that Trump will replace the top generals and a few layers down with yes-men who will spend the military budget on coke and then the US will be less of a threat to the rest of the world. Another Russia is not a good thing, but it's better than a mad man at the top of the most powerful military in history.
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We're definitely going in the direction of "might is right". The "palantirization" of data stores (not just those for surveillance) is going to be an enabler of the "hard power" you're alluding to. This whole platform is probably a dragnet for identifying intelligent people with dissident views. Expect things to get uglier and stranger as well.
Project Insight. Hydra was growing inside S.H.I.E.L.D the entire time!
I mean, my hope is that the kids at the CIA read all my dumb postings here, report them to their old-men quattos, and try and flip me :D
But I'd think that the folks with their hands on the big levers probably care less and less about that kind of thing; I'd imagine it's harder and harder to find the Foucault readers who might even care to collect and monitor dissident views because the newer folks figure all us stupid nerds will show up on flock and get nabbed once they've run out of brown folks to kidnap.
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Power also needs to be justified. Hitler is an example of "unjustifiable might." And all fools who want to promote Darwinism need to know that causing one's own extinction is far easier than causing one's own evolution. Evolution is merely a survivor bias, and Darwin's On the Origin of Species didn't analyze the patterns of extinction.The evolutionary pattern should be that only when you yourself are perfectly rational can you eliminate the irrational enemy. Some people are inherently irrational, yet they try to use Darwinian "survival of the fittest" as their belief to eliminate rational beings, ultimately leading only to their own extinction. This is what happened, is happening, and will happen.Might makes right is not an Rights; Rights are Rights. Might is might, and Right is Right. The statement "might makes right" is rife with literary folly.
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> It feels to me like they don't feel like it's as useful as the application simple hard power.
Soft power is a hard power amplifier though. I don't think it's incompetence and ignorance about how to maintain and use power, I think it's intentional deconstruction of power so that others can fill the vacuum.
One can view the defensive realist perspective as another application of the 80/20 rule. It’s all economics. Debt determines many outcomes.
But in some ways publishing your opinions on other countries might be the equivalent of sharing your hand at the poker table, right? So this arguably strengthens the soft-power method as well. (OTOH, to your point: how you describe other countries is itself an exercise in soft power, so your point is well taken in that respect.)
Shouldn't the DEA be the weakest agency? Now that the drug problem requires the involvement of the Department of Homeland Security, the War Department, and the U.S. military, shouldn't the DEA be shut down?
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It’s the incompetence and low-intelligence of our leaders that scares me most. We need actual clever people in office coming up with decentralized systems that work rather than the mentally deficient demagogues and liars coasting along collecting rent. Californian independence is the best way forward for us.
Facts are the enemy.
I remember reading books like 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 as a teen thinking, "Cool story, but the US will never look like that." Oof.
FWIW both of these books were written about western societies. 1984 was about Orwell’s experience writing propaganda for the BBC during WW2. Oceania is explicitly modeled on the U.S. + Britain; “air strip one” is his tongue-in-cheek name for the British isles. Fahrenheit 451 is based on the second red scare and McCarthyism in the U.S. It’s explicitly set in America, and the inspiration for it was actual calls to ban books in the U.S.
They not only could happen here, they did happen here. It’s a testament to the power of propaganda that people view them as a hypothetical rather than as a lightly fictionalized documentary where the countries were changed to prevent the authors from going to jail.
I looked to see if I could find anything asserting 1984 was about propaganda at BBC - nothing.
I found no interviews, no recordings - it seems what survives are his notebooks.
Can you describe the basis for the claim?
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Those events and times inspired those books, but they didn't actually happen in those countries.
There is a core message about the nature of not just ingsoc but the other governments of the world as well, and their relationship with each that gets left out when talking about 1984. The overbearing surveillance capital state is all people think about, that's part of it, but why that state exists, the motivations of it's leadership, the sheer and terrifying brilliance of the architecture of their government. in many ways, I'm glad the leaders of major countries and political movements don't grasp 1984 well (or at all).
But I agree that in 1948, Orwell's frustration and experience was not just that there was a world war, but that it was the second one in his life time. War-time mentality does approximate the levels of repression he mentions in the book, but in any country, it doesn't quite get there. But it could!
That's the scary part, things like "facecrime" weren't possible in 1984, now not only is it possible, it can be done without humans being involved too much. We have all the surveillance, more than he could have even imagined. But not only that, we have the means to analyze all the surveillance data in real time and do something about it. The capability to implement a world much worse than the one in 1984 exists. The villains of our times and the people they rule over just haven't managed to negotiate the imagination and sophistication of a strategy to abuse it yet.
EDIT: Coincidentally, I just stumbled on this timely piece: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62rexy9y3no
This is what I mean. just random people are doing the spying parts already. [SPOILER] a very similar scene is in 1984, except with the government behind the cams.
Thank you for inspiring me to look up the sources for the literary motifs in 1984.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four#Sources_f...
A very interesting read, but it did not verify any of your claims.
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While it’s true that the day-to-day misery and bureaucratic absurdity of 1984 were heavily shaped by Orwell's time at the BBC, he primarily wrote the novel as a cautionary warning against the rise of totalitarianism and the dangers of a centralized, surveilled state.
Having witnessed the horrors of Nazi Germany, the rise of Stalinist Russia, and the Spanish Civil War, Orwell wanted to expose the mechanisms of oppression and propaganda.
Eh, orwell got his fare share of socialisation with socialism in spain and became a ardent anti-communist (more anti-totalitarian after seeing what this "experiment was all about" when it betrayed the anarchists).
Its like animal farm a staunch criticism of the communist experiment and the societies it would form. The history rewritting was actually a typical socialist society pehnomena, going so far that china basically erased its whole past permanently. Its a incredible young country (barely 70 years old) and had to reimport a ton of its culture from taiwan!
Orwell lived through the hyper akward year, where hitler and stalin where allies and best friends - and thus saw the moscow controlled part of the international defending facists as best friends for a year, right after they stabbed the anarchists in the back in spain.
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“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” ― George Orwell, 1984 (2026?)
Just wait until the AI "layer" gets fast enough to rewrite the web in real time. Text, Photos, Videos, even real time phone calls will soon be in the grasp of the corporations. Forever locking us into our own personal prisons, controlled silos of information perfectly crafted and tailored to extract the maximum value where truth is not just hard to know but is imposable to know.
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Brave New World always gets overlooked. I understand why we gravitate towards 1984, however it sure seems like we are much closer to BNW. What is TikTok (read: all of the addictive parts of the internet/smartphones) if not a gramme?
BNW has proven to be far more prescient, and insidiously so, than 1984
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I always thought if Orwell was quite prescient of the eastern block than surely Huxley was even more so about the western.
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> If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever.
I think it's the idea of the boot that is stamping on this human face. We're in an open society, 1984 makes up for a good contrast that pushes us in the right direction.
I feel that way everytime I go for a walk in a well populated neighborhood, and there's nobody around. Or at work hearing about how people spend hours with their glowing walls of faces that talk endlessly about nothing, they say soon the faces will be able to talk back to!
“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.” ― George Orwell, 1984
Having said that, there is nothing there that isn't public information. I guess the CIA's name added some weight but this could easily be published by any public institution interested in foreign affairs.
Brunhilde Pomsel, Joseph Goebbels’s former personal secretary, said something like "even when we heard about atrocities, we didn't believe it, because come on, Germany was the most civilized, most developed country in the world, we couldn't do such things".
But these are publications written by the CIA. Factbook was a name given to the book by the CIA, nobody is banning facts, that's just what they called it. It presumably just doesn't make sense anymore for the CIA maintain an encyclopedia, and I'm surprised they haven't sunset the program sooner.
I love that you're lamenting a CIA website closure as a step toward dystopia... 10/10
It could be as simple as budget changes.
I think the lament is the rise of the "facts are the enemy" stance is a step towards dystopia.
I recently learned that if we converted all the land we use to grow corn for ethanol (not food) into solar farms the US would produce 84% more energy than it currently produces (from all sources) [1]. Of course that's a huge undertaking, but we're not even talking about it because pesky things like facts are swept aside in lieu of punchy counters like: panels are expensive (they're not), we don't have the land (we do), what about the batteries (solved problem with today's--let along tomorrow's tech), the corn best doesn't get enough sun (it does), etc.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KtQ9nt2ZeGM
Real reason to remove the facts and archive of the records is so that they're not cited in deportation litigation and government lawyers don't have to argue against the facts the government holds true
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I had the opposite reaction to you.
I read the Handmaid's Tale and my first thought after finishing it was "Oh wow, this might actually happen here!"
If the CIA published this for the first time this year, no one would want it.
Why is valued if it is removed?
Did we read the same book? Wasn't Winston fixing historical records? Sure he just directly rewrote them, but that's not a job. A job makes it look like you aren't fudging the numbers. But the result is the same.
The CIA has a long history of lying with statistics to push political agendas. Who remembers the "war on drugs" or LA in the 90s? I don't recall seeing CIA working with contras in the duckbook.
That's because it's a tool of propaganda. It's not suitable for the current restructuring so they got rid of it.
One only believe it's useful insofar as the people in power reward you for believing it. Regardless of what you believe for example writing the word stable next to a country doesn't make it so. It's a common misconception people have about religion.
There is always a tradeoff. For the utility gained by the factbook you carry increasing cognitive dissonance. You are stuck in a system radically reinterpreting labels, becoming increasingly brittle and cruel.
It was certainly one perspective that was valuable to have: I imagine everybody understood that it was by CIA (it was in the name!) with everything that implies even with "fact" in the name.
There were still actual facts in there, and when there was controversial stuff, you knew that it was coming in with US-tinted glasses, so if that supported with any claim an "adversarial" point, you could trust it to be true (eg. if it confirmed rising GDP and per-capita increase for China and matched Chinese figures, you'd be fine trusting it).
Wild. Growing up through Reagan, I saw the world only act like this.
Apple's 1984 commercial didn't age well: https://youtu.be/ErwS24cBZPc
Everyone ran towards this Brave New World based on media fueled populism.
To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words.
Provenance such as "this is what I want to do with my life" are poor justification for enabling it.
> To me religion isn't Christianity or Islam. It's following orders of arbitrary leaders who give themselves titles via narrative. Priest, Minister, CEO, General... just words.
Religion = doing what your boss told you. Got it, that makes sense why so many people are religious.
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This drips of sarcasm. While the parent comment is low quality, it can be seen as merely noise. your comment actively makes this site toxic. Please refrain from such comments in the future.
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I used the CIA factbook so much in college in the early 2000's when looking at so many things. When researching countries to support and travel to it made sense to vreview it beforehand. Its insane that this as a resource would be taken down.
It gets cited a lot in immigration litigation as well (eg in asylum arguments) because it's an unimpeachable factual source that the government's lawyers can't reasonably dispute.
Now that you mention it, I'm pretty convinced this is the reason they took it down. If you can't dispute the facts, get rid of them, I guess.
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In what ways would you use it like that? Honest question, I'm not at all familiar with what was in it.
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It was a great resource for basic facts about countries. Providing it to the public was genius in addition to being useful.
I was in middle school in the 90s and I had that URL memorized. Used it a lot as a reference for class projects.
One consequence: The World Factbook is often used in immigration applications as a "you won't get hassled" source of information about conflicts, involvement with the military, etc. (The same is true about State Department assessments of human rights violations.)
This is surely just the tip of the iceberg of what is going on in the CIA at the moment. Senator Ron Wyden just sent a mysterious public letter about concerns about what they are doing.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5724300-ron-wyden-cia-le...
Whenever there's a mystery, apply the scientific method to investigate it. Form a hypothesis, an experiment or test , then record the results and check if they support.
Hypothesis: CIA is hacking reporters to determine their government sources.
If we start seeing more government sources exposed, we haven't proven it but it supports the hypothesis.
Hypothesis: State election systems are being compromised for federal monitoring and control.
If we start seeing more improbable results in one direction, that is support for the hypothesis.
> apply the scientific method to investigate it.
Great where do I find a spare identical copy of the CIA to use as the control group?
The CIA's primary remit is outside of their own country. If the CIA is turning their focus inward, that's actually good news for the remainder of the civilized world.
There's this from 2022, but there are probably many concerns from Wyden:
https://apnews.com/article/congress-cia-ron-wyden-martin-hei...
What is going on?
This will not/hardly save any money. And this was a source of US soft power (deciding which facts to list, how to report on them, etc, allowed to shape an opinion.)
This administration doesn't seem to see value in soft power.
Alternatively, they dont like to be fact-checked. One of donalds favorite activities is denying he ever said/did things he is recorded on video as saying/doing.
The facts are inconvenient. Immigrants were citing them at deportation hearings, and the government couldn't dispute them because they came from the government.
Really don't like this engagement-bait style "suddenly stops" / "have quietly" and all this stuff. It's no wonder it works. The headline from the CIA is far more staid and off the front page in comparison https://simonw.github.io/cia-world-factbook-2020/
Is it engagement-bait to say that they suddenly stopped publishing and removed the archives if they suddenly stopped publishing and removed the archives?
Ha, yep. I recall a similar observation in December: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46251912
What other engagement bait adverbs appear in HN submission titles?
How did the word "suddenly" get into the title?
That was editorializing by the person who submitted it, I didn't use that language in my post.
I agree with you
This is so messed up. This was a great public benefit. We used it in High School, including Model United Nations.
used it extensively in high school as a more approachable way to learn about countries without the daunting amounts that wikipedia pages tend to have.
come to realise down the line the "writer's biases" in the latter half of the articles. almost comical to see how nuanced situations are distilled down to "our perspective". recall how you could "learn" about the drug trade situation in almost any country, regardless of how you perceived the country's safeness before reading the page.
There was a website redesign under the Biden administration that lost a lot of important historical information as well. For example, the CIA in-house historian had a book review about the overthrow of the Mosaddegh government in Iran in the 50s, and the CIA/MI6 role in that coup.
More discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794
Thanks! Expanded:
Spotlighting the World Factbook as We Bid a Fond Farewell https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46891794 - 126 comments, Feb 2026
I wonder how much AI scraping traffic the site was getting...
I hope that we will eventually find out why it was shut down.
For now, you can get a copy at https://archive.org/details/CIA-World-Factbook-collection
The irony of an intelligence agency publishing a "fact book" in the first place is thick.
Why? It's an excellent recruiting tool. I used to read it as a kid (along with every other paper or digital encyclopedia I could get my hands on), and it certainly made me interested in the CIA.
Why?
Because intelligence agencies generally have a vested interest in spreading subtle propaganda, such as by distorting facts.
Now, I have yet to see any cases of the CIA doing this to the World Factbook, since that would tank its credibility, but I also don't browse the Factbook too often.
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I know this isn’t a popular opinion, and yeah, I will also miss it, but I’ve always thought the World Factbook was a strange thing for the CIA to be publishing in the first place.
Not because the information is false, but because the act of choosing which facts to publish is itself an opinion. Once you accept that, you’re no longer talking about neutral data; you’re talking about the official position of the United States government, whether that was the intent or not. pro tip: I'm sure it was, esp during the Cold War(tm)
That creates problems, especially in diplomacy. Negotiation depends on what you don’t say as much as what you do. Publicly cataloging a country’s political structure, demographics, or internal conditions may feel benign, but it can complicate discussions that are already delicate, and sometimes existential.
It also gives away more than anyone would like to admit. It signals what we know, what we think we know, and what we’re willing to put our name behind. Even basic statistics like population or religious composition can become leverage or liabilities in the wrong context, and you can’t realistically scrub or redact them every time you enter into a diplomatic negotiation or whatever.
The core issue is simple: this isn’t a private research group or a tech company publishing an open dataset; it’s literally the largest intelligence agency (if you exclude NSA I think) of the United States government publicly describing other nations. That isn’t neutral.
Also, once an agency like the CIA is ideologically skewed, even subconsciously, objective facts become directional. Not by falsifying GDP or population, but by emphasizing governance scores, freedom indices, demographic categories, or economic structures in ways that subtly reinforce a worldview. That kind of torque is harder to detect and harder to challenge than obvious propaganda.
During the Cold War, that might have made sense. Actually, it probably makes sense all the time, but my guess is that the current administration thought (rightly or wrongly) that the editorial team was no longer objective, or they decided there were better avenues to get their message out there.
However, the fact that it no longer even maintained archives since the Biden administration (2020), though, says something else, at least to me: it says that the current admin was in agreement with the previous administration, which means it might have been a bi-partisan view that either it was no longer needed or (really, it seems) no longer wanted or at least valued by either administration.
World Factbook is targeting US government itself providing a consistent and open view on the topic - a single official position on basic facts.
Alternatively, an intelligence agency might publish what they want you to think they know, or simply what they want you to think.
two examples
1. It listed Taiwan under countries
2. It listed Burma even though it's called Myannma (as all my friends from Myannma introduce themselves)
Truth is a danger for the ruling oligarchy.
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It was updated weekly. Constantly writing and maintaining so much information is almost certainly very expensive. Coupled with the fact that you have to be very careful before releasing each edit to make sure that no accidental personal beliefs or theories slip by (as that would be a diplomatic catastrophe), I reckon the cost of maintaining the thing could be very high.
I would wager that they're still going to maintain their own version of the World Factbook, and just simply not share it. This would allow them to cut out the very costly review step that I talked about.
Now whether that's a good decision or not is a completely different question.
Your definition of "very high" costs likely don't align with what you think of when you think of "very high" government spending. NASA's 25 billion dollar budget for 2025 was a paltry ~.4% of the total government budget.
Wikimedia foundation's operating budget is 207 million a year - a drop in the ocean of federal budgets, if Factbook was similar.
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If it was about the cost of updating it, they wouldn't need to remove the archived versions.
yeah, where is the CIA going to find the money to pay a few editors?
I think you touched on the real reason: objective facts are anti-trump, woke leftist propaganda
What makes you think they can't "keep it going"? They're ceasing the publication, aka, the act of releasing it.
From the CIA Factbook History page it writes,
> It was first made available to the public in 1975 and in 1981 was renamed The World Factbook
Is it just being classified again? Who knows! That could be classified.
$100,000,000,000 budget for ICE in a year. Average $400,000,000,000 a year in tax cuts for the wealthy. Those expenditures don't pay for themselves. Gotta cut useful services, medical care for the working class, and devalue the dollar some.
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Wikipedia next? I hope not.
is wikipedia directly owned by the US Government?
No, but neither is Greenland.
Counter-argument: why are my tax dollars replicating Wikipedia?
What do you think Wiki is based on?