Having gone through the piece, the title seems to be just clickbait, unbecoming of the NYT. There's absolutely no "rewriting" of history there; just a new set of tools and approaches that some historians are starting to use for future works.
I even disagree with their quoted “For the first time, historians can find without knowing where to look,” - We've had librarians and research assistants for centuries, so it was always possible to find things even if you aren't sure where to look. It's just that now we have another way of achieving this, which to me is not that much different from the appearance of computerized databases about 50 years ago, and the appearance of effective online search engines about 25 years ago.
squircle · 10h ago
Paywalled... however, it now seems poignant to save and invest in printed texts, invest in personal and community libraries, etc. (And be highly skeptical of anyone advocating the burning of books for whatever reason.)
westurner · 10h ago
Which of these - history revisionist - problems can an immutable decentralized distributed database solve for?
But there is no delete in an immutable data store; and, quantum information is never lost.
I even disagree with their quoted “For the first time, historians can find without knowing where to look,” - We've had librarians and research assistants for centuries, so it was always possible to find things even if you aren't sure where to look. It's just that now we have another way of achieving this, which to me is not that much different from the appearance of computerized databases about 50 years ago, and the appearance of effective online search engines about 25 years ago.
But there is no delete in an immutable data store; and, quantum information is never lost.