Cancel

Grapevine entry for Special Issue 29.

How does the definition of “cancelling” and “deleting” change in a distributed, decentralized, nonhierarchical knowledge infrastructure?

For example, in peer-to-peer protocols the most that can be done is requesting to delete something from a node/peer, but there can be no way to ensure that any cached version of that something is still stored.

Especially to counter authoritarianism, this becomes a powerful resistance to censorship, as it becomes virtually impossible to erase all sources of some specific information.

In VCSs like git, removing something from a repository means adding a removal operation, yet the file is (almost) irreversibly engraved in the history of the repository, thus impossible to erase.