Mining The Babylonian Blockchain

I'm sure that it will be no great revelation to most Steemit users that one of the great advantages of Steem and the Steemit platform is the absolute resistance to censorship the platform provides. With all deletions and edits still present in the block-chain, Steemit serves as its own archive.org. What this should mean is that, unlike other social media platforms, Steemit should be immune, or at least resistant, to the increasingly diverse shenanigans that make up censorship in the modern world.

Artist's rendition of the Hanging Gardens. +15% growth rate to cities historically unverified.

Censorship used to simply be the repression of certain views, generally by exclusion, but due to necessity forced upon it by technology and the internet, it has been elevated to an art form. It is now standard fare to use a wide variety of tools that do more than simply silence. Shadow-bans are one pernicious example, where not only is a voice silenced, it is prevented from diverting its energy elsewhere by being given the appearance of making a difference where it already is. It diverts human effort down a bottomless rabbit hole.

This is probably working against my point.

The sad truth is that having control of the narrative in a society is extremely powerful and can quite literally write the history books, which in turn is capable of setting the social narrative for generations at a time. This leads to tangible changes in policy and culture, and therefore directly to people's actions. This makes sock-puppet accounts, and the sort of social-media-posters-for-hire we saw during the US election just another, convoluted form of censorship of the truth, and ultimately, a tool for indirect control of the masses.

"What is history, but a fable agreed upon?" - Fontenelle, popularized by Napoleon

Consider any polarizing figure from history. By polarizing, I do not mean a figure whom is universally reviled, but one for which there is a wide range of opinion on. Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson might be good examples. You will find very strong opinions on both sides for these figures, and legitimate debate about what standards they should even be measured against. For example, should their treatment of native tribes be measured against what we consider acceptable today, or against the sum total of their contemporary culture?

Do we really know if what we have read about these figures is true? Is it possible the reality is either far better or far worse?

There's certainly a lot of truth to the adage that winners write the history books. Wouldn't it be fascinating to have completely un-redacted access to the personal journals of figures like these, and a wide swath of popular contemporary opinion to compare them with? The History Channel would be out of business practically overnight.

Perhaps they'd still serve a niche demographic.

I can envision a future where historians have similar questions about us. They will have the amazing resource of a complete data chain, even showing what was edited and when, to draw all their conclusions from. They will not have to consider bias and censorship, only (data) "mining" the data available to them on the blockchain. Understanding the reputation system, and having the data to track posting times, would allow the identification of fake accounts and other sock-puppeting efforts, even if other tools like IP addresses are not available.

Personally, I'd point myself right at @NebuchanezzarII and find out if he really built that thing in the first picture, or if the Hanging Gardens looked a bit more like this, as some historians contend:

If we had Sennacherib's blockchain, he might tell us this is all anti-Assyrian and anti-Ninevan cultural appropriation.

Sources: Wikipedia, popsugar.com, http://attackofthecute.com/on/?i=22835, The Independent. Copyright History Channel.