MIA: Making the Visible Invisible
Vanishing Acts and Anticipated Nefarious Disappearances...
Scenes from the Last Fairytale
I just remembered this passage from the Eleprocon Chronicles dated June 1980:
“Information disappearing” — go to look for books and info — realize stuff is missing — follow the patterns of what’s missing — who’s taking it?
This was one of the foundations of the eleprocon conspiracy, keeping eye out for the ‘con’. When making the invisible visible was the objective. When we were tuning into the world around us in new ways with new tools and conceptual frameworks. Yet the looming effects of the emerging digital alchemy being idealized and materialized soon fractured truth and started dismantling trust as we have witnessed since.
Vanishing Acts: How America’s Knowledge Is Being Erased in Real Time
Now in 2025, 45 years after the eleprocon conspiracy came to light, in today’s America truth doesn’t just vanish into thin air — it is deliberately tucked away, scrubbed from websites, yanked off the air, or left unfunded until silence swallows it. From government studies to late-night satire, from children’s television to climate science, a new age of erasure is unfolding. The battleground is not only over policies and elections but over memory itself: what survives as public knowledge, and what is allowed to disappear. And even who is allowed to be disappeared.
Government Records That Fade Like Ghosts
The first signs were subtle. Pages on WhiteHouse.gov, once Trump took office, quietly disappeared, including the full text of the U.S. Constitution. Soon after, EPA climate data sets became inaccessible, then reappeared only in archived or redacted forms. Museums reported directives to “review” or “update” exhibits on race, sexuality, and systemic inequality. School curricula came under political assault, with bans on longstanding frameworks for teaching history or gender. Then there is the lingering issue of the Epstein files.
The pattern is unmistakable: inconvenient knowledge — whether scientific, historical, or civic — is increasingly treated as a liability. And when knowledge is deemed threatening, it vanishes.
The most recent example was the Department of Justice’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) study on domestic terrorism, which showed far-right extremists had committed the vast majority of politically motivated killings since 1990. Days after the study gained renewed attention, the DOJ pulled it from its website. A sterile message appeared: “This page is unavailable as part of a content review.”
The deletion spoke louder than the study itself. In a world of mirrors and archives, the act of disappearance is no longer erasure but a declaration of what truths those in power would prefer unremembered.
Education and Museums in the Crosshairs
The pruning of information is not confined to PDFs and government databases. It extends to classrooms and museums, where entire narratives about who America is — and who it has been — are being rewritten or suppressed.
School boards across the country now ban curricula that even gesture toward systemic racism or gender identity. Museum curators have been instructed to downplay LGBTQ+ histories or reframe exhibits once dedicated to civil rights struggles. The result is a slow, quiet narrowing of cultural memory. A country that cannot teach its children what it has endured — and inflicted — risks severing itself from its own past.
We are magical creatures with the capacity to blend art and science to illuminate what previously was out of sight to bring it out of mind. We are a confluence of physical and metaphysical occurrences. — The Eleprocon Epiphany 1979
The Environmental Precedent
We’ve seen this before. During Trump’s first administration, the EPA deleted climate change data and withdrew scientific reports from its website, forcing environmental researchers to scramble for backups. The lesson is chilling: if the state can hide evidence of a planetary crisis, it can hide anything. In the present administration, the same tactics resurface, applied not only to science but to history, terrorism, and education.
Public Media Under Siege: NPR and Sesame Street
This year, the erasure reached one of America’s most trusted institutions: public broadcasting. With Executive Order 14290, the administration moved to cut all federal funding for NPR and PBS, accusing them of political bias. The move jeopardizes more than 1,500 local stations, many serving rural and low-income communities where commercial news outlets have already retreated.
Caught in the crossfire was Sesame Street. For over fifty years, the show has taught letters, numbers, and kindness to children across economic divides. Now, its home network is threatened with extinction. A last-minute deal with Netflix may keep Big Bird and Elmo alive for the next generation, but the symbolism is stark: even children’s education is not safe from the politics of erasure.
Public broadcasting has long been more than news — it has been a civic commons. Losing it means losing not only journalism but cultural glue, early education, and even emergency communications. The attempt to silence NPR and Sesame Street shows just how wide the net of vanishing acts has grown.
Comedy Silenced
Even satire is being scrubbed. This summer, CBS canceled The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, officially citing “financial reasons” but suspiciously soon after Colbert skewered a Trump-linked corporate settlement. Weeks later, ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! indefinitely after the host made controversial remarks about the death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
Late-night comedy once thrived as a nightly counterbalance, using humor to puncture political power. Now, those platforms are shrinking, sometimes under the guise of economics, sometimes under pressure from regulators and affiliate stations. In an age when laughter itself can be dangerous, the disappearance of Colbert and Kimmel feels less like routine programming churn and more like a cultural purge.
A Fractured Media Landscape
All of this is unfolding in a transformed media ecosystem:
• Gatekeepers are gone. Deletions are instantly mirrored by watchdogs, journalists, and archivists. A vanished DOJ study is resurrected within hours on the Wayback Machine.
• Erasure amplifies. What was once an obscure PDF now circulates virally after being pulled. Attempts to silence often make the message louder.
• Audiences fragment. For some, these disappearances confirm creeping authoritarianism. For others, they pass unnoticed, or are framed as overdue corrections to “bias.”
• Shadow archives rise. Citizens now create decentralized samizdat libraries, preserving what the state would rather lose. Redundancy becomes resistance.
In this landscape, the contest is not only over what is true, but what is visible — and who has the power to determine visibility itself.
Where This Heads
The trajectory is clear. Information wars are intensifying. What once lived in civic commons — scientific data, historical memory, satire, children’s education — is being hollowed out or driven underground.
Yet erasure is never complete. The more truth is suppressed, the more vigorously it is mirrored, archived, and amplified by networks of journalists, educators, entertainers, and ordinary citizens. Still, the cost of fragmentation is steep: without a shared baseline of facts, society risks losing the ability to govern itself.
What is vanishing in America is not just studies, shows, or websites. What is vanishing is the sense of a common inheritance of truth. In its place grows a splintered landscape where memory must be fought for, preserved, and defended — sometimes in secret, sometimes in laughter, sometimes in the bright colors of a children’s program.
The real question is not whether information can be erased, but whether Americans will continue to recognize themselves in the same story once the erasures are done.
The Eleprocon Chronicles
Eleprocon mythOS 2birds BEAMing noosphere
