Doctrine
To preserve a document is to wager that it will be needed. The archive does not describe the past. It constrains the future of whoever consults it. A classified file is a compressed future. Its declassification is a retroactive act: it changes the status of everything that happened in between.
Archived information acts on the future. Destroyed information acts on the past. Both are irreversible.
Vecteur ouvert
An organization that archives everything and an organization that destroys everything produce two different pasts. The question is which of the two decides what took place.
