Tools for Forgetting

Back in May, the Guardian had a short piece on “Daniel Dennett’s Seven Tools for Thinking,” quoting excerpts from his excellent Intuition Pumps and other Tools for Thinking, one of my current bedside books.

Today, I wanted to link to this excerpt and talk about its implications for productivity in content-focused projects, but it was gone, leaving behind just one sentence …

This content has been removed as our copyright has expired.

… and (as of today) 488 orphaned comments, referring to content that no longer exists.

Now it’s one thing to remove content because it has “expired,” controversial enough by itself, but why not also remove the comments, which are no more than detritus right now, completely irrelevant for anyone but … search engines?