Misinformation
The Propaganda Technique That's Older Than the Printing Press
The fake news crisis feels urgently modern, but the most effective misinformation tool in history was perfected by rulers who had never heard of an algorithm.
The Idea
We tend to treat misinformation as a disease of the digital age — something that emerged from social media's architecture and the death of editorial gatekeepers. But the underlying mechanics are ancient, and understanding them historically makes the present far less mysterious. The technique is damnatio memoriae — Latin for 'condemnation of memory' — but the broader practice is simpler: those who control the record of the past control what people believe about the present. Roman emperors had inconvenient predecessors erased from inscriptions and coins. Egyptian pharaohs chiselled rivals' faces off temple walls. Soviet censors airbrushed purged officials out of photographs. The medium changed; the logic didn't. What's genuinely surprising is that the goal was rarely to make people believe a specific lie. It was to create a fog — to make the past feel uncertain enough that the official version became the path of least resistance. This is subtler and more durable than a single fabrication. A targeted lie can be disproved. Ambient uncertainty is much harder to dispel. Historians now call this 'epistemic cowardice' when individuals do it, and 'information warfare' when states do. But the underlying move — flooding the zone, muddying the record, making truth feel like a matter of opinion — is a technique that has been honed across millennia. The printing press didn't create propaganda. It just scaled it.
In the World
Consider the case of Pharaoh Hatshepsut, one of ancient Egypt's most successful rulers. She governed for roughly twenty years in the 15th century BCE, overseeing lucrative trade expeditions and ambitious building programmes. Then, decades after her death, her successor Thutmose III — quite possibly her own stepson — ordered a systematic erasure. Her image was hacked from temple walls. Her name was removed from official king lists. Statues were smashed and buried. For three thousand years, it worked. When 19th-century archaeologists began piecing together the dynastic record, Hatshepsut was simply absent — a gap in the sequence. It wasn't until the early 20th century that Egyptologist Herbert Winlock, working through fragments at Deir el-Bahri, began reconstructing who she was. The Metropolitan Museum of Art's later excavations, and eventually a 2007 CT scan that matched a loose tooth to a canopic jar, finally confirmed her identity beyond doubt. The erasure was so thorough that for centuries, no one knew there was anything missing. That's the point. The most effective misinformation doesn't announce itself as a cover-up. It just quietly closes the space where the inconvenient truth used to stand, and trusts that future generations won't know to look. Hatshepsut's story is remarkable precisely because the physical evidence survived, buried under sand. Most erasures aren't so lucky — and most don't get found.
Why It Matters
Knowing this history doesn't make you immune to misinformation, but it does change how you encounter it. The modern instinct is to ask 'is this true or false?' — to treat each claim as a discrete fact to be checked. That's useful, but it misses the deeper game. The more sophisticated question is: what has been made absent here? What's the gap in this account? Who benefits from the fog? This reframe is practical. When a news story, a social media post, or even a conversation feels unsettling but you can't quite identify why, it's often not because of what's being said — it's because of what's being quietly omitted. The erasure is the message. It also offers a kind of equanimity. Misinformation is not a uniquely modern failure of civilisation. It is a persistent feature of how power operates, which means humanity has also developed persistent ways of pushing back: archaeology, archival work, investigative journalism, oral history. The record resists erasure more than rulers tend to expect. Hatshepsut came back. The question worth sitting with is how we make sure the record stays recoverable in an age when deletion is faster and cheaper than chisels.
A Question to Ponder
What absence in your current understanding of the world might be the result of something — or someone — that was quietly erased?
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