How Things Vanish

De Maizière shut down Linksunten after the Hamburg riots. The whole Indymedia platform just vanished—not just certain posts, the entire thing. One day it existed, the next day it was gone.

It had been the gathering place for Germany’s radical left for years. Testimonies of burned police cars, anonymous manifestos about attacks and arson, the vocabulary of protest turning into something heavier. The government called it a lawless zone and decided the solution was to delete it completely.

Right-wing extremists ran their forums openly, and nobody shut those down. The inconsistency was impossible to miss, but easy enough to ignore if you weren’t really thinking about it.

What was strange was that the cops didn’t want this to happen. Linksunten had become useful to them—they could watch the networks, see what was being planned. Intelligence gathering. Once it was gone, that ended. They lost a window into what people were actually doing, and it made their jobs harder.

But the part that stuck with me was simpler. Something just ceased to exist. A whole platform, years of conversation and archive, deleted because someone in power decided it was inconvenient. Not through courts, not through changing the law, not through any process you could point to or argue against. Just the ability to make things disappear.

Which makes you wonder what else can vanish the same way when nobody’s watching. What other platforms, what other archives. How much of what seems permanent is actually just operating at the pleasure of people who have that power.