For nearly all of history, virtually all communication was unrecorded, which is a significant step below being recorded and made freely available to anyone who looks for it for maybe a decade or so, which is the current level of impermanence being decried.
For the record - and to differentiate - the impermanence being pointed out would exist regarding publications, public works - output meant for circulation.-
Panopticons and surveillance are different matters.-
I'm not talking about surveillance. I'm saying that, until recently, pretty much all the casual discussion of the sort that ends up on most forums would've been spoken and so maximally impermanent. Only a very tiny portion of communication was ever written down before texting and the internet.
