In the novel, Winston Smith's work is rectification: back issues of the Times rewritten to match current policy, originals dropped into the memory hole, the old predictions of Big Brother made accurate retroactively. Orwell drew it from watching wartime BBC broadcasts revised and Spanish war reports contradict each other within months.
The Soviet practice it mirrored: executed commissars disappearing from official photographs, encyclopedia subscribers mailed replacement pages for the Bering Strait article when Beria fell. The folk reading treats the memory hole as a technology of the past.
The contemporary twist Orwell could not see: the memory hole no longer needs a furnace. Silent edits, deleted posts, updated headlines, and version-controlled reality do the work at scale, and the furnace's advantage was that you could at least smell the smoke.
If the record can be corrected faster than memory, what does the past weigh?