Ancient Extraterrestrials

Now there's the makings of a conspiracy I can sink my teeth into. Education is controlled top down, people today are taught to think in terms of for the the group and as a team, individualized intellect is to be frowned on at all costs, which is why the founding generation of the US as a whole were far more intellectual than the comman citizen of today. This way top up centralized hierarchies can set policies in the many areas of expertise and knowledge without needing to micromanage the bottom, who will as a matter of not going against the grain will pretty much regulate themselves. The top minority doesn't care what items the bottom majority chooses to consume, just so as the overall mindset is one of thinking as a global woprkforce rather than any real ties or loyalty to any specific boundary and only the promotion and advancement and success of those willing to sign on and promote those top down policies. The Uniform Standardization of the Earth we'll call it. You give them computers and they transfer all the knowledge they can from the physical world to this virtual, then, once most of the world's knowledge has been collected on these, as you call them "fragile" devices, a prearranged or forseen tragedy wipes out and destroys all the saved data, plunging the world into a knowledge blackout. How do you get an informed people to surrender their knowledge so you can erase it and write it as you would have it for all future generations? You ask them for it. What happens to hard file records after scanned and uploaded to the new computerized systems? As a rule, they are destroyed.