Reposted from c/politics since it violated their rule about needing to have a link:
Now that the fascists have taken over, what books, academic studies, and pieces of knowledge should take priority in personal/private archival? I’m thinking about what happened in Nazi Germany, especially with the burning of the Institute for Sexual Science(Institut für Sexualwissenschaft) and what was lost completely in the burnings.
Some of us should consider saving stuff digitally or physically. Redundancies will help preserve stuff.
If you’d like to support archival in general, consider donating to https://archive.org/ . They regularly archive books and media that can be potentially banned. It doesn’t hurt to download parts of the archive on your machine if you want to be extra sure, but keep in mind the internet archive is massive with petabytes of data.
And also good to keep in mind is that digital storage is volatile. Yes it’s impractical to have a few terabytes printed out, but if stored properly, it’ll last longer than digital media storage.
Another thing to consider:
If things go full on crazy, like they seem likely to do, being in possession of improper knowledge could be a capital offence when the thought police come knocking.
Ehhh, fuck fascists. They can’t get all of us if a bunch of us do this.
It’s all hypothetical for now. But with control of the house and senate, there’s not a single thing actually stopping them as long as the rank and file of the GOP stay in line and push everything through. Hopefully there’s enough liberal and further left inclined “Well organised militias” to fight back against anything super fashy…
Lmaoo are you serious? Nothing has bee n nation wide,. Turns out people like their shitty jobs over murder.
Digital data stored right is extremely non-volatile - but it takes an effort to do so,but the same goes for printing out terabytes.
And digital data can be hidden far easier.
Depends on what medium it’s on. Some are far better than others, so as a generalisation I said what I said. A majority of folk these days, when they think digital media storage, think solid state. Which is, in fact, not suited for long term storage. A piece of paper stored correctly is going to outlast a usb drive, SD card or SSD.
That’s what BD M-Disc is for.
Good argument for encryption and servers within a privacy respecting country
Archive is on American soil. They got sued for lending ebooks during the pandemic and lost, so they are not a safe bet. Archive elsewhere. Anywhere else.
Why can’t humanity seem to learn that storing all of our knowledge and cultural artifacts in just one place with no backup is a BAD IDEA? Don’t let the library of Alexandria burn again!
They really should relocate to Europe.
How, exactly?
They should sure, who’s coughing up the tens of millions of dollars that might cost?
If they don’t have the resources to do it, they can’t.
Distributed filesystems that self hosters can support may be the future for resilient data, but we’re not really there yet in a scalable way.
Depebding on the country, Europe has significantly worse copyright law than the US, to the extent that archiving a web page is illegal.
Fun fact:
In Germany you have to pay a special tax for anything that could be used to violate copyright. It ranges from 0.10€ for USB sticks to 90€ for faster printers to 14,000,000€ for opening up a public library - all going to a bunch of publisher organizations.
What the fuck are you talking about?
The shit show Germany has is well aware to me but also grants you the right to download whatever you want as long as you don’t distribute it.
And an archive would be doing exactly that: Distributing copyrighted materials.
Moving to Europe is not necessarily a great idea depending on the country they choose. US copyright law is comparatively lenient to some European countries, who can be said to be (much more) controlled by publishers when it comes to copyright.
Fuck, are we really becoming the last beacon of freedom and liberty?
One of the few left.
As always
Germany would like a word…
The most Democratic of all.
I really hope you were being ironic
Current Germany is more democratic than most other countries…
We will have to fight for it though. At this rate we will have to vote down chat control yearly for the next century, and Macron and Scholz are not infinitely better than the US dems either.
At least now, they see that immediate rearmament and asserting ourselves as an economic and geopolitic power is a necessity, even if our industry doesn’t feel like it and never wants to change.
The first half of the last century says otherwise
That was 90 years ago boomer
So always = recently
So… in the first half of the last century?
Shit, now I’m doubly worried about Archive staying online.
As @hollyberries pointed out, archive’s servers are on American soil, if there’s a federal ban on improper(“fake”) knowledge, their assets could easily be seized. No laws would have to change from today for them to do this, they’d just have to think up a somewhat reasonable excuse…
Probably they’d use obscenity laws. Or they might bring lawsuit after lawsuit, dmca after dmca, until it drains them of their funds.
The possibilities are endless.
I gotta get offline now. This morning hasn’t been too great for my mental health.
I’m hopeful that the archivists were looking to transfer their servers elsewhere (if they could while in the middle of that lawsuit).
If not it will likely be gone. :/
Or copyright.
Whether honest or not, copyright claims are a very powerful tool to take stuff down now, and fight about restoring it later.
Somebody needs to fix IPFS so we can archive all that shit and share in hosting a chunk.