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.
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!
That’s why people should torrent and seed lots of its data!
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.