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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
Good argument for encryption and servers within a privacy respecting country
