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.
You can easily keep Wikipedia around - burn it on archive BDs(M-Disc), they are easily hidden, can take the whole Wikipedia in one disk and basic information is extremely valuable in an oppressive regime. Then do the same for a collection of E-Books based on what is most likely to be banned/what the right wing does take the biggest offence on. And what aids you the most in either getting out or resist.
Using archive BDs(M-Discs) is important as regular storage devices can easily be detected due to their metallic contents and they degrade within years. M-Discs are far more resilient and can be almost as easily hidden.
Damian Haglund’s website, it’s an exquisite piece of knowledge.
The fascist, directly into cold storage and left to bit-rot.
Joking aside, history. If you really think the internet will not be a thing yet want to survive: water purification. farming, water management, plant guides, waste technology (your bodily excretions have a lot of uses (from laundry to fertilizer) but also a number of risks), medicine, forestry, jointery, metalworking, mining, animal husbsnwdry, skinning, hunting, numeracy, literacy, leadership, etc. in roughly that order
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
For a while now I’ve wanted to start a project of shit politicians say. Video as much as possible. Every shitty immoral reprehensible thing that they come out and say and do logged into a searchable archive. Make it super easy for regular people to stitch together anti-political ads using the politicians own words with context.
Why? More than 50% of US voters just elected a convicted felon and rapist. Using the politicians’ utterances against them is not going to do anything.
I have to believe in a future where people look back on this from a world with less hatred in it than it currently has. I want to give the perpetrators of hate as little plausible deniability as possible.
I have to believe that even though looking back on history didn’t seem to help us avoid this situation, that there will be people in the future who are wiser and empowered to make better choices for them and their communities.
It’s a fantasy, and I honestly don’t care if it’s unrealistic. It’s what I need to believe to keep going. I need to believe there can be something better after this, regardless of whether I’ll get to experience it.
Seriously! I just dont understand how so many people can just overlook this. Honestly they have openly approved it all. They never again have a right to expect justice for themselves, because they approved rampant criminal behavior in about the most formal way.
This is truly sickening. Clearly he can get away with anything just as he has always known. I just cannot figure it out. How can people do this? It truly makes me sure our species stands no chance.
It’s not for now, it’s for our kids, or their kids, assuming we get some morals in a couple of generations.
