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.

  • simple@lemm.eeEnglish
    116·
    16 days ago

    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.

    • hollyberries@programming.dev
      97·
      16 days ago

      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.

        • douglasg14b@lemmy.world
          1·
          14 days ago

          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.

          • BonerMan
            1·
            14 days ago

            Get a server in Romania for example, built up the necessary system and then either take the drives on a plane or transmit the data by internet.

            The problem isn’t the money, they would pay less in Eastern European countries. The problem is the time it takes to transmit the data.

            It would be best to load the entire NAS farm piece by piece into a plane and fly it there.

            A Charter Plane and some trucks aren’t that expansive, and when you keep most of the hardware you don’t need to pay for massive amounts of new hardware.

            The problem is that its time consuming and that the Archive will be offline for at least half a year. For doing that.

            If they wanna do it really smart they keep some smaller servers all around the world and don’t do it from one country alone.

        • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
          13·
          14 days ago

          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.

          • BonerMan
            3·
            14 days ago

            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.

            • yetAnotherUser@discuss.tchncs.de
              11·
              14 days ago

              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.

      • olsonexi@lemmy.world
        6·
        15 days ago

        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!

      • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
        38·
        16 days ago

        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…

        • Gigasser@lemmy.worldOP
          19·
          16 days ago

          Probably they’d use obscenity laws. Or they might bring lawsuit after lawsuit, dmca after dmca, until it drains them of their funds.

          • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
            16·
            16 days ago

            The possibilities are endless.

            I gotta get offline now. This morning hasn’t been too great for my mental health.

          • HellsBelle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            5·
            16 days ago

            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. :/

          • kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
            3·
            15 days ago

            Or copyright.

            Whether honest or not, copyright claims are a very powerful tool to take stuff down now, and fight about restoring it later.

          • AndrewZabar@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            15 days ago

            He doesn’t have to. He can issue an executive order and within hours, a military regimen takes their data center.

    • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
      21·
      16 days ago

      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.

      • Gigasser@lemmy.worldOP
        141·
        16 days ago

        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.

        • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
          161·
          16 days ago

          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…

          • Cuttlefish1111@lemmy.world
            12·
            13 days ago

            Lmaoo are you serious? Nothing has happened nation wide,. Turns out people like their shitty jobs over murder.and prison. The rule of law did not evaporate.

      • philpo@feddit.org
        6·
        15 days ago

        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.

        • SturgiesYrFase@lemmy.ml
          3·
          15 days ago

          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.