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We're In Danger of Losing Our Memories
Hugh Pickens writes "The chief executive of the British Library, Lynne Brindley, says that our cultural heritage is at risk as the Internet evolves and technologies become obsolete, and that historians and citizens face a 'black hole' in the knowledge base of the 21st century unless urgent action is taken to preserve websites and other digital records. For example, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George W. Bush disappeared from the White House website. There were more than 150 websites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney that vanished instantly at the end of the games and are now stored only by the National Library of Australia. 'If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics... the memory of the nation disappears too,' says Brindley. The library plans to create a comprehensive archive of material from the 8M .uk domain websites, and also is organizing a collecting and archiving project for the London 2012 Olympics. 'The task of capturing our online intellectual heritage and preserving it for the long term falls, quite rightly, to the same libraries and archives that have over centuries systematically collected books, periodicals, newspapers, and recordings...'" Over the years we've discussed various aspects of this archiving problem.
How much you wanna bet the above post gets a +5 insightful whereas a similar post about Clinton (or god help us, Obama) would get -1 troll?
And yeah, I'll get modded down for pointing this out, but what do I care? Karma: Excellent. I just hope whoever opts to throw a -1 offtopic my way also takes a serious look at the parent. And no, I'm not posting this as AC either.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Well, for starters, I keep my memories in my head.. but if you're talking about records and history then I think copyright is a bigger culprit than digitization any day. Most of the culture of the 20th century is unavailable because the copyright holders have carte blanche to suppress it so it doesn't compete with their latest offerings.
How we know is more important than what we know.
People who don't like Bush -- ESPECIALLY people who don't like Bush -- should want all record of him preserved.
Because George Bush managed to fuck up the great economy Clinton left him with
And even if people accept that premise that relates to biased moderations in what way exactly?
because Obama is a visionary and has a fantastic platform
Get back to me in four years before you start spouting about fantastic his platform is. I'm rooting for his success (because we can't afford for him to fail) but I'm not going to call it a "fantastic platform" six days into his administration and I'm growing weary of the worship that surrounds him. And this is coming from someone who campaigned for him.
If you disagree that Bush is a worse president than Clinton was or Obama will be, then it is probably wiser to keep your mouth shut and let the world think you are intelligent rather than removing all doubt.
Translation: If you disagree with me then it is probably wiser to keep your mouth shut, lest I be exposed to competing points of view that might tax my brain and force me to actually think.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I bet you also forgot that Smithers was black.
The niche folks must continue to ensure that minutiae are not forgotten, for those who control the past control the future. Attention span is directly proportional to richness of memory. For fuck's sake, everybody read 1984!
The National Archives has versions up of all the Clinton White House pages. Here's one [nara.gov]. I'm sure they'll get around to doing the same for Bush eventually.
They're already ahead of you.
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/
Don't worry; his record isn't disappearing anytime soon. There are no media compatibility issues with gravestones and they offer excellent document retention.
No, it wasn't plummeting. One aspect of it (dotcoms, etc) simply went through a correction. It took a lot more than that for the economy to get to the state it is in now.
... and then they built the supercollider.
but it's not suffering PTSD after being violently beaten up by greedy assholes.
So in which administration do you think passed a lot of the deregulation that enabled those 'greedy assholes'? Which administration passed the Telecommunications Act, the Communications Decency Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?
Eventually the wet for Obama crowd is going to wake up and realize that the Democrats are just as big of a threat to our way of life as the Republicans are. Of course by the time that happens everybody will have forgotten about how badly the GOP fucked up and we'll start the whole cycle over again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Don't be so sure. One of an archaeologist's favourite places to dig is in the village rubbish tip. It's important because it tells us more about day-to-day life in a society than what people wrote down on papyrus, carved into stone, or otherwise saved for posterity.
In virtually every case, the stuff that rulers deem important doesn't bear much relation to the way everyday people live. Often enough, it's an outright lie. So if we want to understand a society with any depth of detail, we need to know the trivial and mundane as well as the monumental.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Archive.org may not be willing to archive important sites (such as pr0n), and it only has a single mirror.
Don't worry I'm working on archiving all that porn locally. Eventually I'll combine every single file into one giant torrent and upload at least 99.9% of it before dropping offline ;)
You sir are a great humanitarian.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Exactly, the idea that there will be LESS information surviving from our current torrent (hehe) of data is simply stupid. The fact is we have a limited view of history in the form of first person accounts because it was so expensive (both in terms of time and resources) to create a personal account of an event. Today we have say 10M blog entries about Obama's inauguration. Even if 1/10th of 1% of those are preserved that means we still have 10K accounts, how many surviving accounts of say FDR's inauguration do we have? My father has a handful of 8mm films from his childhood, my wife has boxes of VHS tapes and my kids will have hundreds of gigs of photos and movies of their childhood, each generation has more chances to save significant amounts of data because storing it is ever cheaper.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You're seriously comparing the CDA and the DMCA to the likes of the Iraq War, badly handling Katrina, and staffing every position with hacks and cronies? Repubs are demonstrably worse for our country.
I don't buy this "Oh, they're all bad, Dems are just as bad" meme. It's just not factually true.
-- http://ninthagenda.com/
It's still his fault. We KNEW he would be elected. That alone crashed the dot-com bubble.
Why is this being modded as funny? Markets, if at all rational (which is debatable), are based on predictions of changing economic conditions in the future. The fact that an idiot like Bush was even a leading candidate at the time should have served as a harsh warning to smart investors, that things in the U.S. economy might head south real quick. They were right. And just look at all the bumps up the stock market took whenever Obama announced a new appointee anywhere in government finance. The markets obviously pay close attention to politics.
Gr... Now I must undo mods...
World War II: Rosevelt (D). (more dead americans than any war in history)
Your comparing our two modern wars to WWII? Please tell me your doing this for mere partisanship, as there is absolutely nothing in common with our current political wars and WWII.
WWII was a war fought over genuine despots, and not just tinpot dictators raised to that level for the sake of political ends. In the case of WWII there was a genuine act of war, a threat to our allies, general geopolitcal stability, and a real genocidal bona fide bad guy. Our current crop of wars lack ALL of these. In WWII there was an ACTUAL threat to the US, a threat that is completely lacking in our current wars.
These wars are poltical only.
I can agree with your complaints against Korea and Vietnam, but comparing WWII to the neocon "Bush doctrine" wars we're in currently is just dumb and fallacious.
Arguably Afghanistan might be just, since the Taliban did INDIRECTLY cause a direct threat, unlike Pearl Harbor and the Japanese incidentally which was a DIRECT threat. I personally think Afghanistan is a good war, as do most nonpartisan analysts, but oddly this is the war we ignore, and proved to be the least of Bush's military priorities.
Iraq is, and was, just dumb, and only motivated by petty political reasons. We had no real reason for being there, outside of purely ideological (and partisan) political reasons. Even Iraq is a bit dumber than our involvement in Vietnam and Korea, since that was at least for BIPARTISAN political idiocy based purely on temporal and fallacious political grounds.
Ignoring war, though GWB was the worst president we have ever had. He did more to dissolve our rights than any president before him (except perhaps Adams). He didn't even have the illusion of ethics, he endorsed torture, exceptionalism (rebranded nationalism), he looked out for his rich cronies in a way that Reagan could only dream of, he killed ALL safety regulation, and generally fought against the majority of Americans as much as possible. I don't understand how ANYONE can like him, he didn't even support his religiously fundamentalist base, much less true fiscal conservatives. Hell even hopeless pure war-for-wars-sake hawks can't like him since he f*'ed up both the wars he decided to start.
Economically, I suppose, he did start a trend some might like, decreasing income and dramatically increasing spending. Perhaps some might even like the idea of a "war against x" where "x" is an unassigned variable. He also popularized the wonderous anti-intellectualism that uneducated idiots love (we can call it populism), where ruling a country by your "gut" is preferable to ruling it by experts, information, and science.
I'm not going to hop on the partisan band wagon here, either. Clinton was a BAD president, as was every modern president we've had since FDR. It isn't a question of "us versus them". that mentality is the problem. We CAN have political differences, we SHOULD have them. You are about as right as I am. Politics are necessarily subjective. When you act as if they are objective, you always act towards tyranny.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Regan and HW spent like drunken sailors, leaving a mess for the next President to pay off. Clinton cut spending, payed off debts, and set things up for tax cuts. Bush spent like a drunken sailor, and gave tax cuts, leaving a mess for the next guy. Damn those nasty big-government tax-and-spend Democrats.
I don't understand the Reagan nostalgia one bit. He introduced idiotic SDI program (Starwars), he renewed the cold war (though was fortunate enough to last until its inevitable decline, and thus take credit), he introduced the terrible "trickle down" motivation to focus everything on the rich and deprive the other 70% of the population of any benefits, he decided running government based on religion was a good idea (while his wife gave him astrological advice), and he started the modern idea of "make less spend more" rebranded as "conservationism" (viz "quit your decent job, get one at Taco Bell, and by a Mercedes Benz"). He continued to destabilize most of the world via the CIA, especially Latin America because he personally didn't agree with their popular democratic governments (for the sake of democracy mind, i.e. American interests). He funded most of the people who are now our "greatest enemies", in his wars against Russia.
What the hell was so great about him, except charisma?
This isn't a partisan attack, I also dislike Clinton, both Bushes, Nixon, and most of Carter. Hell, I even preferred the first Bush over Clinton, even if I lean somewhat left. Hell, I even think Kennedy would have been a terrible president. But after Nixon, Reagan was really the guy who led to the presidency being imperial, and the great destroyer of rights. He held lead into the era where we exist for the government, and not the other way around.
Reagan was one of our worst presidents... Besides GWB, of course, who did the most to destroy America, and all that we are founded on.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey