Archive For the Future

Hey! Are You...?

Stuck at home and need to do some activism?
Tech savvy, news-hardened but limited in physicality and/or time?
Got some office supplies and/or digital hard drive space?

Document What's Happening!

The comparison we're all making to modern US politics burned the Magnus Hirschfeld documents for a reason. That government and political movement shredded their documents for a reason.

Now the news is all digital and we don't even have local copies unless we go out of our way to make them.

It doesn't take an EMP. The Internet Archive is not impregnable. Colos can be burned or Microsoft, Google and Amazon can be told to just erase stuff. It's never been easier to lose the last 20 years of history.

"How Can I Do This?"

Make local copies. Keep them offline. Print what you can, save what you can, write what you can.

The more people do this, the more Miep Gies' and Bep Voskuijl's there might be in 5-20 years. The more sources document individually, the harder the next wave of denialists have to work, the more the future can remember us and people like us and what happened.

Save information offline in a way that might be accessible by strangers in the future. Print out what's practical to print and you think is important put it in a box in a closet with a label. Keep adding to it. And/or store it on a USB platter hard drive that you keep offline.

How To Archive the Internet

What you can effectively accomplish depends on your ability and inclination.

"Computers are uncomfortable"

journal and notate what you know, think and hear
Print out the news and keep it in a box.
Save newspapers, at least the relevant parts
If you like, scrapbook the news
Take photographs and print them out, or use old fashoned film. Label them carefully
Where possible, send hard copy to people outside the US to save, just in case"
Encourage other people to do the same

"I know my way around the internet"

Save news articles as PDFs with images and as much context as possible in-line
Download transcripts of videos, or entire videos if you have the space and capacity
Screenshot what you can from anywhere not easily printed, organized by date
Copy all that stuff onto an UNENCRYPTED, Spinning platter-type external Hard Drive
Mark the Harddrive with a piece of masking tape "News" or "history" or something

"I build things on the Internet"

Less useful now then before, but build scrapers capturing tweets for certain people and hashtags and other indicators of newsworthyness. Copy data and store it offline
Keep an offline copy of Wikipeda
Archive the Internet Archive
Archive anywhere else that seems likleky to disappear
Use tools to download other sites and information.
Build other tools to help people access and save the information
Organize stories into timelines and trends
Share this idea with people using your platform

For all of these store them in a safe space. Keep hard drives offline as much as possible. And most importantly tell your children, grandchildren, heirs, nieces, nephews, niblings or anyone who might come after you are gone where it is and what it is. Maybe write out a page of why you saved it.

It's not up to any individual or organzation to be comprehensive. You cannot and will not be able to capture everything and that's OK. Big things will be collated with multiple sources, little things will be more impoirtant to have a record of. Record what's local to you, record what's important to you with as much context and date information as feasable, but also? This is a best effort distributed idea. Much of the data recorded will be lost. It's better to have thousands of people with a journal or diary then 20 with tape drives storing the internet in bunkers (and others may already be doing that). Diverse unconnected sources Do what you can, where you can, when you can as long as you can.

Help prevent the erasure of history. Help prevent the erasure of people.

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