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.
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.
Samesies…
It’s very difficult though, sourcing material is difficult enough, archiving and making it actually useful and valuable even moreso. It takes a lot of intelligent processing.
LLMs can reduce that effort a lot, on the searching side, but that’s very expensive either in hardware or in API costs. And either way, would likely involve the efforts of a team to achieve.
Honestly I think the hardest part is identifying it and locating it.
Probably need to start a community around it. People link to stuff. Pay walls would have to be dealt with. In the vast majority of cases that’s not too difficult. No it does start getting less available around video sources. IP restrictions will be a pain in the ass.
Recording the video is messy. YT-DLP could work for some things, But honestly with the level of what’s coming I’d be afraid of leaving fingerprints on anything. Probably throwing a full screen player up in a 1080p window and using OBS on it would be the safest. Could probably get away with using an elgato to capture the HDMI signal up to 4K.
Speech to text models are light enough to run on raspberry pi. They’ll need to be vetted. They’re not highly accurate. Captioning is a great community task.
Organizing an indexing the captions, there’s no shortage of free database software. I probably start with sqlight to keep things portable and fluid. Moving to Maria or Postgres when things get too slow, But then we’re going to have to host it. Anonymous hosting is a completely different ball of wax.
Storing the data would get out of hand quickly. It’s trivial enough to buy a single 20 tb hard drive and store more than we’d need for years. But then hosting it anonymously would be difficult to say the least. Even the markers of these conversations would be traceable enough for us to be located. Paying for a private enough nude to be safe is going to be pricey over time.
I’m sure archive.org would take it, But honestly I wouldn’t put $5 on them surviving a couple of years into the new administration. What they’re doing is to inconvenient to too many corporations with deep pockets.
IPFS would work, well about as well as it works anyway, but that’s the opposite of anonymous.
Edit: come to think of it it would be a hoot to run it on the short video federated platform. Just keep the database somewhere else. Again not anonymous enough for my tastes, But what I had a little bit of fun to the project.
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.
Because advertising is what wins?
There’s no such thing as bad publicity anymore. If you can gain a lot of publicity with well-timed and poignant collages and snippets that target audience on say tic Tok. That’s an extremely powerful tool.
Currently things like this take not insignificant time and effort. Reducing the time of production is valuable.
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.
It’s not for now, it’s for our kids, or their kids, assuming we get some morals in a couple of generations.
Assuming the planet is still habitable
“The statistical likelihood,” continued the autopilot primly, “is that other civilizations will arise. There will one day be lemon-soaked paper napkins. Till then there will be a short delay. Please return to your seat.”
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.
Trump, so far, has fewer votes than he got in 2020*. The future sucks, but there is hope. Please vote, life is not a passive sport.
Maybe a warning for future generations about what is apparently acceptable discourse now.
Best time to start this was before. But 2nd best time is now!
That would be awesome, I wish that had existed a few months ago.
I don’t think it would have mattered starting a few months ago he was very open with everything that he did and said. But media like that has a tendency to get buried over time and I want my kids and their kids to know exactly what the f*** happened