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The more I think about this Internet Archive/Openlibrary situation the more completely bleak it feels to me. We live in a firehose of bad news all day everyday but this topic particularly gets to me more than most. Wondering if it’s just me or others feel similarly.
Seems like hacking is a normal hazard of internet infrastructure. However, it is bleak when good institutions get hacked, especially when those institutions are vital to a lot of functions. The public library in my city got hacked and it's terrible. As a society we need to fund and support libraries and archives.
That is terrible. Libraries are quite valuable to the continuity of a reasonable society. Even still, private libraries pre-date public ones, so I'd like to think that even if something were ever to happen to libraries, that the knowledge wouldn't be lost. But hacks aside, so long as the library system continues to be funded, I don't imagine it's going anywhere.
It's not all bad, we got a new Godspeed album. Joking aside, things are looking pretty bad, but I dunno. This hack isn't even the 999999th worst thing happening on this planet right now. As far as things worse than this hack: I try and hold onto the idea that sometimes experiencing joy, seeing the beauty in things, and finding some measure of inner peace despite the horror that constantly surrounds us, can itself be an act of resistance. Which sounds pretty trite, I know, but I think it's still true just the same.
So I mean sites do get hacked, and whoever hacked Internet Archive likely wanted attention. This particular hack caught ALOT of attention (at least on Twitter, anyways), and I'd like to think that there are at least a number of individuals who have had the same visceral reaction that this is a big resource that has now been forced down. My hope, and perhaps what may come to be, is that there may be other groups out there to help take up the mantle of what IA/OL has done and host archives online of a significant number of texts, and/or helping to ensure that the Internet Archive / Open Library is more anti-fragile.
Fair points and I have to share the same hope. I guess at the end of the day this issue just has a unique ability to make me see the ideological underpinnings and by extension the ridiculous power disparity between the powers that represent them. Hobbyists fighting to preserve the persistence of human thought/information vs an essentially infinite machine that wants a shittier outcome
i've been pretty down about it lately too. someone else in the thread mentioned their public library getting hacked. not sure if it was the same one but my city's library system got knocked out by a ransomware attack for months earlier this year which really sucked. at the same time, people recently came together and helped raise funds for a local nonprofit video store that was at risk of shutting down. it's sad to get to that point and a lot of these problems do feel out of our control, but i try to stay optimistic knowing there are still communities of people who care enough about preserving art & culture to want to get out there and do something.