10 ms·

Can we crowdfund a militia to protect and secure archives for digitizing in conflict zones? We are losing too much priceless history to fools over ego.

synicalx 9y ago
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... 2017 as a comment. First tier is a group of local farmers with rusty AK's, but the stretch goal is a team of operators from Academi. If you chip in more than $50 you get your name removed from the list of backers on the off chance that this turns into some sort of international incident when the militia joins ISIS or the Academi team massacre a nearby village.
abecedarius 9y ago
There was an Indiegogo campaign a while back to do this for books in Timbuktu. (I chipped in.) Well, not a militia technically.
andrepd 9y ago
Crowdfund to pay mercenaries to guard books? That's... something.
- TomMarius 9y ago
  To protect unique irreplaceable artifacts of human history.
ajmurmann 9y ago
This is very interesting. I've thought several times fantasized about setting up a Kickstarter to fund hiring blackwater for things like this. I wonder though if this isn't what we originally created government for. Does the fact that people are thinking about this "hack" say more about where technology has gotten or about the state of politics?
- ianai 9y ago
  Probably the state of politics. I suspect crowdfunding would never raise enough for the likes of Blackwater.
  - pamqzl 9y ago
    I'm not sure I'd be donating to the campaign of the guy who says "please send me money to hire a private army, and I will definitely use them for upright and noble purposes, I promise!"
    - ianai 9y ago
      That kind of sounds a lot like the IRS!
HillaryBriss 9y ago
in the first Gulf War, the UN Coalition forces (mostly the US) carpet bombed parts of Iraq that contained a lot of yet-to-be-excavated ancient villages (they looked like mounds in the sand by the 1990s). we lost of a bunch of priceless history then, too. i'm not trying to make statements about the equivalences or non-equivalences of various war participants over there, but, there's so much ancient history being destroyed by military operations nowadays. who the hell knows what's being lost in Yemen right now? and there are also ethical questions. i mean, suppose we could pay Blackwater to lead a team of archaeologists to make digital copies of some stuff -- but they had to kill a few dozen people in the process? would anyone still feel good about donating to that campaign? would it have been worthwhile?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- WillPostForFood 9y ago
  Nowadays? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_Alexandria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_...
  - LoSboccacc 9y ago
    "During his reign of the eastern part of the Empire (40–30 BC), Mark Antony plundered the second largest library in the world (at Pergamon) and presented the collection as a gift to Cleopatra as a replacement for the books lost to Caesar's fire." Oh, Romans
    - pault 9y ago
      To be fair, he was one of the more colorful characters in the history of the empire. That entire generation is fascinating.
- knowThySelfx 9y ago
  Remnants of Pagan civilisations is being destroyed by this. There could be some agenda over this.
WalterBright 9y ago
A while ago I had brief (because I was traveling) access to a stack of old family documents. Scanning them would have taken too long, so I just snapped a photo of each page with my phone. It took a few seconds for each page, and I got through the whole stack. The results were very good, the pages were clear and sharp, even though I hadn't been able to flatten them out.
- greenbush 9y ago
  The Google Drive app on Android (not sure about other platforms) has a "Scan" functionality that digitally flattens out the picture of a document and saves as a pdf. It's very handy and quality is very good.
  - WalterBright 9y ago
    Thanks for the tip!
  - saiya-jin 9y ago
    various other apps, ie TinyScanner are doing the same (for those who don't use these google services for whatever reasons, like me)
  - abricot 9y ago
    The Dropbox app on iOS does the same thing.
pamqzl 9y ago
You'd think it would be cheaper and more productive to just buy the books and put them in the British Library or something.
sametmax 9y ago
Priceless to whom ? How many hindsights are we really going to gain from that ? How many people are even going to benefit from it. No, how many will even hear about it or will effectively access this ? We have tendency to consider that all knowledge is precious. That all information, especially from the past, should be treasured. It's sounds more anchored in a collector mindset that in any real assessment of the value of the discovery. We can't save everything. We don't have to save everything. As usual, we need to evaluate the cost vs the reward. Now the hard part is to put a value on knowledge and potential, which I agree is very hard and controversial. But stating we must save things as soon as we discover it doesn't help.
- simias 9y ago
  You might only discover that something had value in hindsight. Discriminating between what's a priceless heirloom and trivial garbage can be very difficult. Storage is cheap nowadays, if we can afford to archive petabytes of cat videos I'm sure we can collect endangered cultural artifacts. Who knows what we could've learned from the destroyed works of the library of Alexandria? All those things we don't know we don't know...
  - monsieurbanana 9y ago
    Your argument about cheap storage misses the point. The difficult part is finding/protecting/retrieving/sorting the data.
  - sametmax 9y ago
    > You might only discover that something had value in hindsight. I completely agree. But we have data about many, many languages, lost and current. The chances that those newly discovered ones bring something more than "oh that's nice and interesting" on the table are quite weak. > Who knows what we could've learned from the destroyed works of the library of Alexandria? This is a totally different scale. As I say, we must assess the potential winning vs the cost. Currently, the science enthusiasts are saying yes to everything, and the people with money are saying no to everything. I find it harmful both ways.
pjc50 9y ago
Theoretically this should be the job of UNESCO. But I'd rather deal with the conflict zones directly.
cm2187 9y ago
It's actually an interesting debate. Do we care more about a book or a statue than a human life? Shouldn't these resources be protecting the populations first before worrying about books?
- FroshKiller 9y ago
  The fruit of the Other's work--their research, their art, their innovations--is necessarily worth more than the Other's lives to the colonialist. It's obvious that lives (and memory) are worth more to anyone with compassion who can recognize other people's humanity. That is only a debate and only interesting if you engage in it to remind someone with a colonialist mindset of their own shared humanity.
  - weberc2 9y ago
    To be clear, if the OP proposed intervention to save lives, you would no less call him a colonialist.
    - FroshKiller 9y ago
      Please don't put words in my mouth.
      - weberc2 9y ago
        That's a rich request in light of your previous comment.
- Ensorceled 9y ago
  How much of your personal wealth have you spent saving these people? 50%? 80%? How do you have time to post on HN when you should be tirelessly working as an activist? We need to stop shaming people for trying to do good because there is something else we believe is a better cause. Well, except people who think they are "helping" by forming "prayer circles" to help with disasters or take crates and crates of bibles to starving people. Shame the hell out of them.
FroshKiller 9y ago
This comment is a gem of colonialist thought. Those "conflict zones" are also generally the sovereign territory of the people who live there, who are generally one half of the "fools" you mentioned (their neighbors being generally the other half). The "ego" they have is generally a desire to keep their sovereign territory--their homelands, which are frequently the same places in which their ancestors produced the "archives" you want to "protect and secure." Those people have a right to decide what to do about the destruction of their cultural artifacts, because they are people and have agency. They can fight, they can ask for help from their allies, they can do any number of things. If they don't prioritize the preservation of their culture, that's unfortunate, but it's also their business. If they decide to destroy artifacts of their culture rather than let them fall into invaders' hands (sound familiar?), that's tragic, but it's still their business. Your suspicion of value in their cultural output does not entitle you to pay armed men to swoop in and take their "priceless history," no matter how noble you think your intentions are.
- lucozade 9y ago
  This comment is a gem of nationalist thought. When the Bamiyan buddhas were dynamited, exactly whose culture were the Taliban "preserving"? It is entirely reasonable to believe that culture and history have an importance independent of petty, local squabbles. Crowd funding militia may well be questionable but to demean the sentiment as colonialist is pointlessly insulting.
  - FroshKiller 9y ago
    I don't think you understand what nationalism is. I admit that my reply could be read as a tacit endorsement of tribalism, but there's nothing nationalist about it. You should not presuppose that conflicts are "petty, local squabbles." Minimizing language like that reinforces the mindset that the mighty are justified in interfering in the sovereign destiny of a people. Anyway, my reply was thoughtful, not pointlessly insulting. If you'd like to engage on this beyond the invocation of the Taliban bogeyman, I'm happy to. But if you're just gonna presume that I'm equating the exercise of sovereign rights with wholesale destruction, I'm not interested.
seanmcdirmid 9y ago
Or we could fund adventurer archeologists like Indiana Jones to protect the artifacts by stealing them. Either way, we've probably stepped off into the realm of unworkable fiction.
- nradov 9y ago
  Indiana Jones aside, people actually used to do that. Check out the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. German archeologists excavated and disassembled large artifacts. They kind of "stole" the artifacts, although it wasn't technically illegal at the time. http://www.egyptian-museum-berlin.com/c01.php http://www.egyptian-museum-berlin.com/c01.php
Mikeb85 9y ago
Fun fact, St. Catherine's monastery was promised protection by Mohammed (the founder of Islam). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashtiname_of_Muhammad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashtiname_of_Muhammad Even the fundamentalists wouldn't go against the prophet himself...
- mullen 9y ago
  ISIS would kill all these monks and burn the place down if given half a chance but then they would literally be going against the word of Muhammad if they did.
qbaqbaqba 9y ago
Something like say... United Nations and UNESCO?

synicalx 9y ago

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you... 2017 as a comment. First tier is a group of local farmers with rusty AK's, but the stretch goal is a team of operators from Academi. If you chip in more than $50 you get your name removed from the list of backers on the off chance that this turns into some sort of international incident when the militia joins ISIS or the Academi team massacre a nearby village.

abecedarius 9y ago

There was an Indiegogo campaign a while back to do this for books in Timbuktu. (I chipped in.) Well, not a militia technically.

andrepd 9y ago

Crowdfund to pay mercenaries to guard books? That's... something.

TomMarius 9y ago
To protect unique irreplaceable artifacts of human history.

ajmurmann 9y ago

This is very interesting. I've thought several times fantasized about setting up a Kickstarter to fund hiring blackwater for things like this. I wonder though if this isn't what we originally created government for. Does the fact that people are thinking about this "hack" say more about where technology has gotten or about the state of politics?

ianai 9y ago
Probably the state of politics. I suspect crowdfunding would never raise enough for the likes of Blackwater.
- pamqzl 9y ago
  I'm not sure I'd be donating to the campaign of the guy who says "please send me money to hire a private army, and I will definitely use them for upright and noble purposes, I promise!"
  - ianai 9y ago
    That kind of sounds a lot like the IRS!

HillaryBriss 9y ago

in the first Gulf War, the UN Coalition forces (mostly the US) carpet bombed parts of Iraq that contained a lot of yet-to-be-excavated ancient villages (they looked like mounds in the sand by the 1990s). we lost of a bunch of priceless history then, too. i'm not trying to make statements about the equivalences or non-equivalences of various war participants over there, but, there's so much ancient history being destroyed by military operations nowadays. who the hell knows what's being lost in Yemen right now? and there are also ethical questions. i mean, suppose we could pay Blackwater to lead a team of archaeologists to make digital copies of some stuff -- but they had to kill a few dozen people in the process? would anyone still feel good about donating to that campaign? would it have been worthwhile?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
WillPostForFood 9y ago
Nowadays? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_Alexandria https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_...
- LoSboccacc 9y ago
  "During his reign of the eastern part of the Empire (40–30 BC), Mark Antony plundered the second largest library in the world (at Pergamon) and presented the collection as a gift to Cleopatra as a replacement for the books lost to Caesar's fire." Oh, Romans
  - pault 9y ago
    To be fair, he was one of the more colorful characters in the history of the empire. That entire generation is fascinating.
knowThySelfx 9y ago
Remnants of Pagan civilisations is being destroyed by this. There could be some agenda over this.

WalterBright 9y ago

A while ago I had brief (because I was traveling) access to a stack of old family documents. Scanning them would have taken too long, so I just snapped a photo of each page with my phone. It took a few seconds for each page, and I got through the whole stack. The results were very good, the pages were clear and sharp, even though I hadn't been able to flatten them out.

greenbush 9y ago
The Google Drive app on Android (not sure about other platforms) has a "Scan" functionality that digitally flattens out the picture of a document and saves as a pdf. It's very handy and quality is very good.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  Thanks for the tip!
- saiya-jin 9y ago
  various other apps, ie TinyScanner are doing the same (for those who don't use these google services for whatever reasons, like me)
- abricot 9y ago
  The Dropbox app on iOS does the same thing.

pamqzl 9y ago

You'd think it would be cheaper and more productive to just buy the books and put them in the British Library or something.

sametmax 9y ago

Priceless to whom ? How many hindsights are we really going to gain from that ? How many people are even going to benefit from it. No, how many will even hear about it or will effectively access this ? We have tendency to consider that all knowledge is precious. That all information, especially from the past, should be treasured. It's sounds more anchored in a collector mindset that in any real assessment of the value of the discovery. We can't save everything. We don't have to save everything. As usual, we need to evaluate the cost vs the reward. Now the hard part is to put a value on knowledge and potential, which I agree is very hard and controversial. But stating we must save things as soon as we discover it doesn't help.

simias 9y ago
You might only discover that something had value in hindsight. Discriminating between what's a priceless heirloom and trivial garbage can be very difficult. Storage is cheap nowadays, if we can afford to archive petabytes of cat videos I'm sure we can collect endangered cultural artifacts. Who knows what we could've learned from the destroyed works of the library of Alexandria? All those things we don't know we don't know...
- monsieurbanana 9y ago
  Your argument about cheap storage misses the point. The difficult part is finding/protecting/retrieving/sorting the data.
- sametmax 9y ago
  > You might only discover that something had value in hindsight. I completely agree. But we have data about many, many languages, lost and current. The chances that those newly discovered ones bring something more than "oh that's nice and interesting" on the table are quite weak. > Who knows what we could've learned from the destroyed works of the library of Alexandria? This is a totally different scale. As I say, we must assess the potential winning vs the cost. Currently, the science enthusiasts are saying yes to everything, and the people with money are saying no to everything. I find it harmful both ways.

pjc50 9y ago

Theoretically this should be the job of UNESCO. But I'd rather deal with the conflict zones directly.

cm2187 9y ago

It's actually an interesting debate. Do we care more about a book or a statue than a human life? Shouldn't these resources be protecting the populations first before worrying about books?

FroshKiller 9y ago
The fruit of the Other's work--their research, their art, their innovations--is necessarily worth more than the Other's lives to the colonialist. It's obvious that lives (and memory) are worth more to anyone with compassion who can recognize other people's humanity. That is only a debate and only interesting if you engage in it to remind someone with a colonialist mindset of their own shared humanity.
- weberc2 9y ago
  To be clear, if the OP proposed intervention to save lives, you would no less call him a colonialist.
  - FroshKiller 9y ago
    Please don't put words in my mouth.
    - weberc2 9y ago
      That's a rich request in light of your previous comment.
Ensorceled 9y ago
How much of your personal wealth have you spent saving these people? 50%? 80%? How do you have time to post on HN when you should be tirelessly working as an activist? We need to stop shaming people for trying to do good because there is something else we believe is a better cause. Well, except people who think they are "helping" by forming "prayer circles" to help with disasters or take crates and crates of bibles to starving people. Shame the hell out of them.

FroshKiller 9y ago

This comment is a gem of colonialist thought. Those "conflict zones" are also generally the sovereign territory of the people who live there, who are generally one half of the "fools" you mentioned (their neighbors being generally the other half). The "ego" they have is generally a desire to keep their sovereign territory--their homelands, which are frequently the same places in which their ancestors produced the "archives" you want to "protect and secure." Those people have a right to decide what to do about the destruction of their cultural artifacts, because they are people and have agency. They can fight, they can ask for help from their allies, they can do any number of things. If they don't prioritize the preservation of their culture, that's unfortunate, but it's also their business. If they decide to destroy artifacts of their culture rather than let them fall into invaders' hands (sound familiar?), that's tragic, but it's still their business. Your suspicion of value in their cultural output does not entitle you to pay armed men to swoop in and take their "priceless history," no matter how noble you think your intentions are.

lucozade 9y ago
This comment is a gem of nationalist thought. When the Bamiyan buddhas were dynamited, exactly whose culture were the Taliban "preserving"? It is entirely reasonable to believe that culture and history have an importance independent of petty, local squabbles. Crowd funding militia may well be questionable but to demean the sentiment as colonialist is pointlessly insulting.
- FroshKiller 9y ago
  I don't think you understand what nationalism is. I admit that my reply could be read as a tacit endorsement of tribalism, but there's nothing nationalist about it. You should not presuppose that conflicts are "petty, local squabbles." Minimizing language like that reinforces the mindset that the mighty are justified in interfering in the sovereign destiny of a people. Anyway, my reply was thoughtful, not pointlessly insulting. If you'd like to engage on this beyond the invocation of the Taliban bogeyman, I'm happy to. But if you're just gonna presume that I'm equating the exercise of sovereign rights with wholesale destruction, I'm not interested.

seanmcdirmid 9y ago

Or we could fund adventurer archeologists like Indiana Jones to protect the artifacts by stealing them. Either way, we've probably stepped off into the realm of unworkable fiction.

nradov 9y ago
Indiana Jones aside, people actually used to do that. Check out the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. German archeologists excavated and disassembled large artifacts. They kind of "stole" the artifacts, although it wasn't technically illegal at the time. http://www.egyptian-museum-berlin.com/c01.php http://www.egyptian-museum-berlin.com/c01.php

Mikeb85 9y ago

Fun fact, St. Catherine's monastery was promised protection by Mohammed (the founder of Islam). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashtiname_of_Muhammad https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashtiname_of_Muhammad Even the fundamentalists wouldn't go against the prophet himself...

mullen 9y ago
ISIS would kill all these monks and burn the place down if given half a chance but then they would literally be going against the word of Muhammad if they did.

qbaqbaqba 9y ago

Something like say... United Nations and UNESCO?