7 ms·

There are two points to make here: 1. If you're paying attention, you know this will happen at some point. Archive your own shit, because Google has made it mo

There are two points to make here: 1. If you're paying attention, you know this will happen at some point. Archive your own shit, because Google has made it more than clear there's no guarantee they'll do it for you forever. 2. This idea that you're being deplatformed or marginalised because years of your archives are no longer available in a free and easily accessible format from someone else is not supported by call outs to MLK, Malcolm X, etc. Even if you accept the idea that they had free and unfettered access to public broadcasting (ha!), there was absolutely no easy way to get access to the archives of that on demand! The speakers themselves, and their organisations, had to manage that. People who think they're entitled to free unfettered video hosting on YouTube are dreaming. There's no historic precedent to indicate that it should be so, and YouTube has made it very clear that they can and will bounce you whenever they like. As of today, you are entitled to free speech, but no one has to give you their soapbox to stand on. I think there's a valid conversation to be had about whether that's how it should be, but I don't think this article is that.

rektide 5y ago
> If you're paying attention, you know this will happen at some point. Archive your own shit, I'm trying to imagine backing up my presence everywhere I go: every comment I write, every reply, every +1/-1. I've definitely lost access to sites unexpectedly a number of times, for things that did not seem like a big deal at the time. And poof, massive pieces of life & time are just gone. The particulars of this fight & this story (or my stupid stories) don't interest me, but that we write ourselves into the digital, and that it can all be closed & taken from us in an instant, far beyond our control is a sick power relation. I'd like to see a couple things- when sites close/ban accounts, they should provide some kind of download window. Here's your stuff: bye! As it is, it's usually too late. People's content goes up in smoke. "There should probably be a law": this feels like the most minimal basics. On the other side, when we do post content, I feel like sites should provide cryptographically signed signatures for our content. "Here's our http-signature for your post!" Yes we may delete your post in the future, unhost you, but here's some hard-to-deny math that says you posted it here. Rather than leaving users in eternal jeapordy, this would mean sites- at zero cost- at least have some stake in in the here & now, that a whole history can't just be unwound (just unhosted); ugly though it may be I see denying the past as too cruel to have as common practice. Damnatio Memoriae[1] is not an acceptable common punishment across the internet, for humanity, & for posterity; altering this devil's bargain requires only slightly tweaked technics. All in all, I'd rather we invert the system, build a better web fabric that starts with rights & gathering & attestation first (on our own properties), & interacts with sites second. The indieweb folk have been talking about POSSE[2] for a long time- Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere- but usually this is through the lens of posts & specific activity: perhaps all web activity just needs to be mediated first, through our own systems & networks, and then sent onward, forward to the targeted social-network second: posts, comments, upvotes, reactions, all of it. This feels like the real archiving fix: making ourselves & our own presences primary, leaving these networks as ancillary concerns, a shadow of what we really are. Intermediating with our own sovereign systems seems like a necessary step, feels like the only option given how powerless & out of control online systems are for their users. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae [2] https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE
- XorNot 5y ago
  Why? Is your HackerNews comment history that important to you? The web currently is suffering from an abundance of practically the opposite problem: the perception, though not the reality, that a lot of commentary is "off the record" - aka equivalent to a conversation in a coffee shop - when this could not be further from the truth. Most social media controversies start from this basic mismatch - the perception of social media commentary as though its like that you might share with your friends, but published, openly accessibly and archived for all the world to see - context which would temper most people from pretending that a comment should stand alone rather then in proper context. The web never forgets, and that's the basic problem. If people are attached to their content but not backing it up in case of disaster, then I fail to see how that's anyone else's problem - your lack of planning does not constitute anyone else's crisis or obligation. POSSE is in fact a correct reaction to this issue: starting from the presumption that your "free" hosting will remain so was a delusion that everyone capable of even a little systemic thinking should've seen as a risk - obviously you're going to lose that as soon as whatever invisible accounting applies to you no longer pays the bills.
  - rektide 5y ago
    > Is your HackerNews comment history that important to you? Uh??? Yes? I seek to understand & learn from myself & my past & what happens. Taking the time to write in, to try to calibrate myself & others, communicate, & having it blown up is very much against the project. Please don't spew this remorseless anti-personal who-cares-about-yourself litter around my or anyone else's grounds, it's callous in extreme. We all care about who we are online. We invest ourselves. These arguments that we shouldn't care about ourselves come off extremely bad handed to me.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      I care about who I am offline even more than online. Should I be pushing for persistent 24/7 video surveillance of public space, stores, malls, parks, etc, so that I can revisit all of that too without making my own effort to preserve what I find important?
drewcoo 5y ago
1. Victim-blaming 2. Hedges is well aware of history. And of changing times. And of the present heavy hand of SV censors. Go read some of his books before you play him off like a simpleton. First our prisons, then our military, and now silencing dissidents - the US likes to privatize its dirty work. Those private actors aren't held to the strict legal constraints created for government actors. This is what Americans call "efficiency."
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- fphhotchips 5y ago
  1. Yep. As you say - the guy is smart enough to know better. 2. I'm sure he is - this article comes off to me as a highly intelligent person ranting. I'm calling out that his appeal to precedent is, at best, weakly laid out in this article (and at worst it's dishonest). As I said, I agree with elements of the argument that he's making, but he's made the arguments poorly here.
Gunax 5y ago
There's no historic precedent until of course there is precedent. Just like there was no historic precedent of states limiting the size and tactics of corporations until the rise of 19th century monopolies. And no historic precedent of meddling in what wages could be paid until we decided there should be a minimum wage. And no historic precedent of forcing businesses to serve all races and ethnicities until we decided that redlining and segregation were wrong. I think everything you wrote is correct. But I am increasing concerned about the power of a few individuals to control what can be published. I think it's time to discuss what we should do rather than what the law mandates. It's a difficult question, and I don't have a good answer. Remember that actors, writers, scientists, and other professionals were blacklisted by McCarthyism--and technically no one did anything illegal, but it's not well regarded now. I am just saying that sometimes free speech is more of an appeal to a principle than a law.
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  Free speech is always appealed to as a principle by our own government whenever it is convenient, especially when they are, as an example, gearing up for their next middle eastern target for regime change. "They don't align with our western ideals of democracy, freedom of speech" they'll say. This trend to strictly delineate between the principle and the law is a new fashion. Historically speaking, although it wasn't enforced by law, if you were a private organization and you did things contrary to the principle, it was enforced by society. What has changed is, as it seems to many as well as myself, is that people merely have lost their principles.
  - Gunax 5y ago
    > This trend to strictly delineate between the principle and the law is a new fashion. Historically speaking, although it wasn't enforced by law, if you were a private organization and you did things contrary to the principle, it was enforced by society. What has changed is, as it seems to many as well as myself, is that people merely have lost their principles. Can you explain this? Wouldn't something being enforced by society be an example of it being a principle rather than a law?
joe_the_user 5y ago
Not to mention that "to be disappeared" is phrase used in various periods when death squads were active in South America, notably during the Dirty War [1] in Argentina when a number of friends of my parents had their children viciously murdered and when my cousins got out of the country by the skin of their teeth. Using the term for "losing your data 'cause you didn't make personal backups" is pretty pathetic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War
- wincy 5y ago
  This is definitely what I thought this article was going to be about. It’s a false equivocation and really irresponsible of the poster to use that terminology.
  - Viliam1234 5y ago
    The author was disappeared, his articles were literally murdered, and you are promoting a genocide of false equivocations. What a nuclear catastrophe! The false vacuum of our hypocritical society is decaying.
- michannne 5y ago
  I personally have never heard of this and I doubt this event is constantly in the mind of the public zeitgeist of the article's OP. Such a general phrase as "to be disappeared" is not monopolized for any harrowing event - it's on par with saying you were "brainwashed" despite the CIA nor other intelligence groups being involved.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    "Being disappeared" doesn't call to mind any specific event to me but definitely is an idiom for like law enforcement or intelligence removing people seen as troublesome. Just google it!
    - michannne 5y ago
ouid 5y ago
>but I don't think this article is that I feel like we might have read different articles.
- fphhotchips 5y ago
  Personally I feel this article strays too far into: 1. Whining and moaning, 2. Other political areas, 3. Intellectually dishonest arguments to stand as a valuable contribution to the discourse on this topic. In particular the 'The most vocal cheerleaders' paragraph is just an emotional dump on the author's personal political bogeymen.
- mistermann 5y ago
  I agree with you, it's odd the nature of these discussions.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
baryphonic 5y ago
> 2. This idea that you're being deplatformed or marginalised because years of your archives are no longer available in a free and easily accessible format from someone else is not supported by call outs to MLK, Malcolm X, etc. Even if you accept the idea that they had free and unfettered access to public broadcasting (ha!), there was absolutely no easy way to get access to the archives of that on demand! The speakers themselves, and their organisations, had to manage that. There wasn't? I remember going through the catalogs in the public library as a kid, looking at the microfilm, even listening to some audio recordings. Even a public library had loads of information, and the thought of it being made inaccessible on an arbitrary whim was unthinkable. Sure, it's not comparable to the reach of today's instant broadcast via Internet, but it was the equivalent of the time. Maybe in the time of Jim Crow or something certain public libraries would censor this stuff. I honestly don't know. It just seems to not jibe with my experience as a kid getting information at the library.
- dghlsakjg 5y ago
  YouTube isn’t a library or archive. It’s a for profit business. Also, libraries are very constrained in what they will and won’t archive and bring in to the collection. Budget, politics, space, taste all figure in. Hustler Magazine is a famous anti censorship platform thanks to Larry Flint. You won’t find it at your local library.
- fphhotchips 5y ago
  So, maybe microfilms would have a record of the fact that the speech happened, but most aren't going to have the full text of the speech. Recordings of every broadcast would also be unlikely to be stored at most libraries that can be described as 'easily accessible' [1]. "I Have a Dream" is famously copyrighted; without MLK and his associates/estate managing the distribution, it would be very difficult to get access to it. I bet the libraries of the South didn't all have it available straight away, for sure. > Sure, it's not comparable to the reach of today's instant broadcast via Internet, but it was the equivalent of the time. But I guess that's partially my point, right? The instant broadcast/archive-by-default nature of YouTube is new and unique to our time; trying to refer back to historic figures as your precedent for having access to it seems a little hollow to me. [1] I grew up in more sparsely populated areas (and, also, in Australia), and perhaps that changes my perspective on what is reasonable to expect for access to libraries pre-internet.
pmoriarty 5y ago
"People who think they're entitled to free unfettered video hosting on YouTube are dreaming. There's no historic precedent to indicate that it should be so..." We have a choice as societies to fund public archives that are free from (direct) corporate interference. Corporations and governments aren't clearly distinct entities, as corporate execs work as politicians and politicians often retire from office only to get hired by the corporations they regulated or gave business to while in office, but there's still a big difference between a corporation made to profit its owners/investors and a non-profit government entity supposed to benefit the public good. We now have so much of the world's cultural artifacts in the hands of these few incredibly powerful corporations at whose whim any/all of them could be lost. It doesn't have to be this way.

rektide 5y ago

> If you're paying attention, you know this will happen at some point. Archive your own shit, I'm trying to imagine backing up my presence everywhere I go: every comment I write, every reply, every +1/-1. I've definitely lost access to sites unexpectedly a number of times, for things that did not seem like a big deal at the time. And poof, massive pieces of life & time are just gone. The particulars of this fight & this story (or my stupid stories) don't interest me, but that we write ourselves into the digital, and that it can all be closed & taken from us in an instant, far beyond our control is a sick power relation. I'd like to see a couple things- when sites close/ban accounts, they should provide some kind of download window. Here's your stuff: bye! As it is, it's usually too late. People's content goes up in smoke. "There should probably be a law": this feels like the most minimal basics. On the other side, when we do post content, I feel like sites should provide cryptographically signed signatures for our content. "Here's our http-signature for your post!" Yes we may delete your post in the future, unhost you, but here's some hard-to-deny math that says you posted it here. Rather than leaving users in eternal jeapordy, this would mean sites- at zero cost- at least have some stake in in the here & now, that a whole history can't just be unwound (just unhosted); ugly though it may be I see denying the past as too cruel to have as common practice. Damnatio Memoriae[1] is not an acceptable common punishment across the internet, for humanity, & for posterity; altering this devil's bargain requires only slightly tweaked technics. All in all, I'd rather we invert the system, build a better web fabric that starts with rights & gathering & attestation first (on our own properties), & interacts with sites second. The indieweb folk have been talking about POSSE[2] for a long time- Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere- but usually this is through the lens of posts & specific activity: perhaps all web activity just needs to be mediated first, through our own systems & networks, and then sent onward, forward to the targeted social-network second: posts, comments, upvotes, reactions, all of it. This feels like the real archiving fix: making ourselves & our own presences primary, leaving these networks as ancillary concerns, a shadow of what we really are. Intermediating with our own sovereign systems seems like a necessary step, feels like the only option given how powerless & out of control online systems are for their users. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae [2] https://indieweb.org/POSSE https://indieweb.org/POSSE

XorNot 5y ago
Why? Is your HackerNews comment history that important to you? The web currently is suffering from an abundance of practically the opposite problem: the perception, though not the reality, that a lot of commentary is "off the record" - aka equivalent to a conversation in a coffee shop - when this could not be further from the truth. Most social media controversies start from this basic mismatch - the perception of social media commentary as though its like that you might share with your friends, but published, openly accessibly and archived for all the world to see - context which would temper most people from pretending that a comment should stand alone rather then in proper context. The web never forgets, and that's the basic problem. If people are attached to their content but not backing it up in case of disaster, then I fail to see how that's anyone else's problem - your lack of planning does not constitute anyone else's crisis or obligation. POSSE is in fact a correct reaction to this issue: starting from the presumption that your "free" hosting will remain so was a delusion that everyone capable of even a little systemic thinking should've seen as a risk - obviously you're going to lose that as soon as whatever invisible accounting applies to you no longer pays the bills.
- rektide 5y ago
  > Is your HackerNews comment history that important to you? Uh??? Yes? I seek to understand & learn from myself & my past & what happens. Taking the time to write in, to try to calibrate myself & others, communicate, & having it blown up is very much against the project. Please don't spew this remorseless anti-personal who-cares-about-yourself litter around my or anyone else's grounds, it's callous in extreme. We all care about who we are online. We invest ourselves. These arguments that we shouldn't care about ourselves come off extremely bad handed to me.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    I care about who I am offline even more than online. Should I be pushing for persistent 24/7 video surveillance of public space, stores, malls, parks, etc, so that I can revisit all of that too without making my own effort to preserve what I find important?

drewcoo 5y ago

1. Victim-blaming 2. Hedges is well aware of history. And of changing times. And of the present heavy hand of SV censors. Go read some of his books before you play him off like a simpleton. First our prisons, then our military, and now silencing dissidents - the US likes to privatize its dirty work. Those private actors aren't held to the strict legal constraints created for government actors. This is what Americans call "efficiency."

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
fphhotchips 5y ago
1. Yep. As you say - the guy is smart enough to know better. 2. I'm sure he is - this article comes off to me as a highly intelligent person ranting. I'm calling out that his appeal to precedent is, at best, weakly laid out in this article (and at worst it's dishonest). As I said, I agree with elements of the argument that he's making, but he's made the arguments poorly here.

Gunax 5y ago

There's no historic precedent until of course there is precedent. Just like there was no historic precedent of states limiting the size and tactics of corporations until the rise of 19th century monopolies. And no historic precedent of meddling in what wages could be paid until we decided there should be a minimum wage. And no historic precedent of forcing businesses to serve all races and ethnicities until we decided that redlining and segregation were wrong. I think everything you wrote is correct. But I am increasing concerned about the power of a few individuals to control what can be published. I think it's time to discuss what we should do rather than what the law mandates. It's a difficult question, and I don't have a good answer. Remember that actors, writers, scientists, and other professionals were blacklisted by McCarthyism--and technically no one did anything illegal, but it's not well regarded now. I am just saying that sometimes free speech is more of an appeal to a principle than a law.

dimitrios1 5y ago
Free speech is always appealed to as a principle by our own government whenever it is convenient, especially when they are, as an example, gearing up for their next middle eastern target for regime change. "They don't align with our western ideals of democracy, freedom of speech" they'll say. This trend to strictly delineate between the principle and the law is a new fashion. Historically speaking, although it wasn't enforced by law, if you were a private organization and you did things contrary to the principle, it was enforced by society. What has changed is, as it seems to many as well as myself, is that people merely have lost their principles.
- Gunax 5y ago
  > This trend to strictly delineate between the principle and the law is a new fashion. Historically speaking, although it wasn't enforced by law, if you were a private organization and you did things contrary to the principle, it was enforced by society. What has changed is, as it seems to many as well as myself, is that people merely have lost their principles. Can you explain this? Wouldn't something being enforced by society be an example of it being a principle rather than a law?

joe_the_user 5y ago

Not to mention that "to be disappeared" is phrase used in various periods when death squads were active in South America, notably during the Dirty War [1] in Argentina when a number of friends of my parents had their children viciously murdered and when my cousins got out of the country by the skin of their teeth. Using the term for "losing your data 'cause you didn't make personal backups" is pretty pathetic. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War

wincy 5y ago
This is definitely what I thought this article was going to be about. It’s a false equivocation and really irresponsible of the poster to use that terminology.
- Viliam1234 5y ago
  The author was disappeared, his articles were literally murdered, and you are promoting a genocide of false equivocations. What a nuclear catastrophe! The false vacuum of our hypocritical society is decaying.
michannne 5y ago
I personally have never heard of this and I doubt this event is constantly in the mind of the public zeitgeist of the article's OP. Such a general phrase as "to be disappeared" is not monopolized for any harrowing event - it's on par with saying you were "brainwashed" despite the CIA nor other intelligence groups being involved.
- majormajor 5y ago
  "Being disappeared" doesn't call to mind any specific event to me but definitely is an idiom for like law enforcement or intelligence removing people seen as troublesome. Just google it!
  - michannne 5y ago

ouid 5y ago

>but I don't think this article is that I feel like we might have read different articles.

fphhotchips 5y ago
Personally I feel this article strays too far into: 1. Whining and moaning, 2. Other political areas, 3. Intellectually dishonest arguments to stand as a valuable contribution to the discourse on this topic. In particular the 'The most vocal cheerleaders' paragraph is just an emotional dump on the author's personal political bogeymen.
mistermann 5y ago
I agree with you, it's odd the nature of these discussions.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

baryphonic 5y ago

> 2. This idea that you're being deplatformed or marginalised because years of your archives are no longer available in a free and easily accessible format from someone else is not supported by call outs to MLK, Malcolm X, etc. Even if you accept the idea that they had free and unfettered access to public broadcasting (ha!), there was absolutely no easy way to get access to the archives of that on demand! The speakers themselves, and their organisations, had to manage that. There wasn't? I remember going through the catalogs in the public library as a kid, looking at the microfilm, even listening to some audio recordings. Even a public library had loads of information, and the thought of it being made inaccessible on an arbitrary whim was unthinkable. Sure, it's not comparable to the reach of today's instant broadcast via Internet, but it was the equivalent of the time. Maybe in the time of Jim Crow or something certain public libraries would censor this stuff. I honestly don't know. It just seems to not jibe with my experience as a kid getting information at the library.

dghlsakjg 5y ago
YouTube isn’t a library or archive. It’s a for profit business. Also, libraries are very constrained in what they will and won’t archive and bring in to the collection. Budget, politics, space, taste all figure in. Hustler Magazine is a famous anti censorship platform thanks to Larry Flint. You won’t find it at your local library.
fphhotchips 5y ago
So, maybe microfilms would have a record of the fact that the speech happened, but most aren't going to have the full text of the speech. Recordings of every broadcast would also be unlikely to be stored at most libraries that can be described as 'easily accessible' [1]. "I Have a Dream" is famously copyrighted; without MLK and his associates/estate managing the distribution, it would be very difficult to get access to it. I bet the libraries of the South didn't all have it available straight away, for sure. > Sure, it's not comparable to the reach of today's instant broadcast via Internet, but it was the equivalent of the time. But I guess that's partially my point, right? The instant broadcast/archive-by-default nature of YouTube is new and unique to our time; trying to refer back to historic figures as your precedent for having access to it seems a little hollow to me. [1] I grew up in more sparsely populated areas (and, also, in Australia), and perhaps that changes my perspective on what is reasonable to expect for access to libraries pre-internet.

pmoriarty 5y ago

"People who think they're entitled to free unfettered video hosting on YouTube are dreaming. There's no historic precedent to indicate that it should be so..." We have a choice as societies to fund public archives that are free from (direct) corporate interference. Corporations and governments aren't clearly distinct entities, as corporate execs work as politicians and politicians often retire from office only to get hired by the corporations they regulated or gave business to while in office, but there's still a big difference between a corporation made to profit its owners/investors and a non-profit government entity supposed to benefit the public good. We now have so much of the world's cultural artifacts in the hands of these few incredibly powerful corporations at whose whim any/all of them could be lost. It doesn't have to be this way.