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Certainly seems like something that the Library of Congress should be handling.
by 3eb7988a1663 2y ago
Certainly seems like something that the Library of Congress should be handling.
- jacobgkau 2y agoThe problem with this is that there's all kinds of user-generated web content that certain people wouldn't want tax dollars going towards preserving. I can already look at e.g. the National Film Registry and say I don't care about movies so my tax dollars shouldn't go towards preserving them, regardless of what some bureaucrat thinks is "culturally significant." The film industry has a pretty massive network of artists who are able to go to bat for that stuff, though. But then take pornography, or hate speech (and/or straight-up misinformation), or content that's illegal in the US but not elsewhere (like drug recipes or weapons schematics). It's already tricky for a private entity to handle convincing people of the value of preserving everything physically and legally possible to preserve. Making an argument for doing it as a public function, even in good faith, could easily turn into a mess-- especially when we can barely agree what should be allowed on the internet now.