The national libraries and the Internet file were, for a while, the main institutions dedicated to cataloging the web. But “only a small group of people participated in that community,” says Jules, “and the blacks who studied to be archivists were not invited in those networks.”
The Internet archive, a non -profit organization created in 1996, functions as a kind of library: includes 835,000 million web pages, 44 million books and texts and 15 million audio recordings, in addition to other artifacts. Many consider it the collective memory of the Network. In April, the Internet archive, which already faced legal problems in separate cases of Universal Music Group and the Book Editorial Hachette, was an objective of the Elon Musk government efficiency department when the agency cut the financing of the national endowment for the humanities (National Endowment for the Humanities), which supports the file.
Despite the Purge of the Administration, Rudy Fraser, the Creator of Blacksky, says that he is “encouraged by the preservation efforts” that he has seen so far, including the innovation laboratory of the Harvard Law Library – which is rescuing federal data sets – and companies like Joy Media, which take advantage of AI, virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to scan Africans, making them accessible to people in the continent that otherwise could not see them.
In 2023, Fraser released Blackskythe Personalized Food and Moderation Service that quickly became the central meeting point for many Bluesky black users. He tells me that he also considers Blacksky as a living file. At present, its database contains 17 million black users messages of the last two years (not counting the deleted and eliminations by moderation). “As the AT protocol is public and the Blacksky application is open source, anyone with technical knowledge could rebuild the data set – less moderation actions – even if our primary databases disappeared,” he says. “Open source and decentralized tools guarantee that, if a single company becomes a objective of a nation-state, communities that depend on its infrastructure can continue to work.”
Preservation efforts have also devised courses on civil rights in university campuses. When Karen Attiah’s course, columnist of the Washington Post, on race, media and global history was suspended by Columbia University in April, Attiah decided to “free my teaching work”, organizing it as an online course and renamed it rightly as “Resistance Summer School.”
“It is not the time for media literacy or historical knowledge to be hostages of institutions that kneel against authoritarianism and fear,” he wrote in his replacement. The support wave was huge. According to Attiah, in 48 hours the 500 seats were filled; The waiting list currently has more than 3,000 people.
It is still too early to know what long -term impact will have Trump’s attack on the history of blacks on population literacy, but Foster and Jules say they will not leave.
“What does it mean for the federal government, at this time, being administrators of the history of blacks? A pen of pen is enough to start dismantling things. What does that mean to the future?” Says Jules.
In the end, the way to a better future is impossible without the efforts to preserve information, says Clark. “The destruction of these stories and records makes people more difficult remember what that progress was like. Both their successes and their failures. And it makes people more difficult for people to imagine how continuous progress could be. That is the point.”
Article originally published in Wired, adapted by Daniela Vilchis.
