On Feb 7th, #Trump sacked the
head of #NARA, the agency that maintains the ofcl texts of the nation’s laws, & whose motto is “the written word endures.”
>110k govt pages have gone dark in a #purge that one scientist likened to a “#DigitalBookBurning,” & which has proved as frightening in its imprecision as in its malice.
Racing to comply w/ #Trump’s executive orders banning “DEI” & “gender ideology extremism,” agencies have cut materials on everything from supporting transgender youth in school to teaching children about sickle-cell disease, which disproportionately affects people of African descent. But they have also axed records having little to do w/the Admin’s ideological priorities, seemingly assisted by AI tools that flag forbidden words w/o regard to context.
A recently leaked list of pages marked for deletion on military websites includes…the #EnolaGay, …the B-29 bomber that nuked Hiroshima.
Oblivion menaces every scrap of #information that doesn’t spark joy in the Oval Office. “It’s gone,” #Trump said of “wokeness,” during his address to Congress, in almost motherly tones. “And we feel so much better for it, don’t we? Don’t we feel better?” But on this front, at least, Trump is facing well-organized resistance.
It comes from a loose coalition of #archivists & #librarians, who are standing athwart #history & yelling “Save!” They belong to organizations such as the #InternetArchive, which co-created a project called the End of Term Web Archive to back up the federal web in 2008; the Environmental Data & Governance Initiative, or #edgi; & #libraries at major #universities such as #MIT & the University of #Michigan.
@Nonilex Uggghh, #Trump's statements there remind me of Hades from #HadesTown...which was written way back in 2006.
Like the Encyclopedists of #IsaacAsimov’s “Foundation”—who race to compile a collapsing empire’s accumulated knowledge—they’re assembling #information arks to ride out the chaos.
“This is how we know about our country,” Lynda Kellam, a social scientist & data librarian, told me. “People who support the ‘drain the swamp’ mentality don’t seem to understand how much the government does.” Kellam… described the vulnerable data as “irreplaceable.”
Sorry to post this yet again, but it was frustratingly predictable:
"It seems likely that the new administration will devastate many government agencies that not only house experts in their respective fields but a treasure trove of institutional knowledge. Once these are destroyed, it will take years to restore them, if they ever can be.”
"Second Foundation” would be a good name for a coalition of blue states, though…
