Self-Starter Internet Archivist: A Guide to Preserving Open Information in The Trump Age
In the before times, before Trump’s siege on education, we could trust that our libraries and book publishers would be kept safe from draconian mobsters in the United States federal government. Universities would be trusted with their own autonomy. Researchers could document the world’s greatest advances in scientific studies, medicines, and engineering. Philosophy, history, and poetry could be shared openly. LGBTQ+ books and religious literature from Ancient Greece were safe. We no longer live in those times. Students and teachers alike are cut off incrementally from the education that made America great. First, they came for the LGBTQ+ poetry, then they came for the Civil Rights history books, then they came for suffragette journals, then they came for science, and now our universities are lawfare warzones with restricted speech.
Earlier today I printed out several news articles collected over the last five months, such as the Washington, D.C., air disaster from January 29th, 2025, and all of the FAA chaos that followed, a list of people abducted by ICE, including Rümeysa Öztürk from Tufts University, and a picture of the new pope. I then buried them in a jar somewhere in the woods. The idea came to me like one of those time capsule projects they used to have us do in school. I thought that news of the present should be preserved and kept safe, in case everything is scrubbed. Maybe 50 years from now, someone will dig it up and piece together a version of our timeline that Project 2025 tyrants do not want to exist.
But there are other ways to protect knowledge that do not involve a gardening trowel and some randomly selected spot off of a bike trail. 1 to 2TB portable hard drives usually don’t cost more than $60 to $70. In these times, with the price of groceries still a problem in many communities, maybe you will only afford to buy two portable hard drives. Or maybe you will only afford two dolls. With the film studio tariffs planned by Trump, maybe you will only afford two movies in a year. Some people might go to such extremes to preserve data that they will scrape every single website and news source going all the way back to the before times. The Internet Archive tried it, and for decades they were hoarding the world’s digital Alexandria, but lawfare has come for them too, and now archivists are asking, what’s next? We are losing access to films, arts, museums, everything. The siege has come.
Much of the Internet won’t be lost just to censorship, but also to cost-cutting and liquidations, which will shut down data servers and result in publications going under. More and more over the last four months, we have found that the Internet Archive has become an important hub for data scrubbed from official websites as part of Project 2025’s shock doctrine. However, even the Internet Archive is now under direct fire from the world’s most powerful lawfare operators, and it could be gone by the end of the year, along with somewhere between 50-100 thousand terabytes of data.
Original Art by Mike B.
In 2011, 24-year-old student Aaron Swartz was arrested at Massachusetts Institute of Technology for downloading 4.8 million JSTOR journals, 80 percent of their database at the time, using a guest user account given to him by MIT (https://swartz-report.mit.edu/faq.html). Swartz believed in a free, open information society and wanted to keep the scholarly knowledge safe from censorship. Federal charges were thrown at him and the ensuing two-year case led Swartz to kill himself, rather than go to prison for 35 years. Perhaps he took self-starter internet archiving a bit too far for special interests groups, but he was, and still is, in many ways the forerunner of the open information society. (https://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2011/07/mit-also-pressing-charges-against-hacking-suspect-037709).
There is a teetering edge one must walk in the interest of gaining access to data and keeping it safe for a good cause. You probably shouldn’t download 80 percent of a paywalled digital library all by yourself in an MIT closet. But you can make use of your library now and devote an hour to scanning materials to create your own personal archive, your own underground library of information. You might not be able to host 100 petabytes of data to share 866 web pages under a single non-profit like the Internet Archive. But archivists who download hundreds of terabytes with access to this information would be able to distribute it throughout digital networks. The survival of the open information society would continue through the next generation of public libraries that exist by the will of the people.
Piracy is illegal, but it is not yet against the law to right-click a website and tap save as, preserving HTML data, including all the contents of the site. There are many ways to skirt the fine edge between being a hacker data pirate and a legitimate archivist. If 4.8 million people were to preserve 2 terabytes of data each on a portable hard drive, then they would collectively have 9.6 million terabytes of data. That is a lot of data! Fifty thousand people with 2TB drives could save 100,000 TB, which is still enough to preserve a pretty good chunk of history. Hard times call for good trouble!
Enjoyed this article? Get updates on the movement, volunteer opportunities, and more by clicking below.