Pretty much the title sums it up. There’s a lot to be concerned about, and one thing I find personally disconcerting is how US educational systems might be impacted.
Do we need to make backups of, like, everything educational and scientific? And where are all the places and forms that we can host these materials?
Edit: to everyone saying it shouldn’t be an issue because Trump/US doesn’t control information in the rest of the world, keep in mind that is little comfort to those of us here if access to that information becomes restricted as well. We should be seeking to hedge all bets.
They published a 900+ page manifesto on it. Project 2025 won’t all be accomplished but it’s the policy agenda.
TLDs, DNS, and much of the structure of how the internet operates was controlled and run by American agencies ICANN, IANA (US department of commerce until just recently). Their offices are still located in the US.
The FBI and Homeland Security are known to seize domains - globally.
With Gabbard as DNI, and Gaetz as AG, everything that is, to them, a threat, insult, disrespectful, embarrassing, untruth, ungodly, or in any way counters their agenda and rewriting of history, will be at risk.
Just think of all that orange guy is, and all that he isn’t:
He is white, old, male, (somewhat) rich, right wing, educated, member of a majority, and a criminal.
Such people, places, things, and ideas are going to get benefits.
All colored, young, female (& div.), poor, left wing, uneducated, all kinds of minorities (!), and upright honest people, places, things, and ideas will be getting hard times.
I’m not expecting much to be banned or censored, per se, but I can see more GOP-controlled states removing a lot of LGBT books and other media from schools.
In general, education in the US is left to the states, which means I’d mainly just expect a continuation of the trend we’ve been seeing for a few years now in places like Florida and Tennessee of removing queer books from schools.
From the federal perspective, I’d also anticipate the possibility of FAFSA being gutted and making higher ed inaccessible to more students. If this sort of content is not covered in public schools, there will be fewer opportunities to study queer literature later on. And even then, state universities in red states are subject to the same restrictions as their public schools, so those students may be SOL unless they have the means to study out of state.
The main problem is: even if the material remains pretty freely available outside of schools, how do you make the people who would benefit from it the most feel driven to seek it out independently?
A climate change denier will head of the EPA.
A vaccine denier will be our Health Secretary.
An oil exec will head the Department of Energy.
Trump has been vocally pro-book bans in the past, and the modern GOP has never been against it, and has even been doing it at an increasing rate over the past few years.
These are people that are happy to remove other people that disagree with them. You really don’t think they’re going to remove books and papers? lol
The only thing is that there’s not really a vehicle for the fed to implement those bans. For all the weaknesses in the US constitution, freedom of speech is a historically tough nut for the government to crack. Not that they haven’t tried, but they have almost no control over what media is and is not allowed to be published publicly.
What is working is when states get to decide what material to provide in schools. That includes required curriculum and what books they will buy and offer in classrooms and libraries. So the state can teach (or not teach) whatever they want within the confines of their own schools, but there’s nothing they could do if, say, someone was to set up shop on the sidewalk across the street and hand out free copies of Gender Queer to any students who walk by. Nor could the fed, as it stands.
So we’ve led our horses to water, but how do we make them drink? How do you convince the students to want to pick up that book and read it for fun, and how can you help them understand what it all means when the critical reading skills for queer literature are not being taught?
Remove books and papers from where? The government in the US has influence on this, for sure, but there is no mechanism for the government to interfere with the private ownership of literature
Not all literature is privately owned. I don’t think you’re quite aware of how many research studies, trials, and such are funded by the US Government. All of that information is currently accessible to quite a few people. What happens when it no longer is? And that’s just one example.
Of course the federal government has a great deal of influence over current and future research, but that isn’t the topic. OP’s asking about existing literature.
Homosexuality is still technically illegal in Texas; they just aren’t allowed to enforce it. If they strip away the supreme court precedents regarding LGBT discrimination, then those kinds of laws will automatically go back into effect.
I’m not expecting much to be banned or censored, per se, but I can see more GOP-controlled states removing a lot of LGBT books and other media from schools.
What is this if it’s not censorship?!
But Trump has also promised to put media that criticise him in jail, and I believe he really means it, and he’s surrounding himself with people who are as crazy as he is.
From the federal perspective, I’d also anticipate the possibility of FAFSA being gutted and making higher ed inaccessible to more students.
Student loans has been one of the most effective tools to enslave domestic middle class population. You don’t under the role they play hence why you don’t understand why the state won’t restrict the loan origination. I expect Trump to come in harder on the borrowers tbh to extract extra revenue and to just punk the stupid plebs for “majoring in ljberal arts”
You don’t need to make any backups, the information is already shared worldwide. Should the Trump Administration choose to censor information, there are plenty of us outside the US who will be more than happy to provide it to you anyways.
At most you’ll need a VPN that doesn’t log IPs.
I dont think this is a wise stance. The internet actually forgets a lot, and unless things are explicitly and intentionally archived, stuff gets lost all the time.
Yeah. Can’t tell you the number of times recently I’ve tried to pull up a video from the past and couldn’t find it. Either removed or just impossible to search for.
I’ve got a YouTube playlist that gets downloaded to my server every week just in case
I agree, but I wasn’t addressing the act of archiving itself, just the access that one may or may not have to it.
as far as i know the internet archive does not have backups, copies, etc outside of the US
Right now that is unfortunately unclear. They did create The Information Archive of Canada in 2016 as a direct response to Trump’s previous Presidency, but they’ve provided no updates since.
Lol sounds like a corruption scheme
as far as i know the internet archive does not have backups, copies, etc outside of the US
If I’m wearing my it’s-gonna-get-like-real-bad-bad hat (I am), I’m left to think about distributed storage among brave people who know how to hide shit. More like part of an undernet of things we need to build and maintain.
But the risk in an authoritarian environment would be great.
This is a good point. I was also thinking that alternatives to the internet itself might become more important. We need more meshnets.
Yggdrasil? Meshtastic? IPFS? Briar? All sound pretty cool, not sure if we have a community for those things yet.
You know, Trump only governs US, not the whole fucken globe.
True. But most of the platforms used by people around the world to communicate (social media, instant messaging, etc) are owned by US companies. So our shitbag of an upcoming President could have a global impact in this regard.
That being said, I don’t find myself particularly worried about this specific thing. Hopefully I don’t eat my words.
Sure, yup. But also, imagine if Germany in 1933 was an active worldwide superpower with 128 military bases in 55 foreign countries, with an annual military budget higher than the national GDPs of 167 of the 188 countries in the world.
The internet in the united states you’re using right now, is going to be unrecognizable in the next 12 months, all free services will charge, cost for access will increase, speed will be symied, vpn usage will be curtailed, and archive, library, and pirate sites will be blocked.
We just re-elected a fascist tyrant who wants to close as many avenues of education and free speech which can be used to educate, organize, and publish against him as he possibly can, as well as funnel as much cash to media and tech oligarchs to keep them onside, and now he’s got both the house and senate with which to do just that.
Google, facebook and reddit have gutted the internet but OP just woke up about these risks because organge man got elected 🤡
A for vibes, D for analysis
Corpos are your primary enemies here… I am sure Trump will enable them, but this is not a partisan issue just pedestrian “American capitalism”
Most educational material within us is owned by publishing companies who fleece the states on text books for school, and student loans for high ed.
Scientic papers are hosted by a few private companies who own the copyright to peer reviewed articles. Look Aaron Schwarz, that will provide you some context on who you are dealing with here.
IE this is not public info and if you try to do what you are suggesting, 1. Not possible 2. It’s a fucking crime 🤡
I ain’t a bootlicker, more power to you though!
Nothing. They hate government censorship. Schools are not that and you can always access anything outside school.
Lol no. They adore government censorship. What they hate is people disagreeing with them. They call being criticised for their racism or being fact checked “censorship”, and by “free speech”, they mean freedom from criticism. They ban books gleefully.
So yeah, they say they hate censorship loud and often, but that’s not what they mean.
