🇵🇸 from the Frederick to the Enchilada 🇵🇸: Archive.org is about as close to an absolute good as humanity has ever created, and if we allow it to die, it will permanently damage all of human culture. I don’t believe that is an exaggeration to say. It would make the loss of the library of Alexandria look like a misplaced receipt.

Archive.org is about as close to an absolute good as humanity has ever created, and if we allow it to die, it will permanently damage all of human culture. I don’t believe that is an exaggeration to say. It would make the loss of the library of Alexandria look like a misplaced receipt.

Thanks to @archive.org, who has assembled a searchable index of 460,575 web pages previously published on MTV's website, you can search the MTV News archive via the Wayback Machine. variety.com/2024/digital...

MTV News Repository of 460,000 Articles Launched by Internet Archive After Paramount’s Content Takedownvariety.com After Paramount pulled MTV News offline, the Internet Archive assembled a searchable index of 460,575 pages previously published at mtv.com/news.

I agree about Internet Archive, but I have to be that annoying person that points out the current historical understanding it that the decline of the library of Alexandria wasn't really a devastating loss, and its collection might have very well been copied in other libraries by the time it happened

The popular focus on the library of Alexandria as a cultural touchstone is itself an interesting topic because we can trace it to specific events, e.g. Carl Sagan making a big deal out of it, you can literally see the mentions to it exploding in the literature after his popular show

Copying of ancient and medieval texts was quite less glamorous and more complicated than "everything is centralized in one place and things are lost forever if the one place is gone"

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