Well-known tools Internet Archive & Wayback Machine suffer the flaw of centralization. Hive as archive can remedy that.
Cover image made using MS Paint. Hive logo comes from
hive.io.TL;DR
- A Disturbing Trend
- The Role of a Free Market in This Context
- Another Issue of Concern to Us
- The Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive
- Hive as a Partner in the Archiving Business
- Who Can Archive Literature and Other Books to Hive Blockchain?
- Good Candidates To Be Recorded to Hive Blockchain
- Short Works of Literature
- Religious Texts
- World Literature
- Reference Materials
- Medical References
- Recipes & Cookbooks
- What about Rewards?
- Just My Two Sats
A Disturbing Trend
In February 2021, the publisher of Dr. Seuss children's books decided to no longer publish six books by the author due to "racist and insensitive imagery" (as determined by other people).
Almost exactly two years later in 2023, something even worse is happening with a number of children's books by Roald Dahl: future editions of some books will be rewritten to replace "controversial language" found in the original books.
Then there are the many books which a tiny yet supervocal minority of people want removed from libraries. These would include books which in 2015 we considered boring or pedestrian but today those people consider inflammatory.
The Role of a Free Market in This Context
If a market exists for such sanitized literature works, people will buy them. If not, then the publishers had earned the losses they will have incurred from the decision to sanitize that literature.
If a market exists for literature in its original form, people will be buying works featuring the original text. If not, then other works will replace them in ther marketplace.
This is supposed to be how a free market operates-- people voting with their wallets by buying what they want.
Another Issue of Concern to Us
A tangential issue exists with the situations involving deceased authors whose works are deemed offensive to a handful of sensitive people:
- Over time, will their original works be lost?
The way culture is changing in many countries (especially in the Americas and in Europe), overly-sensitive people are in control of not only media distribution but also educational institutions.
As a result, many parents and concerned non-parents are looking for content free from the clutches of these overly-sensitive people.
Physical media containing these works of literature are hard to find just because digitized content is preferred. Now add to that issues such as "book burning" and censorship.
The sensible thing would be to allow for all versions to co-exist so that people can go with whatever version they prefer. Live and let live, but for books.
The Wayback Machine and the Internet Archive
Since the dawn of the Worldwide Web in the mid-1990s, the Internet Archive have been taking snapshots of existing web pages and saving them for future reference. Usually spiders are used to crawl the web to locate and archive these pages. This is good for people interested in news at presented at some time or other. The Wayback Machine is how we access that web content stored at the Internet Archive.
As wonderful as this resource is, it suffers from one major flaw: centralization.
Should anything happen to the archive.org domain, that content becomes inaccessible (if not lost). Anything from meteors to nuclear warhead detonation to old-fashioned sabotage can take out this resource of saved knowledge. It would be a shame if vulnerabilities made possible by centraliztion cause the Internet Archive to go POOF.
Even if Internet Archive mirrors its content at multiple sites around the world, its function as a gatekeeper of that content is problematic. How can we make it less of a problem?
We can decentralize the archiving of that content and knowledge.
Hive as a Partner in the Archiving Business
As Hivers, we have a good idea of what Hive offers the rest of the world. Below is one version of an answer to the fundamental question "What Is Hive?":
Hive is a decentralized, scalable, and battle-tested Delegated Proof of Stake network running on Hive blockchain.
(links in original)
As Hivers, we focus on 3 things primarily:
- Social Media blogging (including its various forms of microblogging);
- Decentralized Finance (DeFi);
- Play2Earn (Gaming).
All rely on the Hive blockchain. Relevant to archiving is this detail: data recorded on the blockchain is immutable.
Who Can Archive Literature and Other Books to Hive Blockchain?
Anyone with a Hive account can record content to blockchain. Usually it's posts such as this one or anything else we've read today. However, who says we can't also record to blockchain the text of books and literature we value most?
Copyright laws can make it tricky for us to do that for anything produced within the last 100 years. That still leaves whatever was published in years before 1923, and those works should be considered public domain.
Regardless of what happens to the works of Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl, any of us can record their works to Hive blockchain.
Good Candidates To Be Recorded to Hive Blockchain
Short answer: Everything!
Long Answer: Whatever can be collected and compiled for whatever front-end is being used.
✅ Short Works of Literature
Definitely the works of Dr. Seuss and Roald Dahl. Thanks to dApps
such as first D.Buzz and now LeoThreads, short poetry can be recorded to blockchain as microblogging entries.
✅ Religious Texts
The Bible and The Quran, which have sentences numbered as verses, can be recorded to blockchain either as long form blogs or microblog entries. Texts from other world religions (active as well as expired) can also be saved to blockchain.
✅ World Literature
Works from authors as varied as William Shakespeare, Confucius, Miguel de Cervantes, Rumi, Leo Tolstoy, Miyamoto Musashi, and Mark Twain (among many, many others), can be organized as a series of long form posts.
Blockchain can also be used for philosophy texts going back thousands of years.
✅ Reference Materials
While these get updated constantly, it's good to have older editions available if only to see the trends establihsed by changes to content. Obvious works such as dictionaries and thesauri fit this description.
✅ Medical References
-- Especially those published before 1900, when natural medicine was still practiced by the majority of people.
✅ Recipes & Cookbooks
How was beer brewed in ancient times? How were the first fruitcakes made? What was used before sugar was discovered?
What about Rewards?
When it comes to how each piece of uploaded content is rewarded, it depends. Some people may upvote it and tip it. Some people may actually downvote it (say, a day trader or online merchant downvoting The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx).
We won't like everything which would be archived to blockchain, but we need to respect the right of our fellow Hivers to bring to blockchain whatever content they deem valuable.
Even if archiving works of literature and knowledge doesn't qualify for rewards, it may still be worth bringing them to blockchain to provide yet another means of preserving the world's knowledge.
As with our social media content, each of us is free to support (or not) whatever content we want to support (or not).
Just My Two Sats
It's one thing for a work of literature (or film or sound) to be edited before it is released to the world for the first time. It's something else entirely to edit these works long after the creators are dead and then pass them off as new creations. They would be new creations only in the most technical sense of the term, but we would know that the new works were never intended to be presented in these bastardized forms.
The combination of Internet Archive and Wayback Machine-- more so than even Wikipedia-- have done much to preserve WWW content and offer it for retrieval. Centralization leaves it open to erradication by means natural and human.
As a supplement to Internet Archive and Wayback machine, Hive blockchain can be used to preserve all sorts of published content going back thousands of years. There will be works like these some of us won't be keen on, but we're all free to support (or not) as we wish. What matters is the preservation of knowledge.
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