Iwazaru wrote: ↑Mon May 02, 2022 3:05 pm
I don't even want to think about tons, and tons, and tons of content that exists only within Facebook or Instagram or Discord, be that very useful informational posts or photos/images.
The only way to keep things save is always do new copies and back-ups both in offline and online. But it could be very demanding and tiring to to that constantly. And sometimes it is not a thing that can be done if e.g. it's company official channel and they don't allow content to be anywhere else. Etc.
That's essentially what I'm doing with the Suda51 stuff. With help from BMJ when it comes to digitization.
One thing that pisses me off is all these twitter retards bragging about having rare magazine articles, yet they never share them beyond some blurry-ass picture, nor do they ever share which magazine it was from. For once, it's pathetic to brag about such things in the first place, but secondly, it's faggoty-ass behavior to hoard it. I made it my mission to just track down all these magazines physically to scan them and have the interesting stuff translated, which is what I did with the FSR Famitsu article.
https://www.paradisehotel51.com/sin/famitsu-interview/
I have a bunch of other rare things I haven't scanned yet, just because BMJ is going to eventually send me a tutorial on how to digitize things in better quality. So once that happens I'll go through my magazines, promotional booklets and what not. I will also re-do the art scans for the soundtrack CDs and games he doesn't have. (Which is why you can't find them on the site at the moment.) When it comes to books, I have a big box of stuff ready to ship to him to unbind and digitize himself. I'm just waiting for an equally big box to arrive so I can consolidate them lol.
Following your suggestion. I am also backing up youtube translations and what not in case they are taken down for whatever reason.
My suggestion would be to pick your niche, or something you're especially passionate about and focus on archiving that if you're really into it. It's impossible to run communities like Redump or Retromags by oneself. Meanwhile I can easily manage just Suda51 stuff because it's not that expansive.
And yes, that myth about "once it got to web, then its immortal" is just a wishful thinking. I already lived through trouble of realizing how some obscure stuff is literally lost forever (webarchiveorg didn't save it, people who had it do not anymore after hdd change etc. etc.). That catchphrase only works when talked about VERY popular stuff, and that's it.
It was always bullshit. Most people don't seem to realize the wayback machine must be triggered manually. As in you need to archive the specific link yourself, it doesn't just save whole websites automatically.
Again, I try to do that with everything I come across for the website, which is why I put up archive links right next to the download links.
This whole internet mentality of "someone else will do it" always was bullshit. The only right way to do it is to put your money and your time where your mouth is.
Same thoughts i also have regarding recent fashion of using discord instead of a separate message board or chat room for communities nowodays. People now treat them as forums and often put important information that may not exist anywhere else (e.g. there was a circle of programmers who kept documentation of how to make custom mods for a certain game only in private discord and when admin had nervous breakdown and nuked the server, it basically killed the whole modding community as nobody even backed docs and posts), and also not indexed by search engines etc. etc.
If one "board hosted on company's site" goes offline, its just it. If the whole discord or reddit has 404, it's thousands of communities that loose access.
I would argue most of the content on Discords isn't worth preserving in the first place. I do see your point though. I went on a Discord for the game YIIK (YES yes I play Yiik. Such is my life.) and the devs actually posted a bunch of interesting stuff about their cancelled projects, including concept art, 3d models, explanations of game systems and what not. Granted noone gives a fuck but that stuff might as well be lost because I'm not gonna go through an endless chatroom to find it again, so it might as well be lost already.
I think the problem is that people like you or I did not grow up on the internet, so we interpreted the internet in terms of real-life example. I know I saw the internet as a library, where accessing information (through a website) was not much different than reading a book, and forums were a place for discussion around that information.
The generation after ours grew up in front of iPads & smartphones, so the internet itself is their baseline of understanding. Specifically the scroll-down internet which was ironically pioneered by 4chan. (Think of Twitter, Instagram, TikTok etc. which purposefully make it difficult to retain or catalog content. The whole point of the internet, in that framework, is to provide with a dopamine hit rather than it being a tool that you use to do other things, in conjunction with your real-life interests. You just open your platform of choice, scroll through it, and once you close it whatever you saw might as well not exist anymore.
The shift happened sometime after Facebook (which was the last social media platform I ever used really) was launched. Facebook still had a bunch of featured where you could organize photos into albums, or write blog posts that would be accessible from your main page. Status updates were throaway junk, but they were a smaller part of the whole. Nowadays, every single platform is based on status updates lol.
Of course it is that way by design because internet platforms were built by marketers, for marketers, to spread PR advertisement propaganda and data mine their users, but I went on about that long enough lol
I believe it would be a big gamble for governments to create isolated internet. People like to be brainwashed into consuming foreign items, governments are fine with that as long as these companies paying taxes to them. It's kinda an abusive relationship, when you see how bad modern internet and social media are, but can't get away with that. Also, since a lot of consumers have a short attention span thanks to social media, they can easily create context for every shit that's going on. Social medias are just too convenient. Not only money circulation is going thanks to them, but it's also makes people dumb and easy to control. If anything, for government it's just stupid to do anything with all that shit until something really strange happens.
I agree with everything you said, I was just using China as an example of a country that is rich enough to insulate itself which involved building a separate internet infrastructure. Obviously both are bad. Globalized internet just brainwashes you into poisoning yourself for the sake of corporate interests. The Chinese internet brainwashes you into worshiping the state and the social credit score lol.
Both systems inundate you with a constant wave of bullshit. The chinese portray their concentration camps as "highschools" lol.
I'm just saying that between these two systems, the Chinese one is obviously more successful because it manages to infiltrate the western internet infrastructure, while the west has to beg and grovel to even get movies released in China. Tiktok is just straight up harvesting data for the Chinese government while pushing divide and conquer propaganda onto the west, glamorizing underage girls mutilating or prostituting themselves and so much more.
That is how China manages to keep control, while western social media is so insane, everyone in the middle east & asia is just confused as per what the fuck we're going on about when we say that men are women, blacks are whites, war is peace (literally war is peace LOL), collapsing economies are actually good and white people colonizing foreigners is actually anti-racist.
My dad's generation finally caught on to this insanity because that generation still watches TV, which is mostly ran by people their age (60-70yos), and it took them this long to catch up with what was going on online. Their reaction is of utter confusion because to them, suddenly there's an app on children phones telling them that girls need to cut off their tits and boys need to cut off their dicks, also that black people are oppressed in Italy and need to rise up against the government by burning down businesses and killing private citizens (?????) and that american imperialism is not bad at all, and in fact Biden is saving all of us by forcing us into NATO warmongering through WW2 sanctions.
The reaction from foreigners is not that different from what boomers are doing here. They just look at the facts and interpret it as "american insanity".
Isolationist internet isn't a solution either. It may be harder for foreign companies to get into there, but as long as they abide the rules, it's ok to try to monopolize this closed area. I don't think that isolated internet would be the solution. It's easy to use VPN in China and they do it. The reason they don't give a shit about global internet is their disinterest in English (I'm talking from the perspective of an idiot who tried to find my way in China using English and getting stupid looks, and also chatting online with one Chinese guy who uses online translator to understand English). In case of Europe, where English isn't perceived as a foreign body and is used commonly, nothing would stop them from using VPN and getting into this ocean again.
People who are able to operate a VPN are a tiny minority, way smaller than you expect. Most people don't know how to operate the internet at all, they just click on apps and absorb content passively.
Such a minority of people is not enough to shape culture around you. The reason why the internet suddenly transitioned into real life around the late 2000s and early 2010s is because platforms like twitter, youtube, instagram and so on were built or updated to be easily consumed on a smartphone, which in turn is much easier to use than a desktop PC or laptop because instead of typing out URLs, you just put your thumb on a colorful icon.
I think you're projecting your own intelligence onto other people. The ones who shape the culture around you are not smart people who know how to operate machinery & software, they are knuckle dragging neanderthals who just do as they're told.
The idea of modern western democracy was founded on the idea that the school system would raise citizens and not employees. That is to say that by giving everyone the same cultural baseline, supposedly they'd be able to make informed decisions when voting for representatives. It worked for a while I guess but there is no denying some people are just born retarded. (Alt right adjacent groups only attribute that to Race and IQ. I tend to think there's simply too many bodies and too few souls to inhabit them.) So as mass communication became more and more ubiquitous (Newspapers -> Radio -> Television -> URL based internet -> smartphone based internet) we shifted away from democracy because that majority of people is susceptible to ritualistic mind control.
In the past, organized churches could easily topple governments because they had the keywords & rituals necessary to control the masses. Which is why communist regimes had to outlaw churches and worship entirely (though funnily enough, Castro outlawed every organized religious group except for freemasonry lol).
The shift happened when Edward Bernays ratified those rituals in a psychological/scientific framework with his work on Group Psychology.
Which is essentially just the Talmud translated into science lol.
Nowadays, the ones holding the keys to mass psychological control are marketers, which is why the west exists under a corporatocracy where national governments are meaningless at best, and enforcing corporate order at worst. There's a reason why memes like "ORANGE MAN BAD" catch on so quickly, and are so close to reality. It's because the people who espouse such things unironically only have the attention span and intelligence to digest slogans, or prayers. The point of Trump in western society was to embody the devil figure in a secular religious narrative, where everyone espousing different values than the mainstream can now be safely labelled as a "satanist" (trumptard).
Hitler & Goebbels operated within the same framework.
http://fcit.usf.edu/holocaust/resource/ ... cpropa.htm
All propaganda must be popular and its intellectual level must be adjusted to the most limited intelligence among those it is addressed to. Consequently, the greater the mass it is intended to reach, the lower its purely intellectual level will have to be. But if, as in propaganda for sticking out a war, the aim is to influence a whole people, we must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public, and too much caution cannot be extended in this direction.
The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective it will be. And this is the best proof of the soundness or unsoundness of a propaganda campaign, and not success pleasing a few scholars or young aesthetes.
The point I'm trying to make is that cultural context is always enforced from the top down, because a greatest majority of people are soulless drones who will shape it around you. That is to say that the same westerner who screams off the top of his lungs that Putin is threatening transgender children with the infinity gauntlet, would just be praising Xi Jiping if he were born in China.
People who can operate basic things (such as using a VPN since that was my example) are already too intelligent to have any real cultural impact, because they'll ask at least one question after hearing a slogan, which makes the propaganda ineffective. (That's also why Twitter has a 140 character limit and its entire navigation is based on hashtags; The people calling you a nazi on twitter are actually using a platform modeled after Hitler's propaganda, which in turn was appropriated from Talmudic rituals from the jews, LOL!!!!!!)
All in all, I believe the conclusion could be only pessimistic. The roots of social media degeneracy are consuming every person that lives in a society. Considering how children are getting into this consumerism mindset by using gadgets since they're one year old or so, the war for sanity is over. But who cares, if I would be getting money from abusing these retards, I would roll with it.
My personal solution is to just live in a cave. I've been working towards making my entire business function at a distance, without me having to ever meet a client directly so I can just live wherever, buy a farm and hug sheep or something. I'm tired of people and their retarded shit. You can see that reflected in how I run my website, where it's basically stuck in the 90s and is only preoccupied with existing as a thing lol. My latest update made it even harder for it to be read on phones which is fine by me.
You can make money out of social media addicts, all you need to do is be a shill. I was talking in another thread how most youtubers are not hobbyists at all. They are literal actual shills who are paid to espouse a false consensus. In the USA, a lot of them are most likely paid off by DNC think tanks. I was talking about it in another thread fairly recently.
viewtopic.php?p=2615#p2615
That also exists in China funnily enough, they will hire goofy westerners to do song and dances about how great the chinese government is lol.
I don't engage with it simply because of where my career path has led me. I make money off of other things. But if I had to do that to make money, then sure. I'd praise Winnie the Pooh or Biden or whoever paid me.
