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Comment by fphhotchips | Hacker News Reader

There are two points to make here:

1. If you're paying attention, you know this will happen at some point. Archive your own shit, because Google has made it more than clear there's no guarantee they'll do it for you forever.

2. This idea that you're being deplatformed or marginalised because years of your archives are no longer available in a free and easily accessible format from someone else is not supported by call outs to MLK, Malcolm X, etc. Even if you accept the idea that they had free and unfettered access to public broadcasting (ha!), there was absolutely no easy way to get access to the archives of that on demand! The speakers themselves, and their organisations, had to manage that.

People who think they're entitled to free unfettered video hosting on YouTube are dreaming. There's no historic precedent to indicate that it should be so, and YouTube has made it very clear that they can and will bounce you whenever they like. As of today, you are entitled to free speech, but no one has to give you their soapbox to stand on.

I think there's a valid conversation to be had about whether that's how it should be, but I don't think this article is that.

View on HN

Not to mention that "to be disappeared" is phrase used in various periods when death squads were active in South America, notably during the Dirty War [1] in Argentina when a number of friends of my parents had their children viciously murdered and when my cousins got out of the country by the skin of their teeth. Using the term for "losing your data 'cause you didn't make personal backups" is pretty pathetic.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dirty_War

This is definitely what I thought this article was going to be about. It’s a false equivocation and really irresponsible of the poster to use that terminology.

The author was disappeared, his articles were literally murdered, and you are promoting a genocide of false equivocations. What a nuclear catastrophe! The false vacuum of our hypocritical society is decaying.

I personally have never heard of this and I doubt this event is constantly in the mind of the public zeitgeist of the article's OP. Such a general phrase as "to be disappeared" is not monopolized for any harrowing event - it's on par with saying you were "brainwashed" despite the CIA nor other intelligence groups being involved.

"Being disappeared" doesn't call to mind any specific event to me but definitely is an idiom for like law enforcement or intelligence removing people seen as troublesome. Just google it!

I know what "being disappeared" has meant historically, and I don't see why the same phrase would be problematic here. Again, I see this the same way as complaining about the term brainwashing being used in contexts that don't involve intelligence agencies

Sure, let's compare a third party removing their archives of my stuff with people being detained, tortured, etc.... can't see any issue!

Brainwashing, for better or worse, has already been weakened. So someone using that term today is using it in a very different context. Time and context matters.

Why be so disingenious about this? Being "disappeared", at least in Western society, conjures the image of being quietly whisked away from society in an unmarked van for expressing views that a powerful body does not like. That is the article's OP felt happened - they were removed quietly from a platform because their views went against theirs.

Now, you add in things like torture and detainment. I mean, whatever. Feel free to die on this hill. My post's point is that the vast majority of society does not think of the Dirty War, or any sort of violence, when they hear the phrase "I was disappeared".

> Being "disappeared", at least in Western society, conjures the image of being quietly whisked away from society in an unmarked van

> Now, you add in things like torture and detainment

I'm sorry, where do you think the unmarked van is going? "Now you add in detainment" — detainment at least. If somebody disappears, it's either because they're being kept somewhere secretly or because they've been killed.

The thing is, Chris Hedge is still a well known commentator. I have a book of his on my shelf. I'm pretty sure he can get interviews in a number of places other than RT. This blog post of his is on the front page of HN, a large site.

Hedges hasn't been literally "disappeared", made invisible, any more than he's been a victim of what "to be disappeared" has come to mean.

Being disappeared definitely has connotations of political prisoners and actual government censorship to me. Not a private company deciding not to host your videos for free any more.

But brainwashing doesn't? I really don't see the issue here. "Carted off", "Political assassination", there hundreds, if not thousands, of phrases that are used that have innocuous meanings far beyond any singular event and are used regularly by people of all backgrounds in many contexts. And I don't see why the usage being applied to video hosting somehow detracts from a completely unrelated event

You may have been ignorant of the history and term, but the author deliberately selected that title.

The protagonist here chose to be a useful idiot to help the Russian state attract self-described dissident voices to a Russian propaganda outlet. If you chose to make your living that way and care about your work, embracing backups is a good idea.

Unlike his kremlin patrons, western society doesn’t generally “disappear” people like him, we just ignore.

What is your point? My point is that if, at some point in the last 40 years, the phrase "being disappeared" became synonymous with the Dirty War in Argentina, most Americans did not get that memo. Whether or not I myself was ignorant of the connection is a moot point, the post I replied to claimed that the article's author should have been aware of the connection - to which I say, if that's the hill you choose to die on, be my guest, but I can assuredly say I'm not alone neither is the article's OP in being ignorant of such a connection.

I see from other comments that you don't seem to understand that the commenters here argue that the author himself not only "got the memo" but also the he used the term conscious of the fact what it means to a lot of people in a lot of places.

He deliberately compared the deletion of his stuff by YouTube to people being captured, detained, more often than not tortured and too often killed. He wanted to invoke this image to paint YouTube in as bad a light as possible.

In doing so he not only compared apples to oranges but also showed quite strongly that he is missing empathy and a sense of proportion.

I strongly suggest that he slept in a real bed last night. Ate a good meal. Did not get hurt by prison guards. Wasn't punched in the gut, starved, electro-tortured, got his fingernails ripped out, had to stand on a box with his underpants over his face while wires hung from his hands fearing electrocution. And so on.

I doubt that the victims of being disappeared (nor their families) would see what happened to him and his spinning of the story and say: 'Oh yeah. There is someone who had the same fate as we.'

It actually doesn't matter that you or others did not get the reference. Making this reference is the problem, even if not a single one of his audience would miss it. He intended it and devalued the horrible experiences of real victims to blow his felt victimhood out of proportion and generate more enragement.

Again, you could make the same argument about brainwashing and it would fall equally flat. But, as I mentioned in other replies, you do you.

To anyone as allegedly historically literate as the author, especially one who's focused on the crimes of US imperialism and foreign interference, there is no question they would be familiar with what that term specifically refers to - the dirty war in Argentina (though also applicable to Chile and Uruguay). I too thought it was going to be about a literal black bagging, like what happened to protesters in Portland last summer who were manhandled into unmarked government vehicles by plainclothes officers.

"there is no question they would be familiar with what that term specifically refers to - the dirty war in Argentina"

The only way you could justify a statement like this is by ignoring at least two events that both hit closer to home to Americans - the kidnappings done by the Gestapo in the 30s and the Mafia in the 20s. I stand by my statement that the Dirty War in Argentina is not something that comes to mind for most Westerners when someone uses the phrasing of being "disappeared"

> The only way you could justify a statement like this is by ignoring at least two events that both hit closer to home to Americans - the kidnappings done by the Gestapo in the 30s and the Mafia in the 20s.

Both of those predate the invention of the particular use of “disappear”, a passive voice construction implying an active voice transitive use with an animate direct object (the active voice form of which was not actually in use yet, but is sometimes seen since), which was invented in the late 1970s specifically in reference to the Dirty War in Argentina. It has been used since somewhat more broadly, but only because it invokes the intense coverage (including in the American media) of the Dirty War.

While certainly for a large number of young and/or particularly historically ignorant Westerners the specific referent may not be immediately recognized, the upthread comment that “ To anyone as allegedly historically literate as the author, especially one who's focused on the crimes of US imperialism and foreign interference, there is no question they would be familiar with what that term specifically refers to - the dirty war in Argentina” is absolutely correct.

>which was invented in the late 1970s specifically in reference to the Dirty War in Argentina.

It was not invented, that was the first time the euphemism was correlated. Having knowledge of the history of "to be disappeared" and having knowledge of what "being disappeared" brings to mind, are two very different things.

> events that both hit closer to home to Americans

Well maybe something else would hit closer to home, like ferrying off supposed terrorists to Gitmo without due process or other secret prisons in quite a few countries should come to mind.

I believe that to be intentioned by the author.

The term "disappearing people" was used for describing the US practices outside the US to describe these practices. And the author for sure knew this.

Still doesn't make the use of the term by the author any better in my book.

But given his agenda I would actually think he intended to associate himself with these cases as much as with the victims of other governments to show once more how bad the US is from his view and to his intended audience/bubble.

I don't want to discuss the actual practices of the US and other governments. Nor compare them. This thread isn't the place for that. Just that the author intentionally conjured these images.

> 2. This idea that you're being deplatformed or marginalised because years of your archives are no longer available in a free and easily accessible format from someone else is not supported by call outs to MLK, Malcolm X, etc. Even if you accept the idea that they had free and unfettered access to public broadcasting (ha!), there was absolutely no easy way to get access to the archives of that on demand! The speakers themselves, and their organisations, had to manage that.

There wasn't? I remember going through the catalogs in the public library as a kid, looking at the microfilm, even listening to some audio recordings. Even a public library had loads of information, and the thought of it being made inaccessible on an arbitrary whim was unthinkable. Sure, it's not comparable to the reach of today's instant broadcast via Internet, but it was the equivalent of the time.

Maybe in the time of Jim Crow or something certain public libraries would censor this stuff. I honestly don't know. It just seems to not jibe with my experience as a kid getting information at the library.

YouTube isn’t a library or archive. It’s a for profit business.

Also, libraries are very constrained in what they will and won’t archive and bring in to the collection. Budget, politics, space, taste all figure in. Hustler Magazine is a famous anti censorship platform thanks to Larry Flint. You won’t find it at your local library.

So, maybe microfilms would have a record of the fact that the speech happened, but most aren't going to have the full text of the speech. Recordings of every broadcast would also be unlikely to be stored at most libraries that can be described as 'easily accessible' [1]. "I Have a Dream" is famously copyrighted; without MLK and his associates/estate managing the distribution, it would be very difficult to get access to it. I bet the libraries of the South didn't all have it available straight away, for sure.

> Sure, it's not comparable to the reach of today's instant broadcast via Internet, but it was the equivalent of the time.

But I guess that's partially my point, right? The instant broadcast/archive-by-default nature of YouTube is new and unique to our time; trying to refer back to historic figures as your precedent for having access to it seems a little hollow to me.

[1] I grew up in more sparsely populated areas (and, also, in Australia), and perhaps that changes my perspective on what is reasonable to expect for access to libraries pre-internet.

There's no historic precedent until of course there is precedent.

Just like there was no historic precedent of states limiting the size and tactics of corporations until the rise of 19th century monopolies.

And no historic precedent of meddling in what wages could be paid until we decided there should be a minimum wage.

And no historic precedent of forcing businesses to serve all races and ethnicities until we decided that redlining and segregation were wrong.

I think everything you wrote is correct. But I am increasing concerned about the power of a few individuals to control what can be published.

I think it's time to discuss what we should do rather than what the law mandates. It's a difficult question, and I don't have a good answer.

Remember that actors, writers, scientists, and other professionals were blacklisted by McCarthyism--and technically no one did anything illegal, but it's not well regarded now.

I am just saying that sometimes free speech is more of an appeal to a principle than a law.

Freedom of speech means that we must not allow a person to be harassed by the government or by individuals for what they say. Nowhere does the principle say that others are required to provide dissemination of speech gratis; that would be an entirely different positive (obligatory) right instead of the negative (forbearance) right that freedom of speech is considered to be.

I nearly fully agree. I would only ask for clarification of one aspect:

> to be harassed

What is the definition of harassment being used? Because I experience more and more people who feel harassed when having their opinion critiqued in a discussion and claiming freedom of speach. While they are actually claiming that they want the right to say anything they like without consequences and don't want others to be allowed to argue against their voiced views (and in that denying the same level of freedom of speech to others).

I refer you to the UN Declaration of Human Rights, article 19 for a good modern formulation of freedom of speech: "Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers."

The above goes against the desires of both the illiberal progressive left and the conservatives in their desire to deplatform those who express beliefs they don't like.

> this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference

Aren't to hold views and to express views two significantly different things?

> seek, receive and impart information

Does information include proven falsehoods like vaccination causes autism?

In general I agree, but people weaponizing this to inoculate against critique is probably not in the ideas of those who wrote this.

Call me illiberal or conservative. I don't care for these weaponized labels.

To me, having grown up in Germany, there are very clear borders to "free speech". Denying the holocaust. Insulting/denigrating/dehumanizing other people. Stating falsehoods as facts.

Exactly as our law sees this. Time and time this imho very sensible approach has proven to be healthy for society.

And freedom of association means I do not have to hire that ethnic group I don't like, right?

I guess I just find this discussion so tiring. Even if I accepted your definition, that still does not answer the difficult question that I am proposing: what do you want society to be like?

I agree with most of what you're saying here - I think it is absolutely concerning that Google in particular has the ability to basically just throw you off the modern internet. There is absolutely a conversation to be had about that, and the position that YouTube should have in it. I'm just saying that you can't make an argument from historic precedent if there is none.

Free speech is always appealed to as a principle by our own government whenever it is convenient, especially when they are, as an example, gearing up for their next middle eastern target for regime change. "They don't align with our western ideals of democracy, freedom of speech" they'll say.

This trend to strictly delineate between the principle and the law is a new fashion. Historically speaking, although it wasn't enforced by law, if you were a private organization and you did things contrary to the principle, it was enforced by society. What has changed is, as it seems to many as well as myself, is that people merely have lost their principles.

> This trend to strictly delineate between the principle and the law is a new fashion. Historically speaking, although it wasn't enforced by law, if you were a private organization and you did things contrary to the principle, it was enforced by society. What has changed is, as it seems to many as well as myself, is that people merely have lost their principles.

Can you explain this? Wouldn't something being enforced by society be an example of it being a principle rather than a law?

The laws merely reflect the principles. The Declaration of Independence outlines the principles. The Constitution codifies it into law, as an example -- a perspective much argued for by Abraham Lincoln. (This is why it's ok to amend the constitution -- because much to the chagrin of a certain political philosophy, it is not the constitution that is the unchanging doctrine, but rather, the declaration. Think creed versus canon law, as another example). From this perspective you can probably deduce the examples I would give.

"People who think they're entitled to free unfettered video hosting on YouTube are dreaming. There's no historic precedent to indicate that it should be so..."

We have a choice as societies to fund public archives that are free from (direct) corporate interference.

Corporations and governments aren't clearly distinct entities, as corporate execs work as politicians and politicians often retire from office only to get hired by the corporations they regulated or gave business to while in office, but there's still a big difference between a corporation made to profit its owners/investors and a non-profit government entity supposed to benefit the public good.

We now have so much of the world's cultural artifacts in the hands of these few incredibly powerful corporations at whose whim any/all of them could be lost.

It doesn't have to be this way.

>but I don't think this article is that

I feel like we might have read different articles.

Personally I feel this article strays too far into:

1. Whining and moaning,

2. Other political areas,

3. Intellectually dishonest arguments

to stand as a valuable contribution to the discourse on this topic. In particular the 'The most vocal cheerleaders' paragraph is just an emotional dump on the author's personal political bogeymen.

I agree with you, it's odd the nature of these discussions.

> If you're paying attention, you know this will happen at some point. Archive your own shit,

I'm trying to imagine backing up my presence everywhere I go: every comment I write, every reply, every +1/-1. I've definitely lost access to sites unexpectedly a number of times, for things that did not seem like a big deal at the time. And poof, massive pieces of life & time are just gone. The particulars of this fight & this story (or my stupid stories) don't interest me, but that we write ourselves into the digital, and that it can all be closed & taken from us in an instant, far beyond our control is a sick power relation.

I'd like to see a couple things- when sites close/ban accounts, they should provide some kind of download window. Here's your stuff: bye! As it is, it's usually too late. People's content goes up in smoke. "There should probably be a law": this feels like the most minimal basics.

On the other side, when we do post content, I feel like sites should provide cryptographically signed signatures for our content. "Here's our http-signature for your post!" Yes we may delete your post in the future, unhost you, but here's some hard-to-deny math that says you posted it here. Rather than leaving users in eternal jeapordy, this would mean sites- at zero cost- at least have some stake in in the here & now, that a whole history can't just be unwound (just unhosted); ugly though it may be I see denying the past as too cruel to have as common practice. Damnatio Memoriae[1] is not an acceptable common punishment across the internet, for humanity, & for posterity; altering this devil's bargain requires only slightly tweaked technics.

All in all, I'd rather we invert the system, build a better web fabric that starts with rights & gathering & attestation first (on our own properties), & interacts with sites second. The indieweb folk have been talking about POSSE[2] for a long time- Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere- but usually this is through the lens of posts & specific activity: perhaps all web activity just needs to be mediated first, through our own systems & networks, and then sent onward, forward to the targeted social-network second: posts, comments, upvotes, reactions, all of it. This feels like the real archiving fix: making ourselves & our own presences primary, leaving these networks as ancillary concerns, a shadow of what we really are.

Intermediating with our own sovereign systems seems like a necessary step, feels like the only option given how powerless & out of control online systems are for their users.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damnatio_memoriae

[2] https://indieweb.org/POSSE

Why? Is your HackerNews comment history that important to you? The web currently is suffering from an abundance of practically the opposite problem: the perception, though not the reality, that a lot of commentary is "off the record" - aka equivalent to a conversation in a coffee shop - when this could not be further from the truth.

Most social media controversies start from this basic mismatch - the perception of social media commentary as though its like that you might share with your friends, but published, openly accessibly and archived for all the world to see - context which would temper most people from pretending that a comment should stand alone rather then in proper context.

The web never forgets, and that's the basic problem. If people are attached to their content but not backing it up in case of disaster, then I fail to see how that's anyone else's problem - your lack of planning does not constitute anyone else's crisis or obligation.

POSSE is in fact a correct reaction to this issue: starting from the presumption that your "free" hosting will remain so was a delusion that everyone capable of even a little systemic thinking should've seen as a risk - obviously you're going to lose that as soon as whatever invisible accounting applies to you no longer pays the bills.

> Is your HackerNews comment history that important to you?

Uh??? Yes? I seek to understand & learn from myself & my past & what happens. Taking the time to write in, to try to calibrate myself & others, communicate, & having it blown up is very much against the project. Please don't spew this remorseless anti-personal who-cares-about-yourself litter around my or anyone else's grounds, it's callous in extreme.

We all care about who we are online. We invest ourselves. These arguments that we shouldn't care about ourselves come off extremely bad handed to me.

I care about who I am offline even more than online. Should I be pushing for persistent 24/7 video surveillance of public space, stores, malls, parks, etc, so that I can revisit all of that too without making my own effort to preserve what I find important?

On the one hand:

Posting content online & expecting it to stick around, and perhaps getting banned years down the road & losing it

To:

Whether or not we should have an expectation of our activity in stores/malls/parks accessible publicly & to us in pereptuity.

Can you spot the difference? Is it clear to others that these cases aren't the same? This is a question of expectation & intent. No one has a reasonable expectation that what we do in a store/mall/park endure & be remembered. When we post into comments & threads in public spaces, and it lasts for years, & gets removed for some fault or issue, obliterated forever, that's a surprising change. What we did in parks has never been part of the public discourse. What we do online always has been. The differences are obvious. What we do online, for many of us, speaks much more closely to who we really are, because we are entailed into the bigger conversations happening, operating in a global sphere. Your local sphere probably isn't that relevant, and it was never going to be preserved anyways.

Generally I just think it's bad form to assert your own priorities & value-systems over everyone elses. I don't think you've allowed room for other ways of seeing things. I think there's a lot of relative merits to both. Our online identities contain a lot of carefully-constructed thought that we would clearly want to be able to access, that most people will be free to access: the denial of that, in a shocking surprising manner, is obviously harmful & traumatic. Trying to steamroll that basic fact with some kind of Real World Real Talk comes off way bad to me.

>The web never forgets, and that's the basic problem

Saying "the web never forgets" is very, very wrong if people interpret it to mean that you can count on anything that happened being preserved.

There's two aspects to that, things that disappear in the sense they aren't easily searchable (or at all), and things that get revised, such that you think they are available, but history has effectively been changed.

A virtue of physical books is that they can't easily be changed without a trace.

Archive.org is something, but very far from comprehensive.

> I'm trying to imagine backing up my presence everywhere I go: every comment I write, every reply, every +1/-1. I've definitely lost access to sites unexpectedly a number of times, for things that did not seem like a big deal at the time. And poof, massive pieces of life & time are just gone.

If anything, the strange thing is that life online is unusually durable compared to normal experience. Most of the meat-space equivalences to the ephemeralities you mention-- a discussion here, a note left there, etc, evaporate in days. Online life is weird in that this stuff sticks around for a few years often and occasionally decades.

I too miss previous communities, cultures, and participations. I enjoy the snippets I can find from 2-3 decades ago, and I wish more was still around. But if anything, I think the fact that it could still exist makes me grasp for nostalgia with energy that could instead be spent living for today.

I still have letters from 30 years ago. I would count that as being durable.

I also deleted a lot of letters and journals by throwing them away.

I was bitten by a platform that stopped existing and took content with it. I had not backed up my texts.

I think what I am trying to say is that it depends. If it is important one secures it. If it isn't one carries the risk of loosing it.

It doesn't necessarily depend on the medium. But I agree. Except from entries in one's journal 1on1s are really ephemeral in the real world.

There's a sort-of tech-caused obsession with fighting time and entropy here. Time passes. It always has. You don't need to archive every moment. "There should probably be a law" is one of those regulations that would just give more and more preference to big platforms that could afford to archive things build systems to let you export it that data.

HN, for instance, might be a casualty - how much more investment would it be worth to YC to comply with a bunch of data archive and export regulations? Especially if different countries make different rules?

As for as decentralized syndication and self hosting and all... I'll stay skeptical until someone has a compelling set of products to actually make it easy, since it's been a few decades of mostly unrealized hype at this point.

Sites already have to offer exports to be GDPR compliant.

World's smallest violin for anyone griping that offering a 2 week download window, maybe with a maximum download cap, is going to be cumbersome.

Trying to hype this up as a hard problem is simply not representative. This ask is meager.

"Hard problem" vs "tedious and stupid problem" are different things.

But it's real cute that you mock people who don't want to deal with government regulations proposed to REQUIRE making it a burden of a third party to help people do obsessive self-archiving, but you take offense at having this desire questioned.

(Does HN even have a GDPR export? I can't find it on their legal or FAQ page. For your proposed "my own content export": would it just be comments w/o any context? What's the point, if so? The comments and replies of others too? What if one of those users had issued a CCPA privacy removal request, say?)

Letting things go is a good thing!

> Sites already have to offer exports to be GDPR compliant

Not necessarily. There are limitations in Article 20 of the GDPR. For one it only covers personal data you provided. Not all content you ever created on a platform. This part of GDPR does not make platforms your free backup.

So if HN fell under this provision (and I am not SURE as IANAL) they would not necessarily be forced to provide all comments you ever made.

>> Sites already have to offer exports to be GDPR compliant

> Not necessarily. There are limitations in Article 20 of the GDPR.

I'm AOK with restricting user-rights to save-the-things-that-are-about-to-be-deleted to sites that meet a GDPR style minimum bar for engagement. Minor minor minor sidebar, I think sites should have to have advertised machine-to-machine accessible metadata on what their site's terms of service are.

It's dead now, not a good implementation, & probably not a good fit in the particulars, but the vague wide-scale idea of P3P (Platform for Privacy Preferences, a terrible name for a spec exposing what was more usually data-rights to the content than privacy concerns) kind of has some illumination for what a future path here might look like. It should be known. We should entail ourselves knowingly. This is one place GDPR doesn't really seem to address, that it misses the mark: I believe fully in small scale operators, in letting them do their thing, but as a user we should know what compacts we're entering into. Without having to read elaborate/complex human-authored terms: the machines should be able to tell us what minimum bars are met.

1. Victim-blaming

2. Hedges is well aware of history. And of changing times. And of the present heavy hand of SV censors. Go read some of his books before you play him off like a simpleton.

First our prisons, then our military, and now silencing dissidents - the US likes to privatize its dirty work. Those private actors aren't held to the strict legal constraints created for government actors. This is what Americans call "efficiency."

1. Yep. As you say - the guy is smart enough to know better.

2. I'm sure he is - this article comes off to me as a highly intelligent person ranting. I'm calling out that his appeal to precedent is, at best, weakly laid out in this article (and at worst it's dishonest). As I said, I agree with elements of the argument that he's making, but he's made the arguments poorly here.

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