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by tablespoon
1174 days ago
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You're missing the point. The question isn't "is it important for someone," it's "is it too big to fail" (i.e. does the government think it's sooo important that it must swoop in and save it). If the Internet Archive shuts down and its archive lost, the economy will keep humming, masses of people won't lose their jobs let alone be inconvenienced, etc. Sure, some paper about Geocities culture cira 1997 won't get written, some researcher won't be able to access some old dead link, and I won't be able to access the download the PDF manual for some old product from a company that went out-of-business. Life will go on with almost no disruption, and no one will lose an election because they failed to act to save it. |
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At the very least in a just world, I think the ability to reference historical data from the web probably would influence some elections.
In the unjust world we actually live in, access to historical data can be used as a tool (or weapon!) by journalists, pacs, candidates, etc. to find strengths and weaknesses, and to influence elections.
"back in 2026, the candidate enacted XYZ, as proven by [1][2][3] (all ia links). Ten years later this ended in <great victory|terrible disaster> therefore you <should|shouldn't> vote for them"
... Also, eg. Wikipedia often uses IA links for references to deal with link rot, which happens a lot more than you'd think. I won't say WP would shut down completely, but it's effectiveness would definitely be degraded.
Same probably for a lot of professions and jobs that require research. (including eg. secretaries, special librarians, political assistants, etc...)
Just because you personally can't imagine the impact on society, doesn't mean it doesn't have an impact on society.