The Ethics of Online Archive Curation

[Clay]

I'm a small contributor to an online archive of books and essays called The Ted K Archive.

Here's how the website is explained on the about page:

We, everyone who has contributed, have archived:

• A ton of primary source documents on Ted's life and ideas.
• Documents analyzing the effect he had on the public's understanding of radical environmentalists, anarchists, terrorists, criminals, the mentally ill & simple mental neurodivergence.
• Lots of great suggested reading on anarchism & other issues.

We, the librarians who bought the website domain, are pro-tech anarchists, but we just find his life story and impact really interesting.

So, we’re hoping the website can work to draw people in with similar politics to him and similar mental health issues frankly. Then for the cold hard reality of the primary source reading material, the epic-ness of the suggested reading material and the inviting discussion spaces connected to the website, to all have a deprogramming effect and be a mental health support.

And here's why the name of the website was chosen:

People who are curious about his life and impact are just the main audience we hope to draw in with this website.

Since we think he's going to be remembered as a true crime curiosity anyways, we might as well capitalize on that and use it as a space to promote critiques of people with similar politics to him and help with similar mental health issues to him.

Finally, here's a list of ethical steps taken by the project:

We have a list of essays critiquing Ted’s politics & philosophy on the front page of the website.

There are long critiques and disclaimers added to some texts and we aim to add more.

When collecting together research on misanthropic groups and projects, we simply title the text ‘a text dump on ______’. That way for example we don’t dignify fictional stories terror groups weave when they write their own press releases and title them as communiqués.

Anyone can join the debate over which texts should go up on the website, obviously if you join just to troll or spam though, you will be removed.

A record will be kept of all texts that were rejected, whether for minor formatting reasons or deeply held political reasons.

A record will also be kept of controversial texts that were approved, where for example there was a sizable disagreement.

Ideally, in the future we will have popular sorting mechanisms directly under the main search box, such as a check box for 'only anarchist texts' that would exclude texts labelled 'not anarchist'.

So, I recently archived a book on hunting with a bow and arrow that I think has valuable historical significance, but it did make me feel uncomfortable, so wanted to get other vegans opinions.

The book is called "Hunting with the Bow & Arrow" by Saxton T. Pope, and I simply found the book after researching the sad story of the 'last wild indian'.

But it does include these horrible trophy hunting pictures of animals likely killed slowly by arrow shot.

Finally, here's a few other archival projects for comparison:

The Ted Kaczynski Papers - A University special collections archive which Ted K sends copies of all his letters to, the library is offline, but people can ask for scans of two folders per month.

UNABOM Collection - Another university one that is made up of donated scans of an FBI guy who worked on the UNABOM taskforce. Lots of the scans are online in downloadable pdfs.

I don't think either of the archives above even did anything to publicize their archives, which was potentially a conscious ethical choice, to not make it easier to find for zealots, so to attempt to mainly cater to academic researchers.

The Anarchist Library - Huge archive that includes some non- and ex-anarchist texts, to document the reasons why people left anarchism or came to the philosophy late. But, it means archiving some really dumb stuff, like primitivist terrorists 'communiques'. I think they're wrong to not include disclaimers at the top of texts and to not format some of the texts as text dumps, but their argument is that's simply not their job as archivists.

[NonZeroSum]

Any thoughts on the above?

Also do people think the political advocacy aspect of this project is built on an achievable and worthwhile goal?

This isn't the main goal of the archive by any means, like we're mainly just happy to have been able to achieve archiving goals like creating parallel pages for every PDF on the Calif. Uni. website archive of UNABOM documents. But curious to get people's thoughts anyways. It's totally fine to say you think it's likely an unproductive use of people's time, I'm open to a diversity of arguments.

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For context on what the website is, I'll quote the beginning of the 1 year anniversary post:

Introduction

We've finished filling out all the sections of the archive to a good extent now, so now that we're coming up on a year since we went public, it feels like a good time for a round up on all that's happened. This became a lot longer document than originally planned, so most people may prefer to skim-read and skip around.

Most of the librarians feel that we can finally say there's nothing more we're itching to research to archive on Ted. We'll still upload stuff every now and again to make e.g. badly scanned ecology/philosophy books easier to read and printable again. But otherwise we think we'll slow down a lot now, barring some big event like if any of us make a trip to the Michigan archive. Or if we could convince Danh Vo, Julie Ault or Benning to make public the writings of Ted's that they bought at auction and shared between each other.[1]

We, everyone who has contributed, have archived:

• A ton of primary source documents on Ted's life and ideas.
• Documents analyzing the effect he had on the public's understanding of radical environmentalists, anarchists, terrorists, criminals, the mentally ill & simple mental neurodivergence.
• Lots of great suggested reading on anarchism & other issues.

We, the librarians who bought the website domain, are pro-tech anarchists, but we just find his life story and impact really interesting.

So, we’re hoping the website will continue to draw people in with similar politics to him and similar mental health issues frankly. Then for the cold hard reality of the primary source reading material, the epic-ness of the suggested reading material and the inviting discussion spaces connected to the website, to all have a deprogramming effect and be a mental health support.

For example, a popular text on the website for a while was simply a book on how to Unfuck Your Friendships and the discord has already played host to a discussion between people encouraging each other to think rationally about their depression diagnosis.

Also, there are fans of Ted K who literally glorify the Khmer Rouge's genocide and burning down of cities, so having books about that genocide on the archive to hopefully, yes deprogramme, simple dogmatic reasoning, holding people back from compassionately relating to how fucked up a policy that was is we think a good thing.

The reason we're saying all this is simply to promote transparency. We think due to the undesirability of anti-tech philosophy, opening all its rarer arguments up to scrutiny is likely going to have a positive outcome in drawing in more critical analysis and leading more people to reject the ideas.

In summary

The project grew into eight main categories:

• Introductory Texts has tips on how to use and improve the website, plus more.
• Original Texts are texts that were first published on this website. Feel free to contribute your own essays.
• Primary Source Documents on Ted K can help researchers understand events as they happened, rather than relying on reflections from years later.
• The Collected Works of Ted K includes the largest online collection of Ted K’s books, essays, stories, translations, drawings, musical compositions and mathematical work.
• Analysis of Ted’s Ideas & Actions includes political and literary analysis, podcast transcripts and more.
• Suggested Reading contains some potentially valuable lessons that can be drawn from the story of Ted K’s life. Plus, the history of political violence related to Ted K and leftist political groups in contrast.
• Broader Topics is a wide range of texts that simply shows what else the political violence researchers and true crime fans who frequent this website are reading and find interesting discussing.
• The Criminal Justice System covers everything from; reading on the legislators who advance prison reforms, to the terrorists and freedom fighters who get prosecuted as criminals, to stories of poor people getting arrested for dumpster diving food to feed their family.

As the tangentially related reading grew and grew, it also spun off another website called The Library of Unconventional Lives or TheLUL for short. That website more clearly represents some of the librarians on this project's initial interest in researching Ted K in the first place.