Current Affairs

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Mark Graham is the director of the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive, and Chris Freeland is the Internet Archive’s director of library services and one of the co-authors of the new report Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record. Their work focuses on preserving digital materials that might otherwise disappear.

Graham and Freeland joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss why the internet is not forever, how digital culture vanishes through deletion, paywalls, broken links, platform decay, and corporate control, and what can be done to preserve public access to our collective cultural record.

0:00-4:59 Is the Internet Forever?

4:59-9:52 Intentional Erasure vs. Accidental Loss

9:52-14:14 What Happens When We Lose Access?

14:14-20:41 The Problem With Social Media Archives

20:41-24:39 Ownership vs. Licensing

24:39-29:52 The Truth Is Paywalled But the Lies Are Free

29:52-34:38 The Loss of Historically Significant Media

34:38-38:02 The Vanishing Culture Report

38:02-49:20 What Can We Do?

💻 Vanishing Culture Report: https://archive.org/details/vanishing-culture-2026/mode/2up

💻 Internet Archive: https://archive.org/

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Elon Musk is a miserable deadbeat whom no amount of money can make loved, cool, or happy.

🌹 Full article by Nathan J. Robinson & Alex Skopic: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/a-trillion-dollars-isnt-worth-it-if-you-have-to-be-elon-musk

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Electoral victories by socialists around the country show that the Democratic establishment is weak and can be overthrown. 

🌹 Read the article: https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-left-is-rising 

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Jessica Burbank is an investigative journalist, content creator, and host of The Jessica Burbank Show. Her reporting for Drop Site News and The Counterprogramming Club has exposed the rapid spread of Flock Safety, a multi-billion-dollar surveillance company whose license plate readers and camera networks are being adopted by police departments and municipalities across the country.

Burbank joined Current Affairs associate editor Emily Topping to discuss how Flock’s technology works, why communities often learn about it only after contracts are approved, how surveillance data can be abused by law enforcement, and what ordinary people should know before their towns embrace a mass surveillance system.

📸 Jessica's YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@JessicaBurbankShow

📸 Jessica's Substack: https://substack.com/@kaburbank

0:00-9:07 What Is Flock Safety?

9:07-16:19 Why Should We Be Concerned?

16:19-20:26 Efforts to Prevent Surveillance Abuse

20:26-25:00 The Gymnastics Studio Case

25:00-26:41 ICE and Data Sharing

26:41-28:50 Why Local Police Departments Embrace This Tech

28:50-34:24 What About Communities That Want This Tech?

34:24-37:01 The Ideological Fault Lines

37:01-44:03 Lawsuits Against Flock

44:03-50:03 Are You Being Watched?

50:03-59:21 The Broader Implications of Surveillance Cameras

59:21-1:02:08 What to Consider Before Implementing This Tech

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Judith Butler is one of the world's leading scholars and philosophers on issues of gender, sexuality, and the cultural phenomena that surround them. They are the author of the landmark 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, and more recently the 2024 follow-up work Who's Afraid of Gender?

Butler joined Current Affairs editor-in-chief Nathan J. Robinson to discuss the way people around the world -- mostly conservatives, but some who consider themselves leftists, too -- have become fearful and angry about what they call "gender ideology," why they're mistaken, and what might be done about it.

🏳️‍⚧️ Who's Afraid of Gender?: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374608224/whosafraidofgender/

0:00-4:34 How Gender Became a Right-Wing Panic

4:34-7:59 What “Gender Ideology” Really Means

7:59-13:27 Responding to Kathleen Stock

13:27-16:15 What Performativity Actually Means

16:15-23:28 Matt Walsh and the Demand for Simple Answers

23:28-26:25 Anti-Trans Politics and the Turn Toward Fascism

26:25-31:39 Feminism, TERFs, and Trans Rights

31:39-34:45 How Butler’s Views Have Evolved

34:45-40:53 Anti-Capitalism and Gender as a Distraction

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