Oblivion menaces every scrap of information that doesn’t spark joy in the Oval Office. “It’s gone,” Trump said of “wokeness,” during his recent address to Congress, in almost motherly tones. “And we feel so much better for it, don’t we? Don’t we feel better?” But on this front, at least, the Administration is facing well-organized resistance. It comes from a loose coalition of archivists and librarians, who are standing athwart history and yelling “Save!” They belong to organizations such as the Internet Archive, which co-created a project called the End of Term Web Archive to back up the federal web in 2008; the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative, or EDGI; and libraries at major universities such as M.I.T. and the University of Michigan. Like the Encyclopedists of Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation”—who race to compile a collapsing empire’s accumulated knowledge—they’re assembling information arks to ride out the chaos.
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