The Digital Archive Defying Online Censorship in Spain

The digital library that survives the 'bonfire of the wicked'

Imagine a discussion forum where censorship is advancing, according to its users, and they decide to create their own 'forum Noah's Ark'. An organized collection of screenshots, PDFs and links to books, categorized under topics such as New World Order, Judaism, Feminism or ELbichito. The project, dubbed the 'Arca de Calópez' (Calópez's Ark), was born out of the urgency to preserve knowledge before, as they antiestéticar, freedom disappears in the bonfire of the wicked. But the initiative, which has gathered barely 51 replies in almost five years, reveals both its ambitions and its limitations.

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The technical challenge of preserving entire threads

The most pragmatic part of the project is the search for tools to download complete threads with all their images, in a form that can be browsed offline. Participants try rudimentary methods: saving page by page with the SingleFileZ extension, manually editing links with Kompozer, or attempting httrack and Forum Downloader without success. One forum member discovers that the entire forum takes up just 30 gigabytes (according to 2022 data), but the most reliable solution ends up being the 'Burbudump' developed by another user. The technical component of the debate is the one that advances the most, with tutorials and links to tools, but the longing for a curated library runs into the reality that it is not viable with only two or three people.

The paranoia about deletion: dystopia or survival strategy?

The project is laden with conspiratorial discourse expressed in references to the '1984 dystopia', to control of the internet and to the need to 'wake people up' by dropping USB drives in public places. This line of analysis holds that the media, education and institutions are captured by an elite that erases history. The proposed list of categories includes topics such as 'Judaism' and 'Racism', and files from /pol/ (a 4chan subforum) are cited with levels of 'anti-white' and 'lgbt' content. A book titled '150 Genios Opinan Sobre Los Hebreo' (150 Geniuses Give Their Opinion on the Jews) is mentioned and linked. It is impossible to ignore that the debate draws on sources that cross the line into antisemitism. However, the thread itself acknowledges the difficulty of avoiding trolling and the need for a selective committee to filter content.

An impossible library: between archive and propaganda

One participant tries to clarify that library and archive are distinct concepts: the former holds multiple works; the latter, unique documents. The person who started the project defines it as a 'hybrid halfway between a library, a propaganda warehouse and an archive'. This lack of definition reflects the tension between the desire to preserve rigorous information and the temptation to gather material for ideological warfare. After four years of attempts, the initiative languishes: 'these threads always come to nothing', one participant comments. And the founder's reply is honest: 'it can't be done with just two or three people'.

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The 'Arca de Calópez' project is a mirror of the fragmentation of information on the internet: distrust of the official narrative pushes people to create their own refuges, but the lack of critical mass, technical difficulties and the drift toward radical content cause the initiative to dissolve, never becoming the great alternative library of their dreams. The final figure is startling: in 2022, the entire forum fit in less than 40 gigabytes. The real archive, perhaps, is already there, but nobody reads it.