{"id":12788,"date":"2024-09-28T03:05:48","date_gmt":"2024-09-28T03:05:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=12788"},"modified":"2024-09-28T03:05:48","modified_gmt":"2024-09-28T03:05:48","slug":"the-internet-archives-fight-to-save-itself","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=12788","title":{"rendered":"The Internet Archive\u2019s Fight to Save Itself"},"content":{"rendered":"


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If you step into the headquarters of the Internet Archive on a Friday after lunch, when it offers public tours, chances are you\u2019ll be greeted by its founder and merriest cheerleader, Brewster Kahle.<\/p>\n

You cannot miss the building; it looks like it was designed for some sort of Grecian-themed Las Vegas attraction and plopped down at random in San Francisco\u2019s foggy, mellow Richmond district. Once you pass the entrance\u2019s white Corinthian columns, Kahle will show you the vintage Prince of Persia arcade game and a gramophone that can play century-old phonograph cylinders on display in the foyer. He\u2019ll lead you into the great room, filled with rows of wooden pews sloping toward a pulpit. Baroque ceiling moldings frame a grand stained glass dome. Before it was the Archive\u2019s headquarters, the building housed a Christian Science church.<\/p>\n

I made this pilgrimage on a breezy afternoon last May. Along with around a dozen other visitors, I followed Kahle, 63, clad in a rumpled orange button-down and round wire-rimmed glasses, as he showed us his life\u2019s work. When the afternoon light hits the great hall\u2019s dome, it gives everyone a halo. Especially Kahle, whose silver curls catch the sun and who preaches his gospel with an amiable evangelism, speaking with his hands and laughing easily. \u201cI think people are feeling run over by technology these days,\u201d Kahle says. \u201cWe need to rehumanize it.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the great room, where the tour ends, hundreds of colorful, handmade clay statues line the walls. They represent the Internet Archive\u2019s employees, Kahle\u2019s quirky way of immortalizing his circle. They are beautiful and weird, but they\u2019re not the grand finale. Against the back wall, where one might find confessionals in a different kind of church, there\u2019s a tower of humming black servers. These servers hold around 10 percent of the Internet Archive\u2019s vast digital holdings, which includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Tiny lights on each server blink on and off each time someone opens an old webpage or checks out a book or otherwise uses the Archive\u2019s services. The constant, arrhythmic flickers make for a hypnotic light show. Nobody looks more delighted about this display than Kahle.<\/p>\n

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