This article first appeared in OpEdNews on January 5, 2022.
The Internet Archive once was the hidden jewel of the Internet. Imagine the best public library you gave ever been to, filled not only with books, but with old video games, programming codes, CDs, DVDs, films going back a hundred years, old scratchy records (skips intact), images galore, special collections that awed.
And a special search engine called the Wayback Machine that allowed you to, say, look back at a website's original design and compare to its presence today. But also it was a journalist's boon, as one could check out websites no longer existing that once had potentially potent political information -- like the one put up by well-donated-to members of Congress in support of removing the Iranian exile group MEKfrom the State Department terrorist list back in 2014. For $50,000 a pop you could get a Congressperson to say nice things about your weird ways (MEK is/was a cult).
Anyhoo, since I wrote the article below, the Internet Archive has met severe critics and greedy abominations who want money, money, money. IA used started taking don books uploaded to the library that were controversial, like Edward Snowden's 2019 memoir, Permanent Record, that, in part, described the dossier the state holds on each of us, and they sought to quash its distribution by seizing all its profits, removing the publisher's incentive to distribute it. You can get it again elsewhere, especially at Amazon, where, no doubt, purchasers of the book will be noted, their financila details recorded. Then, books in bulk were no longer available. IA had a good system going. You would use Adobe Digital Edition to open a book downloaded from IA and have two weeks to read it before your access was cut off and the book was made available to another borrower. Same as a typical public library.
But then Hachette Publishing (and others) sued to prevent IA from offering books to read, even with ADE, arguing that such acccess was interfering with their orofit line. It's an on-going battle. See details below.
More recently, IA has been the target of a Distributed Denial of Service campaign that took the site down for weeks. Who would do such a thing to such a public treasure. Find them!
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Platform squabbles here. Loudmouths over there. Aggressive algos. Monetized desires. Pop-up ads. PayWalls. Books you thought you bought online turn out to be merely leased. Google. Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram -- working with The Man to keep us accounted for and grazing, putting "dissidents" and people who follow Glen Greenwald in special databases for further scrutiny (and, in some cases, recruitment, IMHO). Oy!
Put up your hand if you've had enough.
You wouldn't always know it from the noise you must wade through these days to browse in peace, but there are people out there, like you, trying to fix the quality, resources, and safety of the Internet. Brewster Kahle, Founder & Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive (IA), is one of those people. Recently, the IA celebrated its 25th Anniversary (and held a big chuffy party). Recently, I interviewed him by Zoom, and the delightful conversation we had reawakened my hope buds and had me seeing a bonny future that returned the Internet to the first glad days of its Alexandrian library promise. What a nice man. And the summary anecdote he told about the still unfolding meaning of the Internet Archive was as beautiful as watching the reddest rose unfold its petals before you in time-elapsed splendor.
Unfortunately, I fucked up. I didn't take side notes. And when I discovered that there was a fly in my unguent, my video ointment -- the Zoom file wouldn't convert from its proprietary form to an MP4, as it does automatically -- I knew then the meaning of Gloomy Gus's funk. There was/is a small file that did convert, but alas had no sound, and that's too bad because Brewster the Rooster is really laying on thick about the beauty of the Archive in that scene. (Full Disclosure: I may yet use that footage and make sh*t up about what he's saying, upload a silent film with dialogue cards.) Below were the main topics (written down on Notepad) that we addressed in our conversation.
I've gotta say, I can't be objective here. Brewster Kahle has created an extraordinary tool and resource library for the real deal Internet users. I got back to Brewster after my catastrophe and he well-hid -- the kind man -- the frustration and sneering derision he must have felt at dealing with a "journalist" nincompoop too incompetent to at least be taking notes as we spoke for an hour that was far more valuable to him than it seemed to be for me. However, he didn't agree to do it again, as I soberly suggested. His kindness lay in not making eye contact in the email exchange. Thank you, Brewster, for that. I couldn't take one more hit to my esteem. He ain't God, but he'll do until the next one, who Voltaire said it is necessary to have, arrives to sort out our species' tea leaves.
And I hope that, below, I am able to remember his words verbatim a few weeks later (I got distracted by voices), and, more importantly, that I have the cajones to fess up when I misquote him. Although I own that, in my dotage, I can barely remember where I left the teeth of my wits on any given morning. I'm pretty sure he said the things I recall, but, luckily, when I contacted IA people, like Wendy Hanamura, Director of Partnerships, I was very quickly emailed a cornucopia of media materials -- jpegs, interviews, articles, TED talks, blog entries, and festive party photos of the anniversary celebration. It was an embarrassment of riches. But also -- and amazingly -- Brewster had already developed his thoughts somewhat along the lines of subject areas I wanted to explore below, so quotes from that cache will guide my memory of our talk.
ArpaNet/TimBL/Internet/ A New 'Retro' Internet
I said to Brewster that not many people realize that today's vibrant Internet is actually the product of the Department of Defense (DoD). He nodded, and that's a quote. And I went on and said that back in the Fall of '57 the Soviets (today's Russians, and Ukrainians some say) launched the Sputnik satellite and it scared the bejeezus out of Pentagon types, some of whom can be jumpy (have you noticed?) and are prone to having feelings of magical powers (I mean, Abbie Hoffman is said to have actually negotiated how high he'd levitate the Pentagon if they didn't stop the Vietnam war -- 'three feet, with a handshake') that they felt a new communication system was needed in case the f*ckers exploded a nuke whose electromagnetic pulses wiped out "our" grids (for the record, the Yanks and Russians are t he only nations to have exploded such a device in space, endangering us all). So, the Internet begins as a byproduct of paranoia.
Eventually, the DoD got around to sharing Arpanet with partners, such as universities, who immediately saw the benefit in being able to share information at the speed of copper. The first network was up and running 50 years ago, in 1971. Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), developed by the DoD, became and continues to be the standard framework for online communications -- TCP builds a frame around data sent and received, and guarantees delivery, IP provides an electronic address. New software and protocol innovations -- remote login, file transfer and email -- made the new network even more user friendly.
Eventually, Tim Berners-Lee (TimBL) came along and, to make sharing research data easier, developed a way of replacing ip addresses (ex. 139.73.22.8) with associated names, such as Google.com: we type in the word, the nice Domain Naming Service (DNS) machine translates it to an electronic address for us. TimBL further developed the use of hypertext (HTTP) and web pages were born, culminating in the now familiar World Wide Web.
The Internet (Arpanet) is now 50 years old.
This is all important background information to understanding the importance of Brewster Kahle's later development of the Internet Archive. TimBL's seemingly wonderful idea for sharing research soon got picked up by commercial interests and crass capitalism and soon thereafter the Internet, barely born, was already rotting from the excesses of mind manipulation through ads and pornography and asinine frivolity. Then we get to the current, at time, overstimulated internetwork powered by social media noise, corporate harvesting of our desires by means of algorithmic profiling, and the virtual repossession of the Internet by the DoD, which now sees it as a battlefield of the future that requires, like any battlefield they're on, the "patriotic" vigilance of a few good men and control.
So, between national security interests, in partnership with corporate and social media data fusion, today's Internet is not a place of privacy, as it once was. And there are pioneering spirits out there trying to get us back to an Internet that is non-profit, vibrant, privacy-mandated, secure, and a return to the Vision Thang that had librarians and researchers around the globe excited about the information that could be shared. There have been many sound ideas published for fixing the Internet, including one from TimBL called Solid that features "pods" that lock away personal data, "in sharp contrast to the harvest-and-hoard model of the big tech companies," he told the NYT's Steve Lohr earlier this year:
Too much power and too much personal data"reside with the tech giants like Google and Facebook -- "silos" is the generic term he favors, instead of referring to the companies by name. Fueled by vast troves of data"they have become surveillance platforms and gatekeepers of innovation.
Though TimBL's "pods" promises more "personal sovereignty" of data, which will thrill researchers, presumably, it's unclear whether its benefits would affect ordinary users much. And it's understood if pods would be better idea than the more easily implentable idea some have for mandatory VPNs.
Other innovations and changes include making the 'Net more feminist-friendly, denuding it of offensive gazes and objectifications, as it were. MIT Technology Review had an article there last April titled, "A feminist internet would be better for everyone." This is a no-brainer, right? Men suck. You remember that scene from When Harry Met Sally? It's bad. Facebook seems to have started out as a sexual harassment tool. (Word is, even in its new Meta morph it has problems with women. Still.) And, Gaud forgive me for disparaging my hero Ed Snowden, but what he got up to with his NSA mates -- the spying of love interests and sharing of nudies -- in the practice known as LOVEINT, is surely a sign of the degree to which men control the Internet (to his credit Ed raises this issue in his memoir, Permanent Record.)
Another innovative concept being developed is the Internet Computer by Dfinity. In this scenario apps are free floating on the Internet, not belonging to any one server. As Will Douglas Heaven at MIT Technology Review describes it in "A plan to redesign the internet could make apps that no one controls,"
Dfinity is introducing a new standard, which it calls the internet computer protocol (ICP). These new rules let developers move software around the internet as well as data. All software needs computers to run on, but with ICP the computers could be anywhere. Instead of running on a dedicated server in Google Cloud, for example, the software would have no fixed physical address, moving between servers owned by independent data centers around the world".
This approach feels akin to the Tor Onion system, a peer-to-peer concept. As the Review piece indicates, the concept is intentionally retro. We had it right, but blew it. Let's go back.
That's essentially what Brewster Kahle has decided to do. The Internet Archive, which seems to be a surprise existence to many people, is an enormous morale booster for those in the know. To remind the reader, the IA is an embarrassing cornucopia of riches. Discovering it for the first time was like that When when I, a rough-and-ready young lad, was introduced to the placidity of the Public Broadcast System, with its quietude, and sooth, and reason, and when the NewsHour came on and a young Judy Woodruff, and the team, proffered her keen and dignified news wares in a quiet environment, I wondered: Is this legal?
While the joy of PBS is somewhat diminished by the knowledge that Judy sits on the Council for Foreign Relations, and that the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is beholden to all manner of benefactor and sponsors laden with blood and hypocrisy, including the Sackler family for a while and ties to deep state you'd be surprised by, it is still a significantly advanced product over mainstream viewing if you need a place to get information not saturated in commercial crassness and too-many-people talking simultaneously syndrome. PBS is not Kahle's model for improving the Internet, but does provide inspiration and substantial evidence that a cleaner product can be made. The hoi polloi and army generals both can tune into PBS.
But Kahle's main mission is to completely re-develop the Internet so that it enjoys many of the features of our common early peer-to-peer exchanges that allowed for an online presence not moderated by corpos looking to control our activity -- and thoughts. In a speech titled "Locking the Web Open," he delivered back in June 2016 at the Decentralized Web Summit he urged a return to when the Web was reliable, private and fun. This is essentially his working mantra, one that folks can pick up on and delve deeper into its nuances and details.
On the reliability issue, he noted,
It turns out that the World Wide Web is quite fragile" . But it is huge. At the Internet Archive, we collect one billion pages a week. We now know that web pages only last about 100 days on average before they change or disappear. They blink on and off in their servers.
The web pages disappear because they sit on corporate servers -- say, Google -- who own the rights to the distribution of information from the server the web page sits on, and they can, and do, arbitrarily take sites down, sometimes, Kahle has noted, without input from the web page provider.
He envisions a Tor-like system where copies of information reside on multiple computers and be reassembled, in the event of the failure of one site, by bit torrenting, similar to the olden days when folks would pirate movies, and even books, from multiple simultaneous sources on the Net. This sounds arcane, but actually it's at the heart of the internet's system and plan. Kahle reminds us of the original Arpanet, with redundancy built. (So, for instance, if the Russkies took out Omaha, information on their servers could be had through redundant copies elsewhere.) Kahle describes the difference between the Internet, with millions of routers out there that guarantee that when you hit the Send button the data gets to the destination by one route or another. Of the Web, Kahle notes,
The Web is not decentralized in this way. While different websites are located all over the world, in most cases, any particular website has only one physical location. Therefore, if the hardware in that particular location is down, then no one can see that website. In this way, the Web is centralized: if someone controls the hardware of a website or the communication line to a website, then they control all the uses of that website.
In essence, decentralization means that no one entity controls the flow of data. That's the opposite of the way it is now. Kahle wants to parle freedom!
Privacy of our data needs to return to its owner, either through mandatory VPNs, or, better, says Kahle, through cryptographic means along the lines of Bitcoin transactions. He explains,
The next generation Web also needs " a decentralized authentication system without centralized usernames and passwords". That's where cryptography comes in to provide a robust but private identity system. [his emphasis]
It's interesting that Kahle points to Amazon's Cloud service as an example of a private, redundant system worth emulating. And helps explain why Bezos' Amazon Cloud services are of interest to the intelligence community.
As far as Fun goes, IA really seems to have that part down. There is so much fun available already at IA that someone leaving behind, say, the energy sap that is social media, might find a walk through its forests quite refreshing, like a thanks-I-need-that slap in the keister. In addition to addressing reliability, privacy and fun, Kahle is working on a way to remunerate writers for their wares. So, for instance, a writer could upload a book to the library that offers a preview of the book (current) with a mechanism for paying the writer through, say, Patreon or subscription.
Like Judy, IA just won't stop its goodness:
Buried Treasures of the Internet Archives
If you keep the above indication of what IA offers abstract, as suggested by the icons, you miss out. It's really an excellent ordinary library. For instance, the Vintage Software Collection has downloadable operating systems from Microsoft XP to Windows7; Linux downloads; Driver collections; Amiga games with emulators; Microsoft Office caches. The Collections holds web crawls of all manner, television archives, feature films, and LibraVox , its free audiobook collection. Each visitor to the library will find something different and newly-engaging (imagine coming across a collection of old 78s online! or discovering that you can stay all those early video games of the MS-DOS era right there in your browser!). Brewster the Rooster has said repeatedly over the years that the Internet should not only help scholars and journalists, by preserving the collective electronic past, but be adventurous and fun.
I myself was so titillated by some discoveries that I wanted to cry in knowing such virtue and wonder was still available to the common man. For instance, who among us has not wanted to know how that goat story went that GW Bush read to those Sarasota elementary kids on the morning of 9/11. Remember? I discovered that IA actually has the book! And it's The Pet Goat and not My Pet Goat. Did you know that the goat of the story is related to classic TV's Maynard G. Krebs from the series Dobie Gillis? The story was a tale about a crime in a gated community? The goat was framed? Did hard time? I was so inspired that I dug and dug and discovered there two stories, not one, and then three and four stories about that goat who looked like a proto-hippy, who did baaaad time in the pen. In his later memoirs, he owned that there were times he longed to be in Istanbul around Eid, his neck turned up and ready.
Boy that was something! Then much to my delight I discovered that IA had a collection of the German Romantic poet Heinrich Heine's complete works. (He was a Jew you know, very popular in the Vaterland for his wit and lyricism before the Nazis came along and he quickly went out of fascion.) This was great news for me, as I have had a lifelong desire to translate his works. Here's a sample of one I did:
In Truth
When the springtime shows up with its sunshine,
then the little flowers blossom and bloom;
when the moon begins her luminous course,
then the little stars swim in behind;
when the poet sees two sweet little eyes,
then songs gush forth from the depths of his soul; --
and yet songs and stars and little flowers
and little eyes and moonlight and sunshine,
no matter how pleasing all this stuff is,
it's far from being the whole world.
If you like that translation, won't you buy a busker a coffee? (It doesn't have to be me.)
And one other Google I recently found at IA was Blake Bailey's biography, Philip Roth. The tome was pulled by its publisher, Norton, after allegations of sexual violence came to their attention regarding Bailey. The charges have not been resolved in court. Bailey is Roth's hand-picked biographer, and is a gifted prize-winning writer. As I did with Woody Allen's "controversial" memoir, Apropos of Nothing, I decided to review the book. When it was pulled I felt deprived as a lifelong Philip Roth reader, who looked forward to learning more about the generally reclusive writer's life. It seemed to me, Bailey's book was a separate issue, and, perhaps, profits from the book could have been partially escrowed pending the outcome of charges against the writer. I found the preemptive ban of his book distasteful. And intend to review it soon, now that it is available at the IA.
The Wayback Machine (TWM)
And the IA has been invaluable over the years in my diggings and muckraking as a journalist. It has a tool it calls The Wayback Machine, named after the time travel device used in the old TV show featuring Mr. Peabody and Sherman, who would go on adventures and make often comically glib observations about the failings of humans over time. This reporter found the following conversation between Mr. Peabody and Sherman especially enlightening:
So the Rooster decided to name his webspider after the program (not necessarily because of that controversial episode, with the synch problem).
I found the Wayback Machine useful for all kinds of projects:
- Years ago sitting Congress people and other political operatives decided to de-list MEK from the Terrorist list, after they were chased out of Iran, as they were prone to making naughty bombs go off. They took up residence in Iraq. And though they were widely regarded as a cult with strange messianic practices, they were seen as ready-on-Day-One government in waiting by the US government after Iran was relieved of duty by Shock and Awe: The Sequel. But first they had to be de-listed. The Wayback Machine helped me find the website, now disappeared, that showed who was taking cash in Congress to get behind the effort: www.delistmek.com .
- Further, not long after the NYT, WaPo, and WSJ got hacked into by "the Chinese" in 2012. A relatively new cybersecurity company was called in to investigate and named a group out of Shanghai as the miscreants for the attacks. This led me to look into Mandiant. Run by Kevin Mandia. The young Air Force intel guy working out of the Pentagon "retired" and became a private contractor, eventually ending up at a company Foundstone, an early version of the cybersecurity breach protection racket.The company folded relatively quietly after a criminal controversy over the company's alleged pirating of software that was then cracked. The CEO of the company was George Kurtz, who went on to co-found and is the current CEO of Crowdstrike, Mandiant's principal "competition" in the industry. TWM helped me locate A Fortune magazine piece that laid out the details of Foundstone years, which allowed me to look into the evolution of Crowdstrike and Mandiant.
- On a more private journalistic front, TWM helped me recover an article left behind at the now defunct newspaper online, The Prague Post (since converted to a blogosphere), where I was a columnist. Just the one piece of mine was left in the archive. A review of Julian Assange's book, When Google Met Wikileaks. Ain't that Assange something?
Copyright Issues
Naturally, such overwhelming goodness and bonhomie stirs the proprietary interest of turf gangsters who don't want Jimmy running to no new product, especially one that gets him off the devil's skag. So, IA will have some copyright issues to deal with from behemoths who will want their demise, the way the f*ckers brought peer-to-peer sharing to its knees. Kahle wouldn't go into any detail in this area, due to its sensitivity. But it's the same old same old. Ka-ching-a-ling-a-ding-dong-ding.
Publishers continue to remind us that we are no longer in the 'purchase a book and when finished reading hand it on to a friend' age. But IA tries to mitigate that circumstance -- due to its legitimate status as a library. It points to its Open Library project as a model for its distribution. Open Library uses a method called Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) which allows you to download a book for a limited period before access is rescinded. Both use Adobe Digital Edition (ADE) software to achieve this end. He told Publishers Weekly in July 2020, "Controlled Digital Lending is a respectful, balanced way to bring our print collections to digital learners." But, says the PW piece's author, Andrew Albanese, this practice rankles publishers. He writes,
But the practice of CDL has long rankled author and publisher groups-- and those tensions came to a head in late March when the IA unilaterally announced its now closed National Emergency Library initiative, which temporarily removed access restrictions for its scans of books, making the books available for multiple users to borrow during the Covid-19 outbreak. On June 1, Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
For now, Kahle doesn't seem overly exercised by the copyright issue.
The Banned Books Drama
And naturally IA is caught up in the Banned Books saga that features Texas, the Lone Star state, looking to turn back the clocks of time, perhaps as a result of a virus that may have spread after a secret visit by the Taliban to a Unical oil executive's Houston home just before Christmas in 1997 (the exec, out of respect, covered a ract garden statue with a trash bag so as to not offend; for their part, some Taliban members were curious as to why the exec had 4 Christmas trees in his house; a movie was made). Anyway, as IA points out on its site:
Book Banning has existed in America since colonial times, when legislatures and royal governors enacted laws against blasphemy and seditious libel. Legislatures in the early American republic passed laws against obscenity. Though freedom of the press has grown significantly over the course of the twentieth century, book banning and related forms of censorship have persisted due to cyclical concerns about affronts to cultural, political, moral, and religious orthodoxy.
This is just a continuation. IA is designed to get around just this issue.
As far as the latest controversy goes, IA blogger Caralee Adams recently wrote after a conversation with Lisa Seaberg,
What's become caught up in this "wide net," said Seaberg, are books about health education, teen pregnancy, civics, philosophy, religion, anthropology, inventions, encyclopedias and, ironically, a novel about book censorship in a high school. Those who favor removing certain books see an opportunity and momentum, she said, but the difference in this moment is that libraries are able to provide access to titles regardless of where the reader is located.
The Banned Book movement seems to be part of the rightward drift toward fascism on display in America these days. A clown show descent into self-lampooning politics.
IA has a special collection set aside called Banned Books that includes access to texts that have offended offensive eyes over the eras, including Mein Kampf, The Wizard of Oz, The War of the Worlds, Little Black Sambo, The Color Purple, Ulysses, Tom Sawyer, Lolita, Gone with the Wind, Catch-22, The Witches, Flowers for Algernon, The Awakening".
What Can You Do?
At the moment, hundreds of libraries donate books to the Internet Archive. This makes it rich in multicultural emollients. You can find books and videos and audio in other languages, and about other cultures, making it truly an enterprise growing toward its mission of providing a global open Alexandrian library that is always reliable, protects the viewer's privacy and is just plain fun.
You can donate money of course, but the simplest thing you can do is register an account, then, says Brewster the Rooster, Upload material that you believe would be of interest to other members of the public.
Internet Archive goes back to the past to recover the future of the Web. It's that call for action from the film Network that urges people to gpo over to their window, open it, and scream out there together, "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it any more." But it's like a PBS version of the Munch scream -- civil, more or less neutral, and engaged in the Human Project.
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Why a ruling against the Internet Archive threatens the future of America's libraries - MIT Review
Hachette versus Internet Archive - Electronic Frontier Foundation
