There. The life a webpage is 100 days. This takes snapshots of webpages, done it since 1976, and called the way back machine on archives. Org. You can find things that disappeared either maliciously or sometimes they just drop off the net. How many websites are there today . Hundreds of millions. Theyre sort of coming and going all of the time. We collect about 800 million pages every day. The total collection is about 800 billion u. R. L. s. Its kind of huge. That turns out to only be part of what we do. We also archive television, abc nbc, cbs fox, and more. You can search to find clips of what other people said and be able to put them in the blog posts and the like. The idea so people can compare and contrast critically whats happened on division. The old daily show with jon stewart, he did Something Like that said they said this now they said that. Its used by journalists and end users all the time. Its a free library on the internet. Why couldnt i just go to google and type in jon stewart . Youll find the jon stewart show and they may have put up certain clips from the past, or on youtube, you might see a smattering, but you dont know what show it came from. It doesnt have the context of television. Ours is a run of television. It only takes bits and pieces. If you want the whole thing, we print it on to a d. V. D. Drive, loan it to you, and you have to send it back. Then you can use the clip for a documentary. Its in a sense like the library, in that youre borrowing things from the library. We do it with books, several thousand books a day, about a million books a year now, digitizing them, weaving them into the net so that more and more wikipedia footnotes theres a page number, you click on it, it opens up right to the page and you can go back and forward, but if you want more, you have to borrow it. If somebody else has checked it out, you have to wait. At least you get a couple pages, go deeper than wikipedia. Wikipedia is the encyclopedia of the internet. We want to be the library of internet, go deeper, go to published works of humankind television, books, journalism, literature, music recordings, that kind of thing. What kind of Law Department do you have to have at the internet archives to handle that . We operate like a library. The idea is to just not offend people or make them feel like theyve been taking advantage of so we dont make any money. Were awe try to link music to spotify so we have all the album art. Theyre wacky and fun. We make those downloadable and you can listen to them, but they sound like 78s, you know, the era, the first half of the 20th century is largely forgotten because it wasnt moved on to longplaying records. Then c. D. s, then spotify. Some do, but most not. How are you funded . The same kind of way that wikipedia or npr is funded. At the end of the year, we get grants. About a third of our income comes from libraries, so you collect the webpages for them. We collect the web collection for the National Archives of the united states, the library of congress, that comes from the internet archives. We have a room inside the adams building. Under visit it. The library of congress, they bring book carts down, and we digitize all day long. We have 20 locations around the country, actually now the world digitizing books. Okay, you think, gosh shouldnt this be done by a robot . Hasnt it already been done by now . Turns out it hasnt been done. If you take a look at the number of books on the internet archives, it goes up to 1923, and copyrights made everything beyond that restricted. It goes up, up, up, crashes decades of almost nothing online, and comes back at the begin at the end of the 20th century, beginning of the 21st century. You go to amazon to buy the book and what books by decade are available new . 1923 and then crash. 20th century is basically not criminal. Whats amazing of it is good, but the 20th century the published material is almost not existent. Were raising a generation, ourselves really, are not the best we have to offer. We basically have a collective ashamnesia about the 20th century a century not to forget. Wed be doomed to forget it if we forget the lessons from other times. Were trying to go through the 20th century. Better world books is donating all the books we dont already have to the internet archives, and they get those from libraries, and were basically trying to fill in the 20th century, make it so all the wikipedia footnotes turn live. Oh we went and broke the broken links to wikipedia. The executive director of wikipedia was worried that truth might fracture, if we really work on trying to make wikipedia stronger, cited by better sources, that people would start sources that were available but not good. Those citations behind wikipedia articles are based on how good they are whether you can click and see them. We committed to going and fixing all the broken links and filling in all the books and journal literature thats linked to from wikipedia. We fixed 11 million broken links on wikipedia in the last couple years, and now were going through the books, finding them, and replacing those black just texts with a blue link so you can click on it and go to it. If the books are missing, we try to find the books, digitize them put them up. How did you come up with this idea . It was the vision of the internet, certainly what i wanted the internet to be. Okay 1980, why dont we go and make the library for the digital age . I helped participate in this. I dont know. Yeah. Internet hall of fame. Ive been asked this stuff for a long time. Like building the early thing before the web. Once the web came along i helped get the publishers on the web. By 1996, we had enough momentum that i thought i could turn to build the library. The idea is to make it so all the published works of humankind is one click away. If youre in the middle of some rural place, in africa some place, if you want access, you should be able to have access. That was the dream of the internet that i signed on to. Were now in 2020. Were still not there yet. A mounting number of us are saying lets get there. It was a good idea to make a hyperconnected set of information. Lets do that. Whats motivating me is this misinformation, fake news. The people are making stuff up. Theyre not being called on it because you cant get to the cited material. You cant actually go and say no, heres better information. People are making stuff up. We cant live that way. Weve convinced a whole generation all of us really, to turn to the net to answer questions. We dont go to the libraries anymore in the same way. We may go there for events and things, but probably not to pull books. Reference material, its the net. The net isnt good enough yet. So were working on it. Were the 300th most popular website. We have 4 million users every day that come to it and look for information. Some people want to live in their bubbles, but some want to go deeper. This is a part of the ecosystem. You had an invention called alexa. What happened that . Alexa internet, the company that amazon. Com bought. Its a talking widget. Alexa internet was named for the library of alexandria. I worked for Joe Jeff Bezos for three years. Terrific guy. Hopefully he paid you in stock . He did. The smartest thing i ever did. Its helped the internet archives grow and grow. Thank you to jeff bezos and steve case who bought my company before that. He ran America Online. So i built a company that America Online and steve case bought. Ive been very fortunate. Its all toward this goal of building the library. Ive only had one idea, trying to stay at it. I wanted by october of 2020, lets be able to say welcome to the library, that the internet is not a library. Can we make the library enough to raise educated citizens . If we dont, theyll learn from whatever they have in front of them. If its foreign points of view, just trolling people making stuff up, well end up with a mess. I say were sort of seeing that play out. So why dont we go and stand up and help out the facebooks, the twitters, that are trying to make referencible material. Sometimes not as much as they should be. How do we make it possible . Yes, it can be made up, but at least you know its made up based on the analysis of the authors of material. How can we build an internet thats a global brain that we can learn to trust . Right now were in a position where its starting to be scary out there. People are starting to worry that maybe the internet is full of junk. We dont have enough alternative of where to go otherwise. How do we make some websites that want to be better be able to be better, referencible . How do we welcome authors . Wikipedia contributors, how do we give them access to the books in the library, so they can reference into it . My favorite thing just recently with this weaving books into the web thing with wikipedia was my nextdoor neighbor. Shes 15 years old. She lit up. I never get a rise out of my 15yearold neighbor. Why do you want that . Well, my school wont let me quote wikipedia in my research papers. Thats not good enough. You have to follow through. If i could click on it, open the book, i could do my homework in the middle of the night. That got her. Thats good, right . We want people go deeper and make it so that publishers may sell books, may sell even more books, but readers get the information out of books, music, video journal, literature, old periodicals, they know where it came from, that they can trust it. You have nine months for your 40yearold goal. Yes. Are you going to make it . Well, were trying to get the as they say in Silicon Valley the minimum viable product. Can we have enough to do this . So phillip andover, the academy they had their full library lent it to us, so we could digitize it. We have the full library of one of the best prep schools in the country is now a High School Library for anybody that wants access to it. Isnt that great . Mary Grove College that just went out of business unfortunately in detroit, it was a catholic girls school, then became coed, but last year was its last time, and what they did with their library they donated it to the internet archive. Now were in the process of digitizing it over the next nine months. We will now have a college library, a complete prep school library, plus 1. 2 million other books. If we could get up to a total of 4 million books an 80 million project, but doable, we would have a yale, princeton Class Library to anybody that wanted it on the internet. That the dream of where were going for. Well start with the first steps. Weaving them into wikipedia so people find them. Thats just on the book side. The web side is going well, and were using it to help journalists be able to know when things disappear by people, being able to keep some of the web referencible, even though they may have been taken away. What are the mechanics of digitization . Does somebody have to stand there, page by page by page . We built our own machines. It holds the book like this, so it doesnt break the book binding. It raises and lowers glass with a food pedal. We raise and lower glass. It lowers the glass flattens the page. A person turns the page. Now clickclick. Shouldnt that be done by a robot . We tried. We invested in a Robot Company to try to get it to work. It ripped books. It broke a lot. We said, okay, lets have people do it. People are doing this now at a couple thousand books a day. Google has already digitized an enormous number of books. Some are available but they got caught up in copyright issues. Our approach if we have a physical copy, we digitize it, and only one reader at a time can read it. You can get a couple pages to read it, kind of like amazon but if you want the whole thing, you check it out for two weeks then the next person that wants it. Anytime theres one book, other libraries have those, they can loan them out as well. So its restricted. It balances the copyright interests to make sure theres no more copies floating around than originally bought and published. Brewster kahle, when you came up with this idea, what were you doing at the time . I was walking over the Charles River a friend posed a question. He said, brewster, youre a technologist. Yes. Youre also a utopian idealist. Yes. Paint a portrait because of your technology. That turned out to be a very hard question. Were good about complaining about things, whether its nuclear war or i could only come up with two ideas. One was trying to save peoples privacy, even though people are going to throw it away. The other was build a library about everything. I thought the second one the library of everything was too obvious, but the privacy one was too difficult to try to make Cost Effective privacy devices by making chips in 1980. So i went to plan b. Ive never turned back. There are a number of us that have an idea of what the worldwide web should be. Weve made progress. It has participation by lots of people but we need better tools to make our way through it. It feels confusing, threatening to people. By people spreading disinformation and misinformation, we need better tools. Im not going to let this go the wrong way. There are thousands and thousands participating toward wikipedia, internet archives, Public Library of science they all have a general dream of building something thats more than anything else. Its an Information System that connects people with information they need. It gives people an idea of what they can leave behind by writing things that will endure. Thats the dream im ever, and many others are as well. What was your role in the development of the internet, worldwide web, did you have one . I was on the Steering Group but not the leader. There was a system for how to be the first publishing system on the internet. That was wais. Thats why im in the internet hall of fame. When the web got going, all of these technologies folded into the web. Mosaic, the first net browser before netscape. It was part of that. And but the web is better. I got the wall street journal, new york times, reuters a. B. , encyclopedia before before before britannica, i got them online. Its a wild west. I was a keep part in that era. Once that era was going, and i sold the company to a. O. L. , then i can build the library itself. Now beyond that, were trying to help rearchitect the web to be more decentralized. Can we make a decentralized web one with a peertopeer back end, even though youre blocked in some country, you still get access to it. Even if one publisher goes away, its still replicated in other places. A peertopeer back end for the web is a new and Exciting Development coming out of the same people, bitcoin, other decentralized technology. So can we keep the web architect itself moving forward . You mentioned the Charles River in boston, cambridge. Were you employed by m. I. T. At the time . I was a student at m. I. T. Studying artificial intelligence. My minor was buddhism. That tells you about the era. I got to learn one of the great things i learned was think big. Right . Come up with a goal you wont achieve in your lifetime. Achieving your goal is overstated. So if you can come up with a big idea whether its artificial intelligence, seemed like a good idea at the time, and for me it was the universal access to all knowledge. That was something bigger than just me, so a large number of us could Work Together without all having to work for each other. Besides, you dont just achieve it and move to florida or arizona to retire. In 1980, what were you working on . Semantics networks in style. I felt that we were data starved. I thought we were basically trying to build a machine but without the memorial. We were trying to study and have a machine learn from too little. Karl fineman my friend, said if were going to if were going to build the next generation beyond humans, lets have them read good books. I figured that was a good idea. We could do that. I spoke with Richard Fineman and steven wolfrum, and i said why dont we do this. They said, thats a great idea. Lets figure out how big it is. The library of congress, the Largest Library in the world, we did this back in 81, 82, and we knew computers were getting faster and bigger, where wed be able to store all the words in the library of congress, the movies, and thats been true, but whats depressing is weve long since passed that. All the word in words in the library of Congress Congress 28 million megabytes 28 terabytes, thats four hard drives you can buy in best buy for less than a months rent. All the words in the library of congress. Its been true for a long time we can do that. You asked, why hasnt been that done . Institutional lethargy, lack of funding, lack of support for the next generations learning tools, which is digit, but we knew back then how long it was going to take us to do this. So i just started out on the chart. We needed a super computer to be able to do this. I helped big the connection machine, thinking computer. One of the first applications after we got the boards and chips to work on the super computer was to make a Search Engine. We used it at dow jones electronics, ask it freeform questions. First time you could ever do that. Find articles, and say find me more like that one. This is in the mid 80s, 15 years before google. It was the first Search Engine on the wait. Wais was the first serve engine Search Engine on the internet. We use google, but its from this technology that all of us built. We built parallel computers networked all of this, to try to get this vision built. How do we build a smart machine a global brain . How do we build ourselves into a better smarter society, where you have computers and networks of other people to augment what you are and how smart you are . That was the idea. Thats the dream. Thats actually a large part of what makes the internet so fun and wacky. I want to know about icelandic goth music and there it is. When i was young, it was what was in textbooks felt like life was happening to me, but on the internet you can explore. How do you do that . Its by networks, by computers by Search Engines by people participating and trusting they can go and expose themselves and their ideas on this open internet. 99. 9 of those people are not getting paid. So we basically made a system that people are building together as a big societal project. Thats the wonder of the worldwide web. I think in these times we beat up on ourselves and say this isnt going right. All these things arent going right, but a lot of things are. I think the internet and how sharing people have been, how trusting people have been is something we should absolutely preserve. We should make sure this system doesnt make people all go back to the keep your heads down. My parents said, their advice from their parents, when they went off to college, keep your heads down, careful for what clubs you join, not what for they are but become, like the mccarthy stuff. That wasnt my generation at all. It was like be out there try stuff, put things out there, fail fast, right . Lets get some things a try keep a north starosta allows us to keep going and doing what we want to do. Weapon. We want to be supportive of this generation and think more critically, but how it can be abused by government and corporations, and keep our greed down, because some of these technologies are too powerful to be in the hands of a few people and theyre accumulating too much power. Im not saying its all roses out there, but lets not go backwards to a preinternet world where theres restrictions on information that you only got the statesponsored approach toward particular ideas. Lets not go back to just three hours of Television News every evening. Thats all there was when i was growing up. It was very restrictive and prescribed. Lets figure out how to have multiple points of view without the abuse in there. Thats the challenge right now. How do we not throw out the baby with the bath water . How do we put some of the greed under some level of you predicted my next question, the monetization of this societal project were contributing to. Is that. I think its a big failing. The critique of facebook is correct. If i had one regret for being involved in the eras of the development of the internet, not putting in place a Better Business model. We didnt have a digital money system that worked very well. We couldnt make it so you could do distractions. My favorite Business Model is the royalty system. So advertising has a problem winnertakeall, but theres advantages to have aggregated ad networks. The aggregated ad networks leverage the same team for multiple properties. Thats why you get magazines all collapsing in on each other or Television Networks all collapsing in on each other. On the internet, its even worse than that, because its surveillance capitalism. Those Companies Want to watch you all across websites. Its spooky and terrible, right . Im not sure theres much to save the advertising model from being spooky and terrible. Im not sure how you regulate them. Theres other models. Theres subscription models. Those are fairly winnertakeall. Good work started in 1452. By 1610 we had a model that worked quite well, which was royalties. You have paid one person the bookseller, and theres a little bit of money went back upstream. Not enough right . Not that it was wonderful days, but didnt mean there was any point of control. If you have a strict point of control, then youre in trouble. So if theres so there were many readers many booksellers many printers, many publishers, many authors. They didnt all get constricted. If theres ever a constriction point, then somebody can exploit that monopoly, and go back upstream and cream everybody out. In Book Publishing now were down to five major publishers, under threat by another, which is amazon, because they control so much of the marketing that they can go and set prices or content restrictions. They can do anything they want. So they control so much of the pipe that im really worried that books, my model of how to make a successful industry work out of the internet, even books is sort of under threat. So royalty system would have been great. We didnt put it in place. We have some of the tools for having digital currency, being able to buy things moving smoothly on the internet, because right now you cant. If you want to sell something on the internet, you pretty much have to post it to someplace like amazon or itunes, Something Like that, where theyll handle all the transactions for you. Thats, again, too much control in one place. Brewster kahle, you mentioned your parents. Who were they and what did they do . I grew up outside of new york city. My parents, my father worked for a fortune 500 company commuting on the train every morning into manhattan. I tried that for a summer. Gosh, that was a sacrifice my parents made for the kids that i wouldnt do for mine. Living in the burbs spending your time commuting. I live right now in San Francisco, right in the city. I really appreciate the good schooling that they afforded me. And they let me graduate from college with no debt. So i could pursue go and work in a threeperson little startup making childrens toys right out of college rather than for i. B. M. An offer id also gotten. I wanted to do something else. That support that my parents did in terms of letting me go and grow that i really appreciate. I just wish that there were more kids able to graduate college with no school debt. What a burden. What a burden that would be if you didnt find a job right away. Anyway, so i feel very fortunate. But San Francisco is home. San francisco is i love the dreamers. When i was trying to figure where to put the internet the late 1980s. The term metadata important important than the data itself. This was revolutionary depth. I said, bill, where do we do this . He said go someplace where people dont think youre crazy. Where would that be . He said, if you were starting a publishing company, youd probably think about l. A. Maybe you should go from boston, which is where id been for 10 years, and strike out. So i struck out for San Francisco. The wonder of San Francisco people dont call you crazy. Theyll say whats your idea . Thats a neat idea. Can i help . Is there some way i can participate in this . There was a support network that was all yeses, rather than all nos, which i was feeling in the 1980s on the east coast. There was also a recession then. So that was when i picked up, and i turned out to be right. So a lot of the internet, the new technologies, in the web was developed. I was reestablishing in San Francisco, because thats where i thought the wacky people would go to figure out what in should be. Not everything in San Francisco is raisins. I think its changed a lot. Theres an enormous concentration on making lots and lots of money. Its not people put on their tombstone, i made lots of money. Thats not how the world works. I wish we could tone down the greed. Brewster kahle is the founder of the internet archives, and hes been our guest. Thanks for your time. Thank you very much. Just a reminder, that this communicators program, as well as all others are available as podcasts. Our Mission Continues to provide an unfiltered view of government. Already this year, we brought you primary election coverage, the president ial impeachment process, and now the federal response to the coronavirus. Watch all of cspans Public Affairs programming on television, online, or listen on our free radio app, and be part of the National Conversation through cspans daily Washington Journal Program or through our social media feeds. Cspan, created by private industry. 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