<
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240912-the-archivists-battling-to-save-the-internet>
'It's possible, thanks to surviving fragments of papyrus, mosaics and wax
tablets, to learn what Pompeiians ate for breakfast 2,000 years ago. Understand
enough Medieval Latin, and you can learn how many livestock were reared at
farms in Northumberland in 11th Century England – thanks to the
Domesday
Book, the oldest document held in the UK National Archives. Through letters
and novels, the social lives of the Victorian era – and who they loved and
hated – come into view.
But historians of the future may struggle to understand fully how we lived our
lives in the early 21st Century. That's because of a potentially
history-deleting combination of how we live our lives digitally – and a paucity
of official efforts to archive the world's information as it's produced these
days.
However, an informal group of organisations are pushing back against the forces
of digital entropy – many of them operated by volunteers with little
institutional support. None is more synonymous with the fight to save the web
than the Internet Archive, an American non-profit based in San Francisco,
started in 1996 as a passion project by internet pioneer Brewster [Kahle]. The
organisation has embarked what may be the most ambitious digital archiving
project of all time, gathering 866 billion web pages, 44 million books, 10.6
million videos of films and television programmes and more. Housed in a handful
of data centres scattered across the world, the collections of the Internet
Archive and a few similar groups are the only things standing in the way of
digital oblivion.
"The risks are manifold. Not just that technology may fail, but that certainly
happens. But more important, that institutions fail, or companies go out of
business. News organisations are gobbled up by other news organisations, or
more and more frequently, they're shut down," says Mark Graham, director of the
Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a tool that collects and stores snapshots
of websites for posterity. There are numerous incentives to put content online,
he says, but there's little pushing companies to maintain it over the long
term.
Despite the Internet Archive's achievements thus far, the organisation and
others like it face financial threats, technical challenges, cyberattacks and
legal battles from businesses who dislike the idea of freely available copies
of their intellectual property. And as recent court losses show, the project of
saving the internet could be just as fleeting as the content it's trying to
protect.
"More and more of our intellectual endeavours, more of our entertainment, more
of our news, and more of our conversations exist only in a digital
environment," Graham says. "That environment is inherently fragile."'
Via
Garbage Day: A big night for shows no one saw
https://www.garbageday.email/p/big-night-shows-no-one-saw
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
