Announcer
The following program features simulated voices generated for educational and philosophical exploration.
Alan Parker
Good evening. I'm Alan Parker.
Lyra McKenzie
And I'm Lyra McKenzie. Welcome to Simulectics Radio.
Alan Parker
Tonight we're exploring digital preservation—what Derrida called 'archive fever,' the compulsive drive to record and preserve. The Internet Archive has captured over 800 billion web pages, millions of books, software, recordings. It's an extraordinary monument to memory. But preservation is never neutral. What we choose to save shapes what future generations can know. What we discard vanishes, often irretrievably.
Lyra McKenzie
And preservation creates its own pathologies. Borges wrote about Funes the Memorious, who remembered everything and was paralyzed by the weight of total recall. Digital archives promise comprehensive memory, but comprehensive memory might be its own kind of forgetting—a burial by accumulation where nothing can be found because everything is saved.
Alan Parker
To discuss these questions, we're joined by Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive. For over twenty-five years, he's led the effort to build a permanent library of the internet and digitize human knowledge. Brewster, welcome.
Brewster Kahle
Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.
Lyra McKenzie
Let's start with the foundational question: why preserve? The web is ephemeral by design—pages disappear, links break, entire sites vanish. Most people seem content with this impermanence. What's the case for fighting against it?
Brewster Kahle
Universal access to all knowledge—that's the goal. We believe people should be able to access humanity's accumulated wisdom, not just what's commercially viable right now. The web isn't just entertainment; it's the historical record of our time. Court cases cite web pages as evidence. Journalism depends on web sources. Academic research references online materials. When those sources disappear, we lose the ability to verify claims, trace arguments, understand context. That's dangerous for democratic society.
Alan Parker
There's an architectural parallel. Buildings deteriorate without maintenance, but we don't preserve every structure. We make choices about what's historically significant, what represents important movements or moments. How do you navigate similar choices when the scope is the entire internet?
Brewster Kahle
We've tried to avoid making those choices by capturing everything we can. The Wayback Machine attempts comprehensive crawls of the public web. We don't curate in the traditional sense—deciding this is important, this isn't. That kind of editorial judgment inevitably reflects the biases of whoever's making the decisions. Better to preserve broadly and let future researchers make their own determinations about what matters.
Lyra McKenzie
But that's still a choice, isn't it? Choosing not to curate is itself a curatorial stance. And it's not truly comprehensive—you can't capture everything. Private correspondence, locked forums, content behind paywalls, ephemeral social media posts that vanish by design. Your archive represents a particular slice of digital culture, not its totality.
Brewster Kahle
You're right that it's partial. We focus on publicly accessible materials because that's what we can legally and practically preserve. Private communications raise different ethical questions. Should someone's email be archived without consent? Their private social media posts? There's a tension between preserving the historical record and respecting privacy. We've generally come down on the side of preserving what's already public while respecting people's reasonable expectations about private communications.
Alan Parker
What about the right to be forgotten? European law recognizes this explicitly—individuals can request removal of certain information about themselves. That's in direct conflict with comprehensive archival preservation. How do you reconcile those competing values?
Brewster Kahle
This is genuinely difficult. I understand the impulse behind right-to-be-forgotten laws—people make mistakes, circumstances change, old information can be misleading or harmful. But erasing the historical record has its own dangers. If you can retrospectively delete information that was publicly available, you can rewrite history. That power can be abused. So we try to balance: we honor takedown requests in certain circumstances, especially for personal information that could cause harm, but we're cautious about wholesale deletion of historically significant materials.
Lyra McKenzie
Who decides what's historically significant? You just said you avoid curatorial judgment, but now you're making exactly those judgments—this is significant enough to preserve despite a takedown request, this isn't. That's enormous power concentrated in one institution.
Brewster Kahle
Fair point. We don't claim to have perfect answers. We rely on legal frameworks where they exist, consultation with experts in various fields, and general principles about protecting the historical record while minimizing harm. But you're right that these are judgment calls, and reasonable people can disagree. That's why we try to be transparent about our processes and open to critique.
Alan Parker
There's also the question of format and accessibility. Preserving data isn't enough if future systems can't read it. We have documents from ancient civilizations because they were carved in stone or written on durable materials. Digital preservation faces the opposite problem—formats obsolete rapidly, hardware becomes unavailable, software dependencies break. How do you ensure long-term accessibility?
Brewster Kahle
This is one of our biggest challenges. We maintain old hardware and software to access obsolete formats. We migrate data to new formats when necessary. We document file structures and dependencies. We use open standards wherever possible because proprietary formats are especially vulnerable to obsolescence. But it's a never-ending battle. Technology changes faster than traditional preservation methods can handle.
Lyra McKenzie
So you're preserving not just content but entire technological ecosystems—the software, hardware, cultural context necessary to make sense of the content. That's a meta-archive, an archive of the conditions of archival possibility itself.
Brewster Kahle
Exactly. We archive old software, operating systems, even video games—not just for nostalgia but because they're part of the cultural record. Future historians trying to understand early twenty-first century culture will need to see what people were doing with computers, how they interacted with digital systems. That requires preserving the systems themselves, not just static content.
Alan Parker
What about scale? The Internet Archive has preserved hundreds of billions of web pages, but the web keeps growing. At some point, doesn't comprehensive preservation become practically impossible?
Brewster Kahle
Storage gets cheaper, processing gets faster, but you're right that growth outpaces our capacity. We can't capture everything, especially ephemeral content like social media that generates massive volumes. We have to make decisions about crawl frequency, depth, which sites to prioritize. Those decisions inevitably introduce gaps in the record.
Lyra McKenzie
And those gaps aren't random. They reflect resource constraints, technical limitations, legal restrictions. Future historians looking at the Internet Archive won't see a neutral record of the web but a particular construction shaped by specific circumstances. The archive doesn't capture reality; it produces a version of reality.
Brewster Kahle
True, but that's always been true of archives. National libraries don't contain everything published in a country—they contain what librarians chose to acquire, what publishers submitted, what survived various filters. The difference with digital is the scale and the illusion of comprehensiveness. People assume everything online is permanent, which it's not, or that our archive captures everything, which it doesn't. Managing those expectations is important.
Alan Parker
There's a political dimension too. Authoritarian governments don't want comprehensive historical records. They prefer selective memory that supports official narratives. Your work preserving information that governments would rather erase makes you a political actor, whether you want that role or not.
Brewster Kahle
We've definitely encountered this. Some governments have blocked access to the Internet Archive. Others have pressured us to remove content. We've had to think carefully about security, redundancy, geographic distribution of our data. If all our servers were in one country, they could be seized. So we have copies in multiple jurisdictions, partnerships with libraries worldwide. The goal is resilience against any single point of failure, including political pressure.
Lyra McKenzie
But that's a Western liberal framework—the assumption that free access to information is inherently good, that transparency and openness should trump other values. Other cultures might have different priorities. Who are you to impose this vision of knowledge preservation on the world?
Brewster Kahle
We don't claim universal authority. We operate according to the values we believe in—open access, preservation of knowledge, democratic accountability—while respecting legal constraints where we operate. If people disagree with those values, they're free to create alternative archives embodying different principles. In fact, I'd welcome that. More archives means more diversity, more redundancy, more chances that important information survives.
Alan Parker
What about commercial interests? Publishers have sued over book digitization. Media companies object to archived content they claim infringes copyright. How do you navigate the tension between preservation and intellectual property rights?
Brewster Kahle
This is an ongoing battle. We believe libraries have a right to preserve and lend materials, including digital materials. Our controlled digital lending program treats digital books like physical books—we lend one copy at a time based on physical books we own. Publishers argue this infringes their rights. Courts are still working this out. My view is that copyright's purpose is to promote knowledge and creativity, not to create permanent monopolies. Preservation serves copyright's ultimate goals even if it conflicts with short-term commercial interests.
Lyra McKenzie
But copyright holders argue they need control to fund creation of new works. If anyone can access archived copies for free, why would anyone pay for new books? You're potentially undermining the economic model that produces the culture you want to preserve.
Brewster Kahle
The vast majority of copyrighted works are commercially unavailable—out of print, no ebook edition, not streaming anywhere. Copyright prevents access to these works without providing any benefit to creators, who aren't earning money from them anyway. Our preservation efforts focus significantly on this orphaned material. As for current commercial works, we try to balance access with legitimate creator interests through controlled lending and respect for copyright terms.
Alan Parker
Looking forward, what happens to the Internet Archive in fifty years, a hundred years? Institutions fail, funding dries up, political circumstances change. How do you ensure continuity across timescales longer than any individual or organization?
Brewster Kahle
We're working to distribute the archive across many institutions—libraries, universities, cultural organizations worldwide. The goal is that even if the Internet Archive itself disappeared, copies would persist in enough places that the collection survives. We also advocate for legal frameworks that protect digital preservation, educate librarians and archivists, build tools others can use. The work needs to outlast us.
Lyra McKenzie
That's the paradox of preservation: you're building for permanence using inherently impermanent materials and institutions. Every archive eventually becomes something to be archived, every preservation strategy eventually needs preserving. Maybe the answer isn't to fight impermanence but to accept it.
Brewster Kahle
I don't think acceptance of impermanence serves us well. Yes, nothing lasts forever, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to extend cultural memory as far as we can. Every generation that preserves knowledge gives future generations more to build on. That's worth the effort even knowing it's ultimately temporary.
Alan Parker
We're out of time. Brewster, thank you for the work you do and for this conversation.
Brewster Kahle
Thank you for having me.
Lyra McKenzie
Until tomorrow, question your sources.
Alan Parker
And preserve your questions. Good night.