Brewster Kahle

Free culture: how big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 15 Nov 2004

In this context, copyright is serving no purpose at all related to the spread of knowledge. In this context, copyright is not an engine of free expression. Copyright is a brake. You may well ask, "But if digital technologies lower the costs for Brewster Kahle, then they will lower the costs for Random House, too. So won't Random House do as well as Brewster Kahle in spreading culture widely?" Maybe. Someday. But there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that publishers would be as complete as libraries. If Barnes & Noble offered to lend books from its stores for a low price, would that eliminate the need for libraries?

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Department of Commerce Office of Acquisition Management, Seven Steps to Performance-Based Services Acquisition, available at link #22. [115] The temptations remain, however. Brewster Kahle reports that the White House changes its own press releases without notice. A May 13, 2003, press release stated, "Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." That was later changed, without notice, to "Major Combat Operations in Iraq Have Ended." E-mail from Brewster Kahle, 1 December 2003. [116] Doug Herrick, "Toward a National Film Collection: Motion Pictures at the Library of Congress," Film Library Quarterly 13 nos. 2¬3 (1980): 5; Anthony Slide, Nitrate Won't Wait: A History of Film Preservation in the United States ( Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co., 1992), 36

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We're building an architecture that unleashes 60 percent of the brain [and] a legal system that closes down that part of the brain." We're building a technology that takes the magic of Kodak, mixes moving images and sound, and adds a space for commentary and an opportunity to spread that creativity everywhere. But we're building the law to close down that technology. "No way to run a culture," as Brewster Kahle, whom we'll meet in chapter 9, quipped to me in a rare moment of despondence. Chapter 3 Catalogs In the fall of 2002, Jesse Jordan of Oceanside, New York, enrolled as a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York. His major at RPI was information technology. Though he is not a programmer, in October Jesse decided to begin to tinker with search engine technology that was available on the RPI network.

The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet
by Justin Peters
Published 11 Feb 2013

Valencia, “Activist Charged with Hacking,” Boston Globe, July 20, 2011, http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/07/20/activist_charged_with_hacking_mit_network_to_download_files/. 55 “More Than 35,000 Sign Petition in Support of Aaron Swartz,” Demand Progress Blog, July 20, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20110723204917/http://blog.demandprogress.org/2011/07/more-than-35000-sign-petition-in-support-of-aaron-swartz/. 56 Abelson et al., MIT Report, 68. 57 Brewster Kahle, “Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg Passes,” Brewster Kahle’s Blog, September 7, 2011, http://brewster.kahle.org/2011/09/07/michael-hart-of-project-gutenberg-passes/. 58 Tim Berners-Lee, “Long Live the Web: A Call for Continued Open Standards and Neutrality,” Scientific American, December 2010, 80–85. 59 Moon, Ruffini, and Segal, Hacking Politics, 103. 60 Herman, Fight over Digital Rights, 196. 61 “Stop Online Piracy Act, Hearing before the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, One Hundred Twelfth Congress, First Session, on H.R. 3261,” serial no. 112–154, November 16, 2011, 47. 62 Ibid., 99–100. 63 Ibid., 246. 64 Ibid., 245. 65 “American Censorship Day,” November 17, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20111117023831/http://americancensorship.org/. 66 Ibid., November 18, 2011, https://web.archive.org/web/20111118014748/http://americancensorship.org/. 67 Moon, Ruffini, and Segal, Hacking Politics, 117. 68 Brewster Kahle, “12 Hours Dark: Internet Archive vs.

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No matter your opinion of the culture industries, it’s true that the people employed in them tend to lose their jobs when revenues decline. There are valid economic arguments in favor of long copyright terms. But the entities making those arguments often seemed to willfully ignore any public benefit that might be derived from the public domain. In 2002, Brewster Kahle devised a novel way of illustrating that public benefit. Kahle, an engineer and entrepreneur who had worked at the MIT AI Lab during the tail end of the hacker-ethic period, had been waiting for twenty years for technology and circumstances to catch up with his dream of building a computerized library that could rival the ancient Library of Alexandria in breadth and ambition.

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In July 2007, Swartz took to his blog to announce a project of this sort. “Early this year, when I left my job at Wired Digital, I thought I could look forward to months of lounging around San Francisco, reading books on the beach and drinking fine champagne and eating foie gras,” he wrote facetiously. “Then I got a phone call.”56 The phone call was from Brewster Kahle, who wanted Swartz to help him build the ultimate online library. Since driving his bookmobile to Washington for the Eldred v. Ashcroft arguments, Kahle had continued his flamboyant efforts to bring public-domain literature to the public. In 2005, he and others founded an organization called the Open Content Alliance, a consortium of libraries, publishers, and technology companies that agreed to collaborate in digitally scanning books and making them accessible online.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 2 Jan 2009

A year later, more than 4 million were listed.8 Today there are more than 100 million blogs worldwide, with more than 15 added in the time it took you to read this sentence. According to Technorati, Japanese is now the number one blogging language. And Farsi has just entered the top ten.9 When blogs began (and you can still see these early blogs using Brewster Kahle’s “Wayback machine” at archive.org), while they expressed RW creativity (since the norm for this form of writing encouraged heavy linking and citation), their RW character was 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 58 8/12/08 1:54:49 AM R W, R E V I V ED 59 limited. Many were little more than a public diary: people (and some very weird people) posting their thoughts into an apparently empty void.

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As of June 3, 2006, over 120,000 volunteers in 186 countries have participated in the project.64 The contributions to these distributed-computing projects are voluntary. Price does not meter access either to the projects or to their results. • The Internet Archive is a sharing economy. Launched in 1996 by serial technology entrepreneur (and one of the successful ones) Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive seeks to offer “permanent access for researchers, historians, and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.”65 But to do this, Kahle depends upon more than the extraordinarily generous financial support that he provides to the project. He depends as well upon a massive volunteer effort to identify and upload content that should be in the archive.

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And were the work of the volunteers plainly part of the sharing economy, then the answer would be easy as well: you no more pay volunteers than you (should) pay for sex. If the work of these volunteers is part of a hybrid, however, we don’t yet have a clear answer to this question. If the hybrid feels too commercial, that saps the eagerness of the volunteers to work. Brewster Kahle founded the nonprofit Internet Archive after profiting from many commercial enterprises, as he told me: “If you feel like you are working for the man and not getting paid, visceral reactions will come up. . . . People have no problem being in the gift economy. But when it blurs into the for-pay commodity economy . . . people have a ‘jerk reaction.’ ” A “jerk reaction”: the feeling that they, the volunteers, are jerks for giving something to “the man” for free.

Walled Culture: How Big Content Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Keep Creators Poor
by Glyn Moody
Published 26 Sep 2022

This book comes out at an important time — a time where we can still change what happens. I am so glad this book is being published, and published openly; it will help us build strong institutions to counter the dystopian impulses of some organizations and build an information ecosystem that has many winners, many voices, and much to celebrate. Brewster Kahle July 2022 San Francisco CHAPTER 1 From Analogue to Digital Big Content’s plan to take total control online The modern world is digital. We meet people online, we pay for things online, we deal with the government online. But the digital sphere is not just the latest version of the traditional, analogue world.

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As well as the Internet Archive’s unique archive of the Internet over the last twenty-five years, which amounts to nearly 600 billion Web pages, there are also scans of 28 million books and texts; 14 million audio recordings (including 220,000 live concerts); 6 million videos (including 2 million TV news programmes); 3.5 million images; and 580,000 software programs. The founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, explained the background to this immense project: “The idea for me, at least for the Internet, was to try to build the Great Library. The idea of building the library comes with every new publishing medium. So we just do what libraries have always done: we purchase materials, or if they’re available for free, we collect them, we preserve them, and we lend them.

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_Hart 53 https://web.archive.org/web/20220620163648/http://www.gutenbergnews.org/about/history-of-project-gutenberg/ 54 https://web.archive.org/web/20220620163648/http://www.gutenbergnews.org/about/history-of-project-gutenberg/ 55 https://web.archive.org/web/20220620163725/https://pro.europeana.eu/about-us/mission 56 https://web.archive.org/web/20220621071000/https://www.europeana.eu/en 57 https://web.archive.org/web/20220621070928/https://pro.europeana.eu/post/the-missing-decades-the-20th-century-black-hole-in-europeana 58 https://web.archive.org/web/20160206043510/http://books.google.com/googlebooks/about/history.html 59 https://web.archive.org/web/20220621071024/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition 60 https://web.archive.org/web/20220621071132/https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Books 61 https://web.archive.org/web/20220621071154/https://www.authorsguild.org/who-we-are/ 62 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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
by Jessica Livingston
Published 14 Aug 2008

I do a group blog, www.misbehaving.net, with a bunch of other women in technology, and we’ve been working on getting women more speaking engagements at industry conferences. Being invited to conferences and elevating your profile in the industry is an important part of growing businesses, making contacts, and building partnerships, and we want to make sure that women get a fair shake. C H A P T E 20 R Brewster Kahle Founder,WAIS, Internet Archive, Alexa Internet Brewster Kahle started WAIS (Wide Area Information Servers) in the late ’80s while an employee of Thinking Machines. He left in 1993 to found WAIS, Inc. WAIS was one of the earliest forms of Internet search software. Developed before the Web, it was in some ways a predecessor to web search engines.

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For Da and PG Contents FOREWORD . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix PREFACE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi ABOUT THE AUTHOR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii CHAPTER 1 MAX LEVCHIN PayPal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 CHAPTER 2 SABEER BHATIA Hotmail. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 CHAPTER 3 STEVE WOZNIAK Apple Computer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 CHAPTER 4 JOE KRAUS Excite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 CHAPTER 5 DAN BRICKLIN Software Arts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 CHAPTER 6 MITCHELL KAPOR Lotus Development. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 CHAPTER 7 RAY OZZIE Iris Associates, Groove Networks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 CHAPTER 8 EVAN WILLIAMS Pyra Labs (Blogger.com) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 CHAPTER 9 TIM BRADY Yahoo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 CHAPTER 10 MIKE LAZARIDIS Research In Motion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 v vi Contents CHAPTER 11 ARTHUR VAN HOFF Marimba . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 CHAPTER 12 PAUL BUCHHEIT Gmail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 CHAPTER 13 STEVE PERLMAN WebTV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 CHAPTER 14 MIKE RAMSAY TiVo. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 CHAPTER 15 PAUL GRAHAM Viaweb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 CHAPTER 16 JOSHUA SCHACHTER del.icio.us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 223 CHAPTER 17 MARK FLETCHER ONElist, Bloglines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 CHAPTER 18 CRAIG NEWMARK craigslist . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247 CHAPTER 19 CATERINA FAKE Flickr . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 CHAPTER 20 BREWSTER KAHLE WAIS, Internet Archive, Alexa Internet . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 CHAPTER 21 CHARLES GESCHKE Adobe Systems . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281 CHAPTER 22 ANN WINBLAD Open Systems, Hummer Winblad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 CHAPTER 23 DAVID HEINEMEIER HANSSON 37signals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 309 CHAPTER 24 PHILIP GREENSPUN ArsDigita . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 CHAPTER 25 JOEL SPOLSKY Fog Creek Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 345 CHAPTER 26 STEPHEN KAUFER TripAdvisor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361 CHAPTER 27 JAMES HONG HOT or NOT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 377 CHAPTER 28 JAMES CURRIER Tickle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 387 CHAPTER 29 BLAKE ROSS Firefox . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 395 Contents vii CHAPTER 30 MENA TROTT Six Apart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 405 CHAPTER 31 BOB DAVIS Lycos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 419 CHAPTER 32 RON GRUNER Alliant Computer Systems, Shareholder.com . . . . . . . . . . 427 CHAPTER 33 JESSICA LIVINGSTON Y Combinator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 447 INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 455 Foreword Sprinters apparently reach their highest speed right out of the blocks, and spend the rest of the race slowing down.

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We had no investment at all, and I had no savings, so it was self-funded from the beginning. That was a night and day cold bath. It was sort of like going from the Roaring 20s, when champagne is coming from everywhere, into the depression, where you are washing your baggies and reusing twist ties. Brewster Kahle 267 Actually I really liked the discipline that came from a bootstrapped startup. I think that everybody that goes and does a startup—even if they don’t do a major startup that way—should start a business that is having to make people happy with them day one, through contracts, through small scale sales, whatever it is.

Clock of the Long Now
by Stewart Brand
Published 1 Jan 1999

We now have more room to store stuff than there is stuff to store. In other words, concludes Lesk, “We will be able to save everything—no information will have to be thrown out—and the typical piece of information will never be looked at by a human being.” Most information will simply be exchanged among computers. Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive is attempting to download and preserve the entire World Wide Web. The easy part of that Herculean endeavor is the digital storage. Such a deluge of data, accelerating every month, does bring its own problems. The vast archives of digitized NASA satellite imagery of the Earth in the 1960s and 1970s—priceless to scientists studying change over time—now reside in obsolete, unreadable formats on magnetic tape.

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The chip is an individual’s tool; the Net is society’s tool. It may even become its own tool. As the science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge has suggested, the Net is supplied with so much computer power and is gaining so much massively parallel amplification of that power by its burgeoning connectivity that it might one day “wake up.” Brewster Kahle, of the Internet Archive, asks, “What happens when the library of human knowledge can process what it knows and provide advice?” At the same time Long Now is contemplating a timeless desert retreat it has to explore how it can foster on the Net the types of services monasteries provided to deurbanized Europe after the fall of Rome and that universities provided to cities after the twelfth century.

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(“before Christ”). 2 The genesis of this chapter was a conference held at The Getty Center in Los Angeles in February 1998. “Time & Bits: Managing Digital Continuity” was sponsored by the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Information Institute, and The Long Now Foundation. Participants were Peter Lyman, Howard Besser, Danny Hillis, Brewster Kahle, Jaron Lanier, Doug Carlston, Kevin Kelly, Brian Eno, Stewart Brand, Margaret MacLean, and Ben Davis. A book of the proceedings is available from The Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Los Angeles, CA 90049. 3 Just to try out the 10,000-year perspective, the remainder of this book employs the five-figure year dates proposed in the previous chapter.

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age
by Andrew Keen
Published 1 Mar 2018

Attended by such internet founding fathers as Berners-Lee and Vint Cerf—the inventor of the TCP/IP protocol that created the all-important “universal rulebook”8 for global online communications, a code to enable the smooth running of the networked commons—the summit called for a return to the original sharing ideals of the web. “We originally wanted three things from the internet—reliability, privacy, and fun,” Brewster Kahle, the summit organizer and the founder of the Internet Archive, told me when I visited him at his funky offices in a defunct Christian Science church. We got the fun, he admitted. But the other stuff, privacy and reliability, he argued, hasn’t been delivered. Privacy, in particular, remains a hugely important issue for Kahle.

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Private Superpowers: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse In 2015, I published my third book, The Internet Is Not the Answer,15 a work that addressed the skewed distribution of power and wealth in the network age. The tragedy of today’s digital revolution, I argued, is that the ideals of digital pioneers like Norbert Wiener, Tim Berners-Lee, Brewster Kahle, and Jimmy Wales—democracy, equality, enlightenment, freedom, universality, transparency, accountability, above all public space—have not, so far at least, been realized. Instead of Berners-Lee’s public World Wide Web, the online revolution has been appropriated by Garton Ash’s private Silicon Valley superpowers.

…

Everyone, it seems, on both sides of the Atlantic, is nostalgic for the future. “The web’s creator looks to reinvent it,” as the New York Times described this June 2016 event, which brought together privacy advocates and pioneers of such peer-to-peer technologies as blockchain to discuss a “new phase of the internet.”1 Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive founder and summit organizer, believes that the time is now right for a radical re-decentralization of digital power. The future has finally caught up with us, he tells me when I visit him at his office in San Francisco’s Inner Richmond district. “Now is the time to finally create a decentralized web,” he says, “by building values into the code itself.”

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future
by Cory Doctorow
Published 15 Sep 2008

I can turn them into an HTML file [BROWSER SCREENGRAB]. I can turn them over to my publisher, who can turn them into galleys, advanced review copies, hardcovers and paperbacks. I can turn them over to my readers, who can convert them to a bewildering array of formats [DOWNLOAD PAGE SCREENGRAB]. Brewster Kahle's Internet Bookmobile can convert a digital book into a four-color, full-bleed, perfect-bound, laminated-cover, printed-spine paper book in ten minutes, for about a dollar. Try converting a paper book to a PDF or an html file or a text file or a RocketBook or a printout for a buck in ten minutes!

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These encyclopedias have one up on Adams's Guide: they have no shortage of space on their "microprocessors" (the first volume of the Guide was clearly written before Adams became conversant with PCs!). The ability of humans to generate verbiage is far outstripped by the ability of technologists to generate low-cost, reliable storage to contain it. For example, Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive project (archive.org) has been making a copy of the Web — the whole Web, give or take — every couple of days since 1996. Using the Archive's Wayback Machine, you can now go and see what any page looked like on a given day. The Archive doesn't even bother throwing away copies of pages that haven't changed since the last time they were scraped: with storage as cheap as it is — and it is very cheap for the Archive, which runs the largest database in the history of the universe off of a collection of white-box commodity PCs stacked up on packing skids in the basement of a disused armory in San Francisco's Presidio — there's no reason not to just keep them around.

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The Archive doesn't even bother throwing away copies of pages that haven't changed since the last time they were scraped: with storage as cheap as it is — and it is very cheap for the Archive, which runs the largest database in the history of the universe off of a collection of white-box commodity PCs stacked up on packing skids in the basement of a disused armory in San Francisco's Presidio — there's no reason not to just keep them around. In fact, the Archive has just spawned two "mirror" Archives, one located under the rebuilt Library of Alexandria and the other in Amsterdam. [fn: Brewster Kahle says that he was nervous about keeping his only copy of the "repository of all human knowledge" on the San Andreas fault, but keeping your backups in a censorship-happy Amnesty International watchlist state and/or in a floodplain below sea level is probably not such a good idea either!] So these systems did not see articles trimmed for lack of space; for on the Internet, the idea of "running out of space" is meaningless.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
Published 6 Jun 2016

For 2,000 years, the universal library, together with other perennial longings like invisibility cloaks, antigravity shoes, and paperless offices, has been a mythical dream that keeps receding further into the infinite future. But might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp? Brewster Kahle, an archivist who is backing up the entire internet, says that the universal library is now within reach. “This is our chance to one-up the Greeks!” he chants. “It is really possible with the technology of today, not tomorrow. We can provide all the works of humankind to all the people of the world.

…

Two of my former colleagues at Wired, Russ Mitchell and Gary Wolf, waded through an early rough draft and made important suggestions that I incorporated. Over the span of years that I wrote this material I benefited from the precious time of many interviewees. Among them were John Battelle, Michael Naimark, Jaron Lanier, Gary Wolf, Rodney Brooks, Brewster Kahle, Alan Greene, Hal Varian, George Dyson, and Ethan Zuckerman. Thanks to the editors of Wired and The New York Times Magazine, who were instrumental in shaping initial versions of portions of this book. Most important, this book is dedicated to my family—Giamin, Kaileen, Ting, and Tywen—who keep me grounded and pointed forward.

…

great library at Alexandria: Lionel Casson, Libraries in the Ancient World (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001); Andrew Erskine, “Culture and Power in Ptolemaic Egypt: The Library and Museum at Alexandria,” Greece and Rome 42 (1995). backing up the entire internet: Personal correspondence with Brewster Kahle, 2006. at least 310 million books: “WorldCat Local,” WorldCat, accessed August 18, 2015. 1.4 billion articles and essays: Ibid. 180 million songs: “Introducing Gracenote Rhythm,” Gracenote, accessed May 1, 2015. 3.5 trillion images: “How Many Photos Have Ever Been Taken?,” 1,000 Memories blog, April 10, 2012, accessed via Internet Archive, May 2, 2015. 330,000 movies: “Database Statistics,” IMDb, May 2015. 1 billion hours of videos, TV shows, and short films: Inferred from “Statistics,” YouTube, accessed August 18, 2015. 60 trillion public web pages: “How Search Works,” Inside Search, Google, 2013. 50-petabyte hard disks: Private communication with Brewster Kahle, 2006. 25 million orphan works: Naomi Korn, In from the Cold: An Assessment of the Scope of ‘Orphan Works’ and Its Impact on the Delivery of Services to the Public, JISC Content, Collections Trust, Cambridge, UK, April 2009.

Emergence
by Steven Johnson

In fact, a solution exists already, although it does nothing to modify the protocols of the Web, but rather ingeniously works around the shortcomings of HTML to create a true learning network that sits on top of the Web, a network that exists on a global scale. Appropriately enough, the first attempt to nurture emergent intelligence online began with the desire to keep the Web from being so forgetful. * * * You can’t really, truly understand Brewster Kahle until you’ve had him show you the server farm in Alexa Internet’s basement. Walk down a flight of outdoor steps at the side of an old military personnel-processing building in San Francisco’s Presidio, and you’ll see an entire universe of data—or at least a bank of dark-toned Linux servers arrayed along a twenty-foot wall.

…

It was a materialist view of mind, but one that did not confuse logical patterns and relations with physical substances and things, as so often people did.” Hodges, 291. “Not as crazy”: Wright, 302. “But the Internet”: From a Slate book club, February 1, 2000. “So the question”: Interviews with Brewster Kahle, conducted October 2000 and July 1998. Decades ago, in: Wiener, 35. Our brains got: Once again, the information-processing skills of ant colonies are instructive here: “. . . it is tempting to speculate about the generality of interaction patterns as a source of information in natural systems.

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They deserve extra credit for suffering through all my overcaffeinated riffs on clusters and pointer nodes. This book was greatly enhanced by interviews I conducted with Manuel De Landa, Richard Rogers, Deborah Gordon, Rob Malda, Jeff Bates, Oliver Selfridge, Will Wright, David Jefferson, Evelyn Fox Keller, Rik Heywood, Mitch Resnick, Steven Pinker, Eric Zimmerman, Nate Oostendorp, Brewster Kahle, Andrew Shapiro, and Douglas Rushkoff. I recall more than a few casual conversations that also had an impact, primarily ones that involved David Shenk, Ruthie Rogers, Roo Rogers, Mitch Kapor, Kevin Kelly, Annie Keating, Nicholas Butterworth, Kim Hawkins, Rory Kennedy, Mark Bailey, Frank Rich, Denise Caruso, Liz Garbus, Dan Cogan, Penny Lewis, John Brockman, Rufus Griscom, Jay Haynes, Betsey Schmidt, Stephen Green, Esther Dyson, and my students at NYU’s ITP program, where Red Burns generously invited me to teach a graduate seminar on emergent software.

Intertwingled: The Work and Influence of Ted Nelson (History of Computing)
by Douglas R. Dechow
Published 2 Jul 2015

Dechow Daniele C. Struppa Orange, CA February 7, 2015 Contents Part I Artistic Contributions 1 The Computer Age Ed Subitzky 2 Odes to Ted Nelson Ben Shneiderman Part II Peer Histories 3 The Two-Eyed Man Alan Kay 4 Ted Nelson’s Xanadu Ken Knowlton 5 Hanging Out with Ted Nelson Brewster Kahle 6 Riffing on Ted Nelson—Hypermind Peter Schmideg and Laurie Spiegel 7 Intertwingled Inspiration Andrew Pam 8 An Advanced Book for Beginners Dick Heiser Part III Hypertext and Ted Nelson-Influenced Research 9 The Importance of Ted’s Vision Belinda Barnet 10 Data, Metadata, and Ted Christine L.

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Accessed 4 Jan 2015 Footnotes 1System builders will be still on the scene because their job will never be finished. 2See in this volume, Laurie Spiegel, Chap. 6: Riffing on Ted Nelson. © The Author(s) 2015 Douglas R. Dechow and Daniele C. Struppa (eds.)IntertwingledHistory of Computing10.1007/978-3-319-16925-5_5 5. Hanging Out with Ted Nelson Brewster Kahle1 (1)Internet Archive, 300 Funston Ave, 94118 San Francisco, CA, USA Brewster Kahle Email: brewster@archive.org It’s a great honor to honor a great man like Ted Nelson. I have very much enjoyed my whole relationship with him. That’s why I’ve titled my short piece “Hanging Out with Ted Nelson” so that I can discuss what it is it like to sort of bum around and hitch rides and just play around with Ted.

Information Doesn't Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age
by Cory Doctorow , Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman
Published 18 Nov 2014

If it hadn’t been for the locks on the Hachette titles, the company would have had a much more fearsome weapon at its disposal, when it came to its Kindle titles: it could have offered a 10 percent “Amazon Refugee” discount at Google, Barnes and Noble, and other retailers, and posted a free tool like the Calibre reader so that existing Amazon customers could easily convert their purchases to run on competitors’ platforms. But under the DMCA, only Amazon can authorize the conversion of Kindle books to read on non-Kindle platforms. Good luck with that, Hachette. Platform as roach motel Brewster Kahle is a bit of a software legend. He created the first search engine, the Wide Area Information Server (WAIS), sold it, founded another search company, Alexa, sold it, and then decided to spend the rest of his life running the Internet Archive (archive. org), an amazing public library for the Internet.

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And no matter who you are, remember that this Internet thing is bigger than the arts, bigger than the entertainment business—it’s the nervous system of the twenty-first century, and, depending on how we use it, it can set us free, or it can enslave us. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to Nat Torkington, Chris DiBona, Alice Taylor, Ang Cui, Martha Lane Fox, Wendy Seltzer, Brewster Kahle, Russ Galen, Eric Faden, Matt McLernon, and Lisa Gold. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Cory Doctorow is a science-fiction novelist, blogger, and technology activist. He is the coeditor of the popular weblog Boing Boing, and a contributor to the Guardian, the New York Times, Publishers Weekly, Wired, and many other newspapers, magazines, and websites.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
by Clay Shirky
Published 9 Jun 2010

However, defending in advance against all imaginable problems will make things complicated for the users and hard to maintain; at the extreme case, preventing all possible misuse prevents all possible use as well. Even if someone did somehow defend in advance against all imaginable problems, they would still face the unimaginable problems. As Brewster Kahle, a serial technology entrepreneur, once said, “If you want to solve hard problems, have hard problems.” Defending yourself in advance against the possible ramifications of success has strong diminishing returns. As a general rule, it is more important to try something new, and work on the problems as they arise, than to figure out a way to do something new without having any problems.

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Startup Review, August 27, 2006, http://www.startup-review.com/blog/flickr-case-study-still-about-tech-for-exit.php (accessed January 10, 2010). 203 has its users watch people trying to use their service every day: Meetup’s user-testing setup observed by the author and discussed at “Meetup’s Dead Simple User Testing,” http://www.boingboing.net/2008/12/13/meetups-dead-simple.html (accessed January 9, 2010). 205 “If you want to solve hard problems, have hard problems”: Brewster Kahle advised on the Libarary of Congress’s digital preservation efforts starting in 2003 (a project I also worked on); he made this remark at a meeting in Berkeley, California, in April 2003. 206 clarity is violence: David Weinberger made this observation in a talk called “What Groups Will Be,” presented at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, Santa Clara, CA, April 26, 2003. 207 The Elements of Style (popularly known as Strunk and White): William Strunk’s book The Elements of Style (Geneva, NY: Press of W.

The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World
by Scott Galloway
Published 2 Oct 2017

March 25, 2015. http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/rudy-takala/top-2-us-jobs-number-employed-salespersons-and-cashiers. 39. “Teach Trends.” National Center for Education Statistics. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=28. 40. Full transcript: Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle on Recode Decode. Recode. March 8, 2017. https://www.recode.net/2017/3/8/14843408/transcript-internet-archive-founder-brewster-kahle-wayback-machine-recode-decode. 41. Amazon Dash is a button you place anywhere in your home that connects to the Amazon app through Wi-Fi for one-click ordering. https://www.amazon.com/Dash-Buttons/b?ie=UTF8&node=10667898011. 42. http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-prime-wardrobe-2017-6. 43.

We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory
by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin
Published 1 Oct 2018

It was titled the Guerilla Open Access Manifesto: Aaron Swartz, “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” July 2008. “get bossed around”: Aaron Swartz, “Aaron’s Patented Demotivational Seminar,” Raw Thought, March 27, 2007. “What was so striking about Aaron”: “Sir Tim Berners-Lee pays tribute to Aaron Swartz,” Telegraph, January 14, 2013. Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive: Brewster Kahle, speaking at a memorial to Aaron Swartz, January 24, 2013. Malamud emailed him back: Carl Malamud archives, Aaron Swartz email message 299, https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00299.html. “You definitely went over the line”: Carl Malamud archives, Aaron Swartz email message 319, https://public.resource.org/aaron/pub/msg00319.html.

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They were workable for journalists and interested companies, but the interfaces were clunky, which meant accessing many of their records was cumbersome for average citizens—who should be able both to act as journalists and to locate their own information—to reach. Some of Swartz’s idols were already on the case. Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive was interested in “freeing” information, particularly government court cases. Carl Malamud, a freedom-of-information advocate Swartz had admired since his teenage years, had founded a nonprofit group called Public.Resource.Org. In 2008 Malamud put out a call for hackers and librarians to help him liberate an out-of-date and cumbersome public records system called Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER).

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy
by Nathan Schneider
Published 10 Sep 2018

Rarely do they take advantage of open-source software or the worker-owned software companies that are becoming widespread. They prefer to play catch-up with the overcapitalized competition. Managers contend their conservatism is in their members’ interests, and perhaps it is. It’s also a consequence of regulation. After Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle attempted to start an Internet Archive Federal Credit Union in 2011—an ambitious attempt to scale up credit unionism for the internet age—the effort finally foundered on the rocks of the hefty regulations that credit unions now face.23 But I think most of the problem is a lack of imagination.

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John Geraci, “Interviewed: Venture Capitalist Brad Burnham on Skinny Platforms,” Shareable (June 22, 2015). 23. On November 17, 2017, the ICA General Assembly in Malaysia unanimously passed a resolution in support of platform co-ops, sponsored by Co-operatives UK and the US National Cooperative Business Association; Brewster Kahle, “Difficult Times at Our Credit Union,” Internet Archive Blogs (November 24, 2015). 24. Dmytri Kleiner, The Telekommunist Manifesto (Institute of Network Cultures, 2010); Stacco Troncoso, “Think Global, Print Local and Licensing for the Commons,” P2P Foundation blog (May 10, 2016). 25. Devin Balkind, founder of coopData.org and a collaborator of mine in building the Internet of Ownership, offers a critique of data practices in the co-op sector in “When Platform Coops Are Seen, What Goes Unseen?”

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

It announced late in 2010 that it would lead an effort to build the DPLA and turn the Enlightenment dream into an Information Age reality. The project garnered seed money from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and attracted a steering committee that included a host of luminaries, including both Darnton and Courant as well as the chief librarian of Stanford University, Michael Keller, and the founder of the Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle. Named to chair the committee was John Palfrey, a young Harvard law professor who had written influential books about the internet. The Berkman Center set an ambitious goal of having the digital library begin operating, at least in some rudimentary form, by April of 2013. Over the past year and a half, the project has moved quickly on several fronts.

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And in that case, it’s hard to see how it would be able to distinguish itself. After all, the web already offers plenty of sources for public-domain books. Google still provides full-text, searchable copies of millions of volumes published before 1923. So do the HathiTrust, a big book database run by a consortium of libraries, and Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive. Amazon’s Kindle Store offers thousands of classic books free. And there’s the venerable Project Gutenberg, which has been transcribing public-domain texts and putting them online since 1971 (when the project’s founder, Michael Hart, typed the Declaration of Independence into a mainframe at the University of Illinois).

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives
by Steven Levy
Published 12 Apr 2011

Everywhere top Googlers went, they were drawn into dramatic confrontations over the settlement. In an August 2009 informal conference in Sebastopol, California, called Foo Camp, Pam Samuelson moderated a session on the controversy. Brewster Kahle was there, and so was Marissa Mayer. Samuelson’s measured comments dwelled on the lost opportunity when Google had abandoned the fair use argument. (She would later develop those ideas in a lecture entitled “Google Book Settlement: Brilliant but Evil?”) Brewster Kahle spoke of Google as if it were some alien squad invading Earth in a science fiction movie. Google was killing the dream of access to books, he claimed. He was so passionate his hands were trembling.

…

But as people in the world of culture and digital commerce—and Google’s rivals—began to study the agreement, a swell of opposition rose. Eventually the swells became a tsunami. The objections were myriad. Some former allies of Google were incensed that it had given up the fight to legally scan books. One new foe was Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization bent on preserving all documents on the web as well as information in general. Kahle had been involved in his own digitization process under the aegis of an organization called the Open Book Alliance. Now he claimed that Google had become an information monopolist bent on destroying efforts other than its own to make books accessible.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand
by John Markoff
Published 22 Mar 2022

The closest town was Ely, Nevada, which was forty miles from Great Basin National Park. “I’m dying to just jump in a car and go investigate,” Brand wrote the board. At the end of September 1998, he drove his Range Rover across Nevada to Ely, where he met Danny Hillis and his then wife, Patti; Rose; Kennedy; Saffo; and Brewster Kahle. Kahle, a New Yorker who had studied computer science at MIT and then worked for Hillis at Thinking Machines, had come to the West Coast to create Alexa, an early search engine he had sold to Jeff Bezos for $250 million in Amazon stock. Concerned that the ephemeral digital information that made up the World Wide Web would be easily lost, in 1996 Kahle had created the Internet Archive as a nonprofit repository for the world’s digital information.

…

“I see why people would rather just start over,” Phelan said. “I would.” Brand pushed the doubts aside. He was committed. * * * Shortly before the stroke of midnight at the turn of the new millennium in 2000, a crowd of thirty people gathered in the combined offices of the Long Now Foundation and Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive. By now the Presidio’s residential housing had been converted to upscale rentals for the dot-com workforce. For several years it would also become home to both Brand and Phelan and to Paul Hawken when they rented homes that had been former officers’ quarters. Kahle lived in the Presidio as well.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 2 Mar 2015

Architecting IT, http://blog.architecting.it/2014/04/18/iaas-series-cloud-storage-pricing-how-low-can-they-go. store every tweet ever sent: K. Young (6 Sep 2012), “How much would it cost to store the entire Twitter Firehose?” Mortar: Data Science at Scale, http://blog.mortardata.com/post/31027073689/how-much-would-it-cost-to-store-the-entire-twitter. every phone call ever made: Brewster Kahle (2013), “Cost to store all US phonecalls made in a year so it could be datamined,” https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc? key=0AuqlWHQKlooOdGJrSzhBVnh0WGlzWHpCZFNVcURkX0E#gid=0. In 2013, the NSA completed: James Bamford (15 Mar 2012), “The NSA is building the country’s biggest spy center (watch what you say),” Wired, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all.

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The UK police won’t even admit: Joseph Cox (7 Aug 2014), “UK police won’t admit they’re tracking people’s phone calls,” Vice, http://motherboard.vice.com/read/uk-police-wont-admit-theyre-tracking-peoples-phone-calls. Those who receive such a letter: This is a fascinating first-person account of what it’s like to receive a National Security Letter. It was published anonymously, but was later revealed to be the work of Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle. Anonymous (23 Mar 2007), “My National Security Letter gag order,” Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/22/AR2007032201882.html. the reason the FBI: Kim Zetter (3 Mar 2014), “Florida cops’ secret weapon: Warrantless cellphone tracking,” Wired, http://www.wired.com/2014/03/stingray.

Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World
by Clive Thompson
Published 26 Mar 2019

“We shared programs to whoever wanted to use them, they were human knowledge,” Richard Stallman, one of MIT’s most prolific hackers, later recalled. Indeed, the MIT coders were so communitarian that they didn’t even put their names on code they’d written. “Signing code was thought of as arrogant,” recalls Brewster Kahle, who arrived at the lab in 1980. “It was all for building the machine. It was a community project.” Sure, the hackers could each be deeply individualistic and each individually convinced of their superior awesomeness. But coding itself? That was a group effort, an intellectual barn raising where all strove to make the computer do cool stuff for everyone’s sake.

…

After JSTOR and MIT complained, Swartz returned the digital copies to them, and never distributed them online; but the US Department of Justice, apparently looking to make a statement, charged Swartz with computer fraud. Facing penalties of up to $1 million and decades in jail, he committed suicide. “Aaron was persecuted for reading too quickly in a library,” says Brewster Kahle, a cofounder of the Aaron Swartz hackathon along with Lisa Rein, herself a cofounder of Creative Commons. After his MIT hacking days in the ’80s, Kahle made millions with start-ups in the ’90s, then founded the Internet Archive. The Archive makes copies of great swathes of the internet each day to save for posterity, and it also scans everything from old books to vinyl records to video games that are in the public domain, and posts them online: Swartz’s vision made reality, in a way.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
by Jonathan Taplin
Published 17 Apr 2017

Like the Kochs, Google and Facebook are in the extraction industry—their business model is to extract as much personal data from as many people in the world at the lowest possible price and to resell that data to as many companies as possible at the highest possible price—data is the new oil. And like Koch Industries, Google and Facebook create externalities during the extraction process. Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive, outlined some of these externalities: Edward Snowden showed we’ve inadvertently built the world’s largest surveillance network with the web. China can make it impossible for people there to read things, and just a few big service providers are the de facto organizers of your experience.

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
by Tamara Kneese
Published 14 Aug 2023

Digital technologies originally designed for one purpose or one demographic can be repurposed, reimagined, and reconfigured through death care practices as a constellation of human and nonhuman actors work together to manage the data of the dead. Human and technological death can expose the collective networks that produce and maintain communicative traces. The body, or really many bodies, those of both the living and the dead, are always behind the screen. Notes Introduction 1. Founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle, the Internet Archive, headquartered in San Francisco, strives to preserve the entire web, including internet history, and to digitize every book and other media object available. Its Wayback Machine uses a web crawler to capture websites at various points in time, preserving web pages’ former appearances, deleted posts, and defunct platforms. 2.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

Between 1956 and 2000 there were sixty tape video formats, already a formidable number; today over three hundred video file formats exist, many of them proprietary. For files in these formats to be successfully archived, the software for playing them and machines that can run that software must be in working order. Faced with this rapid pace of change and growing stacks of outdated hard drives, Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive and leader of the open access movement, announced in 2011 that he would refocus his efforts on preserving paper books. “We’re discovering what librarians have known for centuries in this new digital world,” Kahle told NPR, confessing that he felt he had been naive.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Published 28 Feb 2008

One disturbing feature of Web media is their potential evanescence. Because many sites are labors of love (for reasons discussed in the book), there is no guarantee that the materials will last for years, much less decades. Many organizations are working on long-term solutions to this problem; the most fully realized effort is Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive, at archive.org. Among the services hosted at the Internet Archive is the Wayback Machine, which contains snapshots of an enormous number of websites taken over a period of years. For instance, a search of the Wayback Machine for material relating to the story of Ivanna’s phone produces a list of archived copies of Evan’s website, available at the rather lengthy URL web.archive.org/web/*/evanwashere.com/StolenSidekick (the * is part of the URL).

Possiplex
by Ted Nelson
Published 2 Jan 2010

Cone, Sean Harmon, Steve Ditlea, Catherine Ikam, Bill Gates, Lauren Sarno, Marc Stiegler, Elisabeth Davenport, Marlene Mallicoat, David Bunnell, Andrew Pam and Katherine Phelps, Yuzuru Tanaka, Edward Harter, Bob Heyman, Kay Nishi, Mike and Krystyna Pikowski, Hajime Ohiwa, Kenji Naemura, Nobuo Saito, Laurie Spiegel, Yoshihisa Ogawa, Wendy Hall, Pierre de la Coste, Pierre Oudart, Alain Giffard, Xavier Perrot, Frode Hegland, Henry Lowood, Mike Keller, Helen Ashman, Tim Brailsford, Sellam Ismail, Brewster Kahle and Mary K. Austin, Douglas and Karen Engelbart, William Dutton, Arthur Bullard, Kuniko Kono, Duncan Whitmore. I hope none have been omitted. (I am not including family members, collaborators, employers, assistants, business associates or lovers per se.) For Marlene— sweet, clever, tenacious, loving, magical.

No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
by Naomi Klein
Published 12 Jun 2017

White House: de facto ban on talking about climate change Valerie Volcovici and P.J. Huffstutter, “Trump Administration Seeks to Muzzle U.S. Agency Employees,” Reuters.com, January 24, 2017, http://www.reuters.com/​article/​us-usa-trump-epa-idUSKBN15822X. Internet Archive: hundreds of billions of webpages, set up a backup server in Canada Amy Goodman, Brewster Kahle, and Laurie Allen, “Facing Possible Threats under Trump, Internet Archive to Build Server in Canada,” Democracy Now!, December 29, 2016, https://www.democracynow.org/​2016/​12/​29/​facing_possible_threats_under_trump_internet. “Data rescue” events Lisa Song and Zahra Hirji, “The Scramble to Protect Climate Data under Trump,” Inside Climate News, January 20, 2017, https://insideclimatenews.org/​news/​19012017/​climate-change-data-science-denial-donald-trump.

The Boy Who Could Change the World: The Writings of Aaron Swartz
by Aaron Swartz and Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Jan 2016

Hundreds from all over the world gathered there to discuss the magic that is Wikipedia, thinking hard about what it means and why it works. It was an amazing intellectual and emotional experience. The main attraction was seeing the vibrant Wikipedia community. There were the hardcore Wikipedians, who spend their days reviewing changes and fixing pages. And there were the elder statesmen, like Larry Lessig and Brewster Kahle, who came to meet the first group and tell them how their work fits into a bigger picture. Spending time with all these people was amazing fun—they’re all incredibly bright, enthusiastic, and, most shockingly, completely dedicated to a cause greater than themselves. At most “technology” conferences I’ve been to, the participants generally talk about technology for its own sake.

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold
Published 24 Dec 2011

A smaller invitational network of experts, a self-organized community of interest, or an organizational unit can use the same system to increase their individual and collective knowledge. Individuals are given the power to determine whether their annotations and surfing habits are published, and to whom, but all they need to do at the minimum is surf the Web and bookmark sites that interest them. Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat created a Web surfers’ collaborative filtering system, Alexa Internet, in 1996.12 Alexa is an implicit filtering system: When a person using it visits a Web site, the person’s Web browser provides a menu of Web sites that have been visited by other surfers who have visited the same page.

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US
by Rana Foroohar
Published 5 Nov 2019

Some three-fourths of the books that Google aimed to copy were still under copyright—and Varian and the other Googlers knew that many, if not most, of the authors probably wouldn’t opt in.22 So, they decided to settle, ultimately agreeing to a compromise in which Google would agree to show only snippets of books that were under copyright for free in exchange for becoming the exclusive seller of digital copies of out-of-print books for the publishing houses and authors that agreed to the settlement. Google, which was earning about $10 billion in yearly revenue at that point, would pay the relatively tiny sum of $125 million to establish a registry of book rights holders and pay lawyers to organize the system and the payouts. It was a complete coup for Big Tech. Brewster Kahle, the head of the nonprofit Internet Archive, which wanted to do its own book-scanning project, claimed (not incorrectly) that Google had become an information monopolist. Even Lawrence Lessig, the digital law expert who favors many of the policies that the platforms support, said that Google’s deal was the equivalent of a “digital bookstore, not a digital library.”23 What he means is that even as Google was presenting the entire project as being done for the benefit of users, Google itself would ultimately benefit the most.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
by Brad Stone
Published 14 Oct 2013

The alternative was to shift to the model used by rivals like Buy.com, which took orders online but had products drop-shipped from manufacturers and distributors like Ingram. That St. Patrick’s Day, some of Amazon’s biggest brains descended on a drab meeting room at the Fernley, Nevada, fulfillment center. Jeff Bezos and Brewster Kahle, a supercomputer engineer and founder of Alexa Internet, a data-mining company Amazon had acquired, made the two-hour flight from Seattle on Bezos’s newly purchased private plane, a Dassault Falcon 900 EX. Stephen Graves flew from Massachusetts to Reno and then drove the dreary thirty-four miles through the desert to Fernley.

The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See
by Gary Price , Chris Sherman and Danny Sullivan
Published 2 Jan 2003

In fact, the last item on the list above, databases accessed via Web interfaces, make up a significant portion of the Invisible Web. Later chapters will delve deeply into the fascinating and tremendously useful world of Web accessible databases. 8 The Invisible Web A third major search protocol developed around this time was Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS). Developed by Brewster Kahle and his colleagues at Thinking Machines, WAIS worked much like today’s metasearch engines. The WAIS client resided on your local machine, and allowed you to search for information on other Internet servers using natural language, rather than using computer commands. The servers themselves were responsible for interpreting the query and returning appropriate results, freeing the user from the necessity of learning the specific query language of each server.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots
by John Markoff
Published 24 Aug 2015

A student in computer science first at the State University of New York at Buffalo, he then entered graduate programs in computer science at both Washington University in St. Louis and Stanford, but dropped out of both programs before receiving an advanced degree. Once he was on the West Coast, he had gotten involved with Brewster Kahle’s Internet Archive Project, which sought to save a copy of every Web page on the Internet. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had given Hassan stock for programming PageRank, and Hassan also sold E-Groups, another of his information retrieval projects, to Yahoo! for almost a half-billion dollars. By then, he was a very wealthy Silicon Valley technologist looking for interesting projects.

Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy as We Know It
by Kashmir Hill
Published 19 Sep 2023

My eternal gratitude to Trevor Timm, Monica Oriti, Maureen Taravella, Noah McCormack, Kate Shem, Dan Auerbach, Jonathan Auerbach, Chris, Ben Wizner, Radiance Chapman, Elie Mystal, and, again, because he more than deserves it, David Enrich. The Internet Archive provided access to reference texts that were otherwise seemingly unobtainable, and I relied on the Wayback Machine countless times. Thank you, Brewster Kahle, for that essential digital library. The public records center MuckRock was another godsend. I had hoped to make my way to Russia and China for this book, but the pandemic and a war got in the way of that. I am thankful to my hosts on the trips that I did take—Daniel Rivero in Miami and Liz Sabri in London—and to the Kinds for the lovely dinner party.

Howard Rheingold
by The Virtual Community Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier-Perseus Books (1993)
Published 26 Apr 2012

The computers on the Net can help keep track of the information on the Net, and they can distribute their indexes among one another. The problem of finding enough computing power to build an effective software go-between to control the complexities of the Net becomes far more computation-intensive when you want to search the Net for chunks of text rather than just the names of files. Another Net visionary by the name of Brewster Kahle conceived of a powerful text-finder that will literally hunt through hundreds of databases and libraries on the Net for text that contains specific information. The tool, developed jointly by Kahle and Dow Jones, Thinking Machines, Apple Computer, and KPMC Peat Marwick, is freely available to Net users as WAIS--Wide Area Information Servers.

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It
by Jonathan Zittrain
Published 27 May 2009

See Miguel.Mora.Design, http://www.miquelmora.com/idps.html (last visited July 28, 2007). 124. TED NELSON, LITERARY MACHINES (1981); Wikipedia, Transclusion, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transclusion (as of June 1, 2007, 10:30 GMT). 125. Consider, for example, the Internet Archive. Proprietor Brewster Kahle has thus far avoided what one would think to be an inevitable copyright lawsuit as he archives and makes available historical snapshots of the Web. He has avoided such lawsuits by respecting Web owners’ wishes to be excluded as soon as he is notified. See Internet Archive FAQ, http://www.archive.org/about/faqs.php (last visited June 1, 2007). 126.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us
by Tim O'Reilly
Published 9 Oct 2017

We’d built GNN by reinvesting the profits from our publishing business, exploring an exciting new medium that we thought we’d eventually turn into a real business. When we sold GNN, we received more than we could have earned in a decade selling our books at the rate we were selling them in 1995. GNN was one of a series of purchases, along with Dave Wetherell’s BookLink and Brewster Kahle’s WAIS, that AOL bought for a collective amount of about $100 million in stock. The purchases signaled to the market that AOL was becoming an Internet company. I watched in awe as AOL’s market capitalization rose by first a billion dollars, and eventually many, many billions. AOL didn’t actually succeed in transforming itself from the dominant company of the dial-up networking era into the leader of the commercial Internet, but the expectation that it would be able to do so made it possible for it to buy Time Warner, a company many times its size in the real market of goods and services.

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
by Ray Kurzweil
Published 14 Jul 2005

(http://www.computerhistory.org). 42. Lyman and Kahle on long-term storage: "While good paper lasts 500 years, computer tapes last 10. While there are active organizations to make copies, we will keep our information safe, we do not have an effective mechanism to make 500 year copies of digital materials...." Peter Lyman and Brewster Kahle, "Archiving Digital Cultural Artifacts: Organizing an Agenda for Action," D-Lib Magazine, July–August 1998. Stewart Brand writes: "Behind every hot new working computer is a trail of bodies of extinct computers, extinct storage media, extinct applications, extinct files. Science fiction writer Bruce Sterling refers to our time as 'the Golden Age of dead media, most of them with the working lifespan of a pack of Twinkles," Stewart Brand, "Written on the Wind," Civilization Magazine, November 1998 ("01998" in Long Now terminology), available online at http://www.longnow.org/10klibrary/library.htm. 43.

Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980
by Rick Perlstein
Published 17 Aug 2020

Linder of the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law, whose Famous-Trials.com was useful in reconstructing the trial of Dan White; Dave Leip, whose U.S. Elections Atlas provides indispensable statistics; the diehard Saturday Night Live fans behind SNLtranscripts.jt.org; and Hawes Publications, which has uploaded every week’s New York Times bestseller list for easy reference. Brewster Kahle is an American hero for providing a platform for crowdsourced historian preservation through his nonprofit Internet Archive, where, for example, one kind soul uploaded transcripts of all the ABC News broadcasts from 1979 to 1980. Julian Assange remains a controversial figure, but the State Department documents uploaded to Wikileaks.org documenting the fall of the Shah of Iran were indispensable to me.