If you walk into the Internet Archive’s headquarters after lunch on a Friday when it’s open to the public, there’s a good chance you’ll be greeted by its founder and most cheerful cheerleader, Brewster Carre.
You can’t miss this building. It was apparently designed for a Greek-themed Las Vegas attraction and placed randomly in San Francisco’s foggy, serene Richmond District. Once you pass the white Corinthian columns at the entrance, Kahle shows you the vintage Prince of Persia arcade game on display in the foyer and a gramophone that can play 100-year-old gramophone cylinders. He leads you into a large room filled with rows of wooden chairs angled toward the pulpit. Baroque ceiling moldings frame a grand stained glass dome. Before becoming the Archives’ headquarters, the building housed the Christian Science Church.
I made this pilgrimage on a balmy afternoon last May. Along with about a dozen other visitors, we follow Mr. Kahle, 63, in a rumpled orange button-down and round wire-rimmed glasses, as he shows us his life’s work. The afternoon light hits the dome of the Great Hall, casting a halo over everyone. Especially Kahle, whose silver curls catch the sun, speaks with his hands, laughs easily, and preaches the gospel with his affable evangelism. “I think people are feeling overwhelmed by technology these days,” Karl said. “We need to humanize it.”
The tour ends in a large room with hundreds of colorful handmade clay statues lining the walls. They represent employees of the Internet Archive, a quirky way to immortalize Mr. Carre’s circle. They’re beautiful and strange, but they’re not the grand finale. Against the back wall, where you might find a confessional in a different kind of church, there is a tower of black ministers humming. These servers house approximately 10% of the Internet Archive’s vast digital assets, including 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and documents, 15 million audio recordings, and other artifacts. A small light flashes on each server every time someone opens an old web page, checks out a book, or uses the archive’s services. Constant arrhythmic flickers create a hypnotic light show. No one is more excited about this exhibit than Karl.
Brewster Kahle, founder and biggest cheerleader of the Internet Archive.
Photo: Gabriela Hasbun
It’s no exaggeration to say that digital archives as we know them would not exist without the Internet Archive. And as more of the world’s knowledge repositories move online, archives as we know them will become less functional. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that serves as an unparalleled record of the Internet. Zooming out, the Internet Archive is one of the world’s most important historic preservation organizations. The wayback machine occupies the default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. Despite the enthusiasm it evokes, without it the world would be without the best public resource on the history of the Internet.
Its employees are some of its most dedicated believers. “This is the best of the old Internet, and the best of old San Francisco, and neither of those things exist on a large scale anymore,” said another longtime staffer, director of library services at the Internet Archive. , says Chris Freeland. I love cycling and prefer black nail polish. “It’s a window into the crunchy side of the late ’90s web mentality and late ’90s San Francisco culture, before technology was all over the place. It’s utopian, it’s idealistic. It’s true.”
