Anna Kramer para Protocol:
The glories of the Wayback Machine, the petabytes of data capturing every day of human existence online in warehouses scattered across the world, the smooth system of crawlers marching from my Twitter to the homepage for the Russian government to Clubhouse in China — in the grand scheme of history, all of this could be an ephemeral golden age.
The so-called balkanization of the internet isn’t just a theoretical problem for the Internet Archive. If internet firewalls stay up in China, Iran and Russia, new content continues to move mostly behind paywalls and passwords, and U.S. political leaders decide it’s finally time for Section 230 to go, the crawlers whose simple formulas have preserved the last few decades for future historians might not do the same for more than the next few decades.
Social media companies want us to focus on tomorrow, not on the posts we made a year ago. Publishers do, too. HarperCollins is suing the archive to try to prevent it from sharing out-of-print books in its digital library, arguing that publicly sharing out-of-print books is a massive violation of copyright laws. While at first it might seem odd that publishers would care about books that aren’t in print anymore, for companies whose business depends on people buying new things, archiving so that people can focus on the past is not in their financial interest.
If the balkanization of the internet can be prevented, the Internet Archive could transform the way we learn about larger historical moments, Kahle said. History books and historians are limited to a few textual works, mostly by the powerful people of the time. With the Internet Archive, the everyday history will become suddenly accessible to those studying our time. Imagine if each of us could look back on our great-grandparents and know what they said or thought at age 15, and then 25, and 50. The Archive would allow that.
“Some believe that people will only do things if you pay them, others that people are just sheep,” Kahle said. “None of that is true. They may not be interested in the same things, but when we look at what people produce on the internet, if it’s about the things they care about … They’ll prove you wrong in a nanosecond.”
Vivimos en un momento en que la información que tenemos a nuestro alcance es incesante. ¿Cuánta información nueva se crea cada segundo que pasa? En un instante podemos enterarnos de lo que está sucediendo, pero no tenemos tiempo de reflexionar sobre lo que acaba de suceder el segundo anterior. Todo se vuelve efímero. En parte, el trabajo que realiza Internet Archive es fundamental para la preservación de nuestra cultura y lograr entender nuestro presente. Sin embargo, esto no es lucrativo. Las plataformas nos han acostumbrado a estar siempre buscando lo más nuevo y actual. ¿Cuándo fue la última vez que alguno de nosotros pasó tiempo revisando las publicaciones o imágenes que subió a internet? Es algo que no apreciamos.
Este es sin duda uno de mis proyectos favoritos y desafortunadamente, pareciera que los principios que lo rigen cada vez se vuelven más difusos. Sería lamentable ver que la recolección del espacio de intercambio de conocimiento más grande e importante de la historia se vea mermado por intereses políticos y comerciales.