If you walk into the Internet Archive’s headquarters on a Friday after lunch, when it offers tours to the public, chances are you’ll be greeted by its founder and cheeriest cheerleader, Brewster. Kahle.
You can’t miss the building; it looks like it was designed for some Grecian-themed Las Vegas attraction and dropped at random in San Francisco’s balmy, foggy Richmond district. As you pass by the white Corinthian columns at the entrance, Kahle shows you the classic Prince of Persia arcade game and a gramophone that plays centuries-old phonograph cylinders on display. displayed in the lobby. He will lead you into a large room, with rows of wooden benches sloping toward the podium. Baroque ceiling moldings frame the large stained glass dome. Before becoming the headquarters of the Archives, the building housed a Christian Science church.
I made this pilgrimage on a cool afternoon last May. Along with about a dozen other tourists, I followed Kahle, 63, wearing a rumpled orange shirt and wire-rimmed round glasses, as he showed us his life’s work. When the afternoon light shines on the dome of the hall, it gives everyone a halo. Especially Kahle, whose silver curls caught the sun and who preached the gospel with her endearing evangelism, talked with her hands, and easily laughed. “I think people feel overwhelmed by technology these days,” Kahle said. “We need to humanize it.”
In the large room where the tour ends, hundreds of colorful, handcrafted clay statues line the walls. They represent the staff of the Internet Archive, Kahle’s quirky way of maintaining his circle. They’re beautiful and strange, but they’re not the grand finale. Against the back wall, where one might find confessionals of a different kind of church, there is a noisy black server tower. These servers hold about 10% of the Internet Archive’s massive digital archive, which includes 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Little lights on each server flash on and off every time someone opens an old website or looks at a book or uses the Archive’s services. Continuous, arrhythmic flashing lights create a hypnotic light show. No one seemed to enjoy this performance more than Kahle.
It’s no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive—and that, as the world’s knowledge repositories increasingly go online, archiving as we know will no longer work. Its most famous project, the Wayback Machine, is an archive of websites that functions as a great record of the Internet. Zooming out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed its default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The profound interest that the Internet Archive inspires has been achieved—without it, the world would have lost the finest public resource in the history of the Internet.
Its staff are some of the most devoted parishioners. “It’s the best of the old Internet and the best of old San Francisco, and none of it is really existence on a large scale as well.” likes to ride bicycles and likes to paint his nails black. “It’s a window into the late ’90s web ethos and late ’90s San Francisco culture—the rough side, before it had all the technology. That’s the utopia, that’s the ideal.”
