I think I disagree with him on some points ...
Last Friday I visited the Internet Archive. This organization was started by Brewster Kahle, who started Alexa and sold that to Amazon. He took his money and started buying servers to back up the Internet.
Its headquarters is in a former church off of 19th Ave. in San Francisco. Walking in, there are pews and a stack of servers in the corners. It’s a wacky place, but fitting. It felt like visiting the church of the Internet. This is a church that I want to attend!
But as I walked around with Mark Graham, who works on the team that runs the Wayback Machine, I learned about the various things the Internet Archive does, from scanning books to keeping the Grateful Dead’s archive up and running for everyone to enjoy.
I’m taken back to conversations that Internet pioneer Dave Winer and I have had (he’s starting an open web content production service, er, blogging tool at http://1999.io. He continues to push me to support the open web. I used to think of that as everything that isn’t Facebook. Now, however, I think of it as everything that the Internet Archive can get to, back up and make new use of.
Unfortunately, I’ve bet most of my life on the closed web. What’s that? Things like Facebook or even things like Periscope or Snapchat. The media I put into those things are inside walled gardens that the Internet Archive can’t get to. You can’t even view most things on Facebook unless you log in. But worse, I use things like Facebook Live Video, which even if the Internet Archive could get to, it couldn’t back up and use. Why? The format is pretty much only available on Facebook.
More and more things are hidden from the Internet Archive. Uber and Lyft’s data? Hidden. Spotify’s music? Hidden. China’s WeChat? Hidden.
That said, there are millions of things that are backed up and viewable on the Internet Archive at https://archive.org and that’s something we should all celebrate.
You might be shocked by what you find, from old time radio to tons of books and other things. It’s definitely worthy of our support and I’ll try to create more media that the Internet Archive can see and use in the future.
It’s good to know there’s a group of people at the Internet Archive who are working to keep the open web accessible and easy to use like all the great closed web services. If the ‘Internet church’ ever closes down it’ll be a sad day indeed.
To put a punctuation point on this, when I arrived in London this morning I saw this on Facebook, written by Hossein Derakhshan, which says that Zuckerberg, er, Facebook, has destroyed the open web:
http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/mark-zuckerberg-hypocrite-facebook-has-destroyed-open-web-1559298
I disagree. The open web destroyed the open web (by not keeping up with the closed web’s filtering, commenting, identity systems and yes, even advertising).