The Existential Threat Facing the "Soul of the Internet"
A call to action on behalf of Internet Archive
At its best, the Internet is a place where community is built and where community is preserved.
One of the most important arenas where the latter occurs is a nonprofit called The Internet Archive. Founded in 1996, Internet Archive is an online library which describes itself as “a nonprofit fighting for universal access to quality information.”
Internet Archive preserves millions of books, radio dramas, concert videos, audio interviews, and more. In addition to this, one of Internet Archive’s most ambitious and most valuable endeavors is The Wayback Machine, which digitally preserves webpages at a particular moment in time. Through the Wayback Machine, we have access to historical views of websites, blog posts, tweets, etc. that would otherwise be lost to hacker attacks, self-deletion, domain lapses, or simply gradual updates.
The Wayback Machine claims to have preserved more than 916 billion such webpages. (Ever want a fun nostalgia trip? Get on the Wayback Machine and type in a URL that you frequently visited 15 years ago. For me, it’s www.lego.com.)
Right now, The Internet Archive is under attack.
A coalition of major record labels are suing Internet Archive for an obscene amount of money over IA’s “Great 78s” project, an effort to preserve historical recordings made on 78rpm shellac records.
If they succeed, there is a good chance that The Internet Archive and all that it has meticulously preserved will cease to exist.
The article you’re reading now is a call to action.
Fight for the Future has put together a petition that has already been signed by hundreds of musicians. You can sign it today.
Why care?
Much of our shared cultural history from recent decades has indeed occurred online, and The Internet Archive is the most thorough record of that history. Not to mention the countless pre-Internet documents that have been digitized for the first time through IA’s work.
Here are a few example anecdotes:
When Paramount Global decided on a whim to remove MTV News from the internet, Internet Archive used the Wayback Machine to create a searchable index of the platform’s two decades of music journalism
When Rapzilla.com—Christian hip-hop’s biggest news outlet—almost ceased to exist because of hacker attacks, their staff was able to use the Wayback Machine to save many articles that would have otherwise been lost.
Earlier this year, I learned about a Deepspace5 album that I’d never heard about before. The only online references to it that I could find were an entry in The Holy Hip Hop Database, a post on r/lostmedia, and an album review of a different album that had been preserved only in the Wayback Machine. (For the whole story of my quest to track down that album, listen to DINO NUGGETS 03.09.)
Not to mention all the times where IA allowed me to access a document that I otherwise would have had to go to the Oxford University library or something to read!
What can you do?
“Instead of paying musicians fair compensation for their art, major record labels are suing to destroy the Internet Archive, claiming that their research library of old music recordings is what’s really hurting musicians,” says the petition introduction. “We all know this just isn’t true.” (The petition is very much worth reading in full.)
Although we are all about physical media here at Midnight Donuts, we don’t neglect the value of digital media and its preservation. To quote from our “Welcome to Midnight Donuts!” article when we first launched, “As time has gone on … the value of physical media (not more valuable than digital, but separately valuable, i.e. valuable in a different way) has become apparent.”
One of the most important leg-ups that digital media has over physical media is the ability to preserve large amounts of information from our shared cultural history in a way that is easily accessible to many many users.
Thanks for reading.
