It can feel like everything is on the internet. From drunken photos of your cousin’s bachelorette party, to the collected works of Shakespeare, to exhaustive synopses of every Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode ever made. The internet is like an archive of everything, right? Well, according to Brewster Kahle, not really. The founder of the Internet Archive talks about the challenges and importance of, well, archiving the internet. 

Three Takeaways:

• You might think that the internet holds all of the world’s info, but according to Kahle: “Almost all the 20th century’s books, magazines, newspapers, are not online.”
• The Internet Archive also preserves the history of the internet. Which means that when the Bush administration changed a press release about the Iraq War after the fact… the original press release was archived.
• Kahle and the Internet Archive take their preservation mission seriously. After President Trump, who has talked about closing the internet up, was elected, the Internet Archive announced plans to create a full backup in Canada.

More reading:

• If you want to hear more about how we store our memories online, check out our interview with Abby Smith Rumsey.
• The Ringer says that the Internet Archive is one of the few undeniably good things in our culture.
• Here’s more on how the Internet Archive is backing itself up in Canada.