Brian Gruber 

What is your vision of “the Electronic Frontier?” It’s a catchy phrase.

Brewster Kahle

A line that’s been working for me coalesces activities (around) no centralized points of control. So, that means no central corporate control, no control over ourselves technologically. Government should not be in the way. A move towards decentralization. A game with lots of winners. And we’re building a game that has ever fewer winners.

Brian Gruber 

What did you learn from the SOPA/ PIPA protest about mobilizing people and being active in the modern age?

Brewster Kahle

I think the ‘Eureka!’, the broader realization, was that the Internet is so important to us, not just as a cable TV replacement, it is the way that we live our lives. And those trying to seek control over the Internet ran into a strongly held belief that we have to keep this thing open, rather than letting it be shut down or controlled by large corporations and the government that works for them. That it would massively impact our lives. And it’s not just in what movies we see, it’s not just a video game platform. It’s a broader societal piece of infrastructure.

And people were looking to mess with it. And we rose up. 

Brian Gruber

What is the Internet Archive? And for you, how does it bring to life some of the original, even utopian aspirations of the pioneers of the web?

The Internet Archive is trying to build the pieces to make the internet into the Library of Alexandria for the digital age,” says Kahle. “Can we take all the published works of humankind to make them available to everybody? And can we even take a step further than that and weave in computing, so we build a global mind? Can we do that?

And the answer is, absolutely. The Internet Archive is here to just fill in the pieces that aren’t being done by others. So, we’re a fix-it organization. They didn’t build all the pieces right. Like the long-term memory part. It was just not built in. Oops. And then we didn’t go and move all of the existing materials into this new world. Oops. And then we ended up building a World Wide Web which is becoming an enormous surveillance engine. Oops.

Brian Gruber

Not small matters.

Brewster Kahle 

Not small matters, but they’re all doable. With a really small number of determined people, you can actually get enormous things done. It helps if you’re obsessed.

Brian Gruber

You’ve spent decades organizing information and thinking about the impact of these new media on American and world culture. What’s your ideal or aspiration for how people can engage using the emerging digital tools available to them?

The Internet Archive’s corner of the universe is this idea of universal access to all knowledge. That not only can you read the best works of humankind, but that you can participate and add into it. We’re building something of enduring value. Growing up, trying to get your ideas out there was really difficult. There are the people at your dinner table, but, you know, who gets to be on television, who even gets quoted to be in the news, much less write a news article? No one.

And then, you know, in the 80s, we started to get zines, it was like, wow, this is cool. And we’ve come so far. It’s hard to remember that it was difficult to find other people to share things with if you weren’t geographically close. You know, that was the era of postcards, I mean, pen pals. It just is a little hard to remember that it was much more difficult.

Brian Gruber

In our lifetimes.

In our lifetimes. All of us that have gray hair. We built something pretty tremendous. Let’s protect it. Let’s protect it against those that want to monopolize it, want to filter it, want to put us back in a box.

And that’s SOPA/ PIPA. That’s Snowden. We’ve seen the dark side of this, how far things can get corrupted with the last (2016) presidential election in the United States. No matter what you think of the outcome, the process was dreadful. And it showed flaws and fractures and all sorts of things and how you can get a media landscape corrupted, whether it’s Citizens United flooding the airwaves, or others flooding the Internet. If you had a billion dollars to get somebody elected, which is what it takes, that can buy an awful lot of trolls. And we’re seeing people getting smushed.

What do we do about this? We’ve got to build a stronger and better Internet. The answer for bad speech is more context. What am I looking at? Right now, that’s really difficult to know, it just all flips by, it all seems equally valid. Can we provide a context for people about, well, who wrote that? How long has it been around? Are there controversies about that? Can we surface these things? We can? We haven’t yet. I think we’ve seen some of these outrageous platforms just do things that are not socially good. And getting caught up in the whole venture capitalist-funded, I’m right because I’m rich way of viewing the world. And that’s not true. Or if it’s not illegal, then it’s okay to do. That’s not true.

Laws are very blunt instruments, we have to have people constrain themselves. We have runaway platforms, we have corrupting amounts of money coming in to try to bias people. People are feeling lied to all the time. That makes for cynicism. And we have politicians that think, the more cynicism the more popular they’re going to be. And if it’s happening in the United States, it’s probably happening in every other country as well.

Give me a snapshot of the profile of the person who is really effectively using this knowledge revolution.

Brewster Kahle 

Our parents used to say, “Look it up” as a way of shutting us up. And now we can look it up. And we can find out whether it’s true or not, or least we can have a kind of an idea. There’s Wikipedia. We’ve got a television archive that allows you to go and search based on what people said on the major national television programs. Look at the past versions on the Wayback Machine. If you’re on some website, find out has this been around for a while? Or is this really effervescent? Is this really a news source? Or, where am I?

We’re digitizing books and making them available en masse. We have almost a million of them, modern books. You can check out and read books online for free. And remember that the last time there was a massive fascist swing in the world, 70 years ago, most of those books are not online right now. And the reason why they’re not online is because of inappropriate copyright expansion. Even though we really need this generation to learn from the 20th century, it is largely denied to them. We’re doing what we can to go and find and digitize and make available – at least through lending – the books of the 20th century. Books, TV, web pages.

We’re actively archiving news, and making sure that even if those organizations get smushed, there’s a record. We’re trying to basically hold the Twitter and Instagram and Facebook pages of people that are now in power, trying to give an idea of what these people were saying before they take office. A lot of this they’re trying to erase. You can understand why you’d want to be able to erase it if you’re a private citizen. But if you’re a public figure, what’s the balance here? How do we make these decisions, and get people to step back from the edge of ‘just make more money, money, money.’

And I’d say the other thing is, go to archive.org and upload something. Something that’s meant to last. You could post it to YouTube but you probably don’t, or you could go to your Facebook friends but that’ll not last that long. Take something that you know, some videos, some interview of your parents or your kids. And just hit upload.