If you walk into the Internet Archive headquarters on a Friday after lunch, when it offers public tours, there’s a good chance you’ll be greeted by its founder and cheeriest cheerleader, Brewster Kahle.
The building cannot be bypassed; it looks like it was designed for some Greek attraction in Las Vegas and ended up accidentally in San Francisco’s hazy, serene Richmond neighborhood. Once you pass the white Corinthian columns at the entrance, Kahle shows you an ancient Prince of Persia arcade game and a gramophone that plays century-old gramophone cylinders on display in the lobby. He will lead you to a gigantic hall filled with rows of wooden benches tilted towards the pulpit. Baroque ceiling moldings surround a gigantic stained glass dome. Before it became the headquarters of the Archives, the building housed a Christian Science church.
I made this pilgrimage on a windy afternoon last May. Along with about a dozen other guests, I followed Kahle, 63, wearing rumpled orange button-down glasses and round wire-rimmed glasses, as he showed us his life’s work. When the afternoon featherlight falls on the dome of the Great Hall, it creates a halo in everyone’s eyes. Especially Kahle, whose silver locks catch the sun and who preaches his gospel with genial evangelism, speaking with his hands and laughing easily. “I think people feel defeated by technology these days,” Kahle says. “We need to re-humanize it.”
In the gigantic room where the tour ends, hundreds of colorful, handmade clay statues line the walls. They represent employees of the Internet Archive, which is Kahle’s quirky way of immortalizing her circle. They are lovely and strange, but they are not the grand finale. Against the back wall, where confessionals might be found in another church, stands a tower of buzzing black waiters. These servers host approximately 10 percent of the Internet Archive’s huge digital resources, which include 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings. Minuscule lights on each server flicker on and off every time someone opens an ancient website, reads a book, or otherwise uses the Archive’s services. Continuous, arrhythmic flickering creates a hypnotic featherlight show. No one looks more thrilled with this show than Kahle.
It is no exaggeration to say that digital archiving as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive, and that as knowledge repositories around the world increasingly come online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. Her most notable project, the Wayback Machine, is a website repository that functions as an unparalleled record of the Internet. When scaled down, the Internet Archive is one of the most crucial historic preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed its default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic respect the Internet Archive is attracting is well-deserved – without it, the world would lose the best public resource on the history of the Internet.
Its employees are some of the most dedicated believers. “It’s the best of the old Internet and the best of old San Francisco, but neither of those things exist in large quantities anymore,” says Internet Archive director of library services Chris Freeland, another longtime employee who loves riding his bike and loves black paint for nails. “It’s a window into the behind schedule ’90s online ethos and behind schedule ’90s San Francisco culture – the crunchy side before all the technology came out, bro. It’s utopian, idealistic.”