If you walk into the Internet Archive headquarters after lunch on Fridays, when public tours are offered there, chances are you'll be greeted by its founder and happiest cheerleader, Brewster Kahle.
You can't miss the building; it looks like it was designed for some sort of Greek-themed Las Vegas attraction and randomly dropped in San Francisco's misty, mellow Richmond neighborhood. Once you pass the white Corinthian columns of the entrance, Kahle shows you the vintage Prince of Persia arcade game and a phonograph that can play centuries-old phonograph cylinders on display in the foyer. He will lead you into the great hall, filled with rows of wooden benches sloping down to a pulpit. Baroque ceiling moldings frame a large stained glass dome. Before it was the headquarters of the Archives, the building housed a Christian Science church.
I made this pilgrimage last May on a windy afternoon. Together with a dozen other visitors, I followed Kahle, 63, dressed in crumpled orange glasses with round wire rims, as he showed us his life's work. When the afternoon light hits the dome of the great hall, everyone takes on a halo. Especially Kahle, whose silver curls catch the sun and who preaches his gospel with an amiable evangelism, speaking with his hands and laughing easily. “I think people feel overwhelmed by technology these days,” Kahle says. “We have to rehumanize it.”
In the main hall, where the tour ends, hundreds of colorful, handmade clay statues line the walls. They represent the employees of the Internet Archive, Kahle's idiosyncratic way of immortalizing his circle. They're beautiful and weird, but they're not the grand finale. Against the back wall, where you might find confessionals in any other kind of church, stands a tower of buzzing black servers. These servers contain approximately 10 percent of the Internet Archive's vast digital assets, including 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Small lights on each server flash on and off each time someone opens an old web page, checks out a book, or otherwise uses the Archive's services. The constant, arrhythmic flickers create a hypnotic light show. No one seems more excited about this display 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 the world's knowledge repositories increasingly move online, archiving as we know it would not be as functional. The best-known project, the Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that acts as an unparalleled record of the Internet. Zoomed out, the Internet Archive is one of the most important historical preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has taken a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The rhapsodic appreciation that the Internet Archive evokes is well deserved; without it, the world would lose its best public resource in Internet history.
The staff are some of the most dedicated church members. “It's the best of the old Internet, and it's the best of the old San Francisco, and neither of those exist to any great extent anymore,” says Chris Freeland, director of library services at the Internet Archive, another longtime contributor, who holds likes cycling and is in favor of black nail polish. “It's a window into late '90s web ethos and late '90s San Francisco culture – the crunchy side, before it all became tech, bro. It's utopian, it's idealistic.”
