“The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free.” — Current Affairs editor, quoted by Brewster Kahle

The internet, we were promised, would remember everything. Rather than memory, however, it is now most distinguished by its digital forgetfulness. That’s the warning in Vanishing Culture, a new series of essays published by the San Francisco-based Internet Archive. In its concluding essay by Brewster Kahle — founder of the Internet Archive, member of the Internet Hall of Fame, and the closest thing the web has to an official librarian — he makes the case for preserving the online library system.

“Our evolving digital age can be our next Carnegie moment or it can be a Library of Alexandria moment. It is up to us.”

Today’s internet library system, Kahle argues, is worse than the analogue one he grew up with. It’s faster, he acknowledges, but shallower. The 1976 Copyright Act means that rather than buying digital books, libraries can only rent access in surveillance environments controlled by a handful of corporations. Sixty percent of news organisations now have paywalls. Academic publishing is controlled by three conglomerates. So an entire generation is growing up without access to the published works of the twentieth century.

“The truth is paywalled, and the lies are free,” as the editor of Current Affairs put it. That is today’s internet. No laughter. Only forgetting.

Five Takeaways

• Carnegie Moment or Alexandria Moment: The Internet Archive’s pamphlet Vanishing Culture opens with a choice. Andrew Carnegie invested in public libraries during the early twentieth century: every town in America got one, and by the time the US was thrust onto the world stage after World War II, an educated public was ready. The Library of Alexandria burned. Kahle’s argument: we are at the same fork in the road. The digital transition can be a Carnegie moment — everyone with access to all human knowledge — or it can be an Alexandria moment. Sixty percent of news organisations now have paywalls. Academic publishing is controlled by three conglomerates. The library system we have is worse, not better, than the one Kahle grew up with.

• The 1976 Copyright Act as Original Sin: Copyright used to be opt-in: you had to put a ‘c’ on your work and register it. The 1976 Act made it opt-out: everything is copyrighted by default, forever, with terms that keep being extended. The consequences: Wikipedia had to be written from scratch because the encyclopedias already written couldn’t be shared openly. Academic papers are walled inside publisher systems, which is why arXiv exists. Libraries can no longer buy digital books — only rent access in surveillance environments. The bargain between publishers, libraries, authors, and the public that functioned for centuries has been dissolved by lobbyists writing copyright law.

• The Truth Is Paywalled and the Lies Are Free: Kahle’s most quotable line belongs to someone else — the editor of Current Affairs. But Kahle endorses it fully. An entire generation is now growing up without access to the published works of the twentieth century. People are genuinely confused about whether the Holocaust happened — not because the information doesn’t exist, but because it’s behind a paywall. What is free on the internet is what serves the interests of the platforms: viral, emotional, algorithmically optimised, frequently false. The deep, sourced, accurate record costs money to access. That inversion is not an accident. It is the business model.

• Turnkey Tyranny: Kahle quotes Edward Snowden’s phrase for what surveillance capitalism has built: turnkey tyranny. All it needs is someone motivated to think tyrannically, and all the laws, policies, and technologies are already in place. The internet was built on a protocol: play by the rules and you’re in. That openness is gone. What replaced it is a small number of platforms with enormous centralised control of distribution, purchasing the upstream sources — Comcast buying movie studios, Amazon buying MGM. Whoever controls distribution, Lawrence Lessig’s maxim holds, will eventually control everything upstream from it.

• AI Mass Larceny? The Real Loser Is People: Asked the binary question — is AI mass larceny, yes or no? — Kahle refuses it. His answer: the fight between publishers and AI companies is Coke versus Pepsi. The real dynamic is large corporations — whether you call them AI companies or publishing conglomerates — taking from people’s goodwill, their creative output, their authorship, and landing the value in very few hands. What Kahle wants is public AI: ClimateGPT, reading the Sri Lankan 1953 fish reports and seeing the patterns in them. AI that serves the public good, not the shareholders of one, two, or three gigantic players. The answer isn’t either Coke or Pepsi. It’s water.

About the Guest

Brewster Kahle is the founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive, a member of the Internet Hall of Fame, and the author or editor of Vanishing Culture (Internet Archive, 2024). He was previously the founder of WAIS and Alexa Internet. He lives in San Francisco.

References:

• Internet Archive — archive.org.

• Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Disappearing Digital Heritage, ed. Brewster Kahle et al. (Internet Archive, 2024). Available free at archive.org.

• arXiv (arxiv.org) — the open-access preprint server that routes around academic publishing.

• Episode 2877: Keith Teare — Let’s Just Say It Out Loud: AI Is Not Dangerous. The counterpoint to Kahle’s wariness about AI centralisation.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen. In Keen On America, Andrew brings his pointed Transatlantic wit to making sense of the United States — hosting daily interviews about the history and future of this now venerable Republic. With nearly 2,900 episodes since the show launched on TechCrunch in 2010, Keen On America is the most prolific intellectual interview show in the history of podcasting.

Chapters:

(00:30) - The internet’s librarian: forgetting vs. surveillance
(01:55) - Carnegie moment or Alexandria moment?
(03:20) - Andrew Carnegi...