It’s always easier to romanticise a concept when it’s something that could happen in the future rather than something that’s happening now. I think that goes some way to explaining peoples’ fascination with concepts like time travel, Web3, or hovercars. It also explains the way that the internet and the web were thought about in their nascency when the internet wasn’t so inter yet. I get the sense the current generation gets a sugar-high from much of the media on the internet, but the concept of the internet as a service is as normalised and, therefore, mundane as any other utility. To them, getting excited about the internet as a technology would be like getting excited about the phone networks or the sewage pipes.
But when the internet was nothing more than a baby crawling its way towards relevancy, it sounded positively transhumanist. Prior to the internet, most of the books in existence would have been beyond your reach, but for the first time, the world’s knowledge would be at everyone’s fingertips. There were a relatively small number of people around you physically, but now, you would be able to talk to any person in any country as if they were sitting right there in your semi-decorated twelve-year-old bedroom. And unlike Web3, hovercars, and quite probably time travel, the hivemind of computers was both a technological possibility and a good idea.
As it transpired, the barriers to the free exchange of information were not as much technological as they were grounded in intellectual property law and the economics of data. It was easier to lay a 4,000km cable underneath the Atlantic than it was to get Oxford or Princeton to share. Rather than ushering in a free exchange of information, the internet became the new global market for information as a commodity. The network is a ten-lane highway where every off-ramp has a toll booth. Anyone who has tried to tap the web as a store of research materials will be used to having paywalls thrust in their face again and again. The knowledge is here, but that doesn’t mean it’s available.
Yet, there are institutions on the web that have upheld that original vision of it as a holy grail of communication and educational resources. None more so than the Internet Archive. It is the closest thing we have to a global library and the only large-scale effort to preserve popular webpages, the web being where much of the modern art and culture is made. Among other items, the Archive contains over 800 billion web pages, tens of millions of books, and almost ten million films. For various pieces of media in its collection, it is one of, or the only, preserving grace.
All academic, educational, and critical works are reliant on an abundance of research materials. For me and many other people making media about media, research is slowed, and certain avenues may even be impossible to go down because of the time and costs associated with accessing research resources. If you’re the sort of person that’s into YouTube essays on where video games collide with other topics or articles on the making of classic TV shows, you should know that their quantity and scope is regularly limited by sky-high paywalls and insufficient preservation. But the Internet Archive has provided some respite. Without it, there are a lot of broader historical and critical projects that just wouldn’t have happened.
Even if you’re not interested in that field of media, the availability of art and education on that art has a bearing on all books, films, or whatever else you may enjoy. Criticism is key to honing the quality of media, educational resources are necessary for people wanting to learn any craft, and I’m not sure I’ve ever found a great artist who didn’t feast on the classics in their field. Think about this from a historical perspective. A society in which water and rich soil is abundant can have strong agriculture, a society in which stone is abundant can build impressive monuments, and a society in which access to art and literature is abundant will have strong media and media literacy.
Then there are the sociopolitical implications. Traditionally, book burnings have been morally unconscionable because they cut off access to certain ideas and experiences. Authoritarian governments have used them because they want to repress politics that advocate for self-determination, including the right of minorities to have their identity recognised and respected. But you don’t have to burn a book or a film to remove its ideas from society’s reach. Making it inaccessible or failing to preserve it so that it decays naturally achieves the same effect. Therefore, we should care just as much about book removal or book rotting as book burning. It’s why Republicans across the U.S. have been trying to revoke books that affirm non-white and LGBTQIA+ identities from school libraries. It’s also why it matters that in many parts of the world, you’re seeing a simultaneous rise of reactionary politics and an underfunding of libraries.
Libraries in the U.S. have been in crisis for a while now. And because in many countries, there’s a correlation between living in a low-income neighbourhood and being non-white, it’s also the libraries near non-white people that are too often the libraries underfunded. But the Internet Archive offers something like the materials politicians and companies are trying to starve out of libraries. It gives access to at least a modest collection of LGBTQIA+ works, no matter how many of those books repugnant bigots in your legislature try to ban. It even offers millions of texts in a form accessible to the disabled which can be hard to come by in person.
We largely depend on capitalists for access to media, but capitalists jump at the chance to produce original products and usually nod off when you suggest preserving the old. Helping people continue to enjoy what they already have is not selling them something new. Worse, old, free works might serve as competition for new, paid works. Academic, educational, and critical works also pose a barrier to corporate monopoly over the media experience. So, not only are private interests disengaged from preserving media, but they are also incentivised to stop its distribution, and for obvious reasons, especially free distribution. As a result, any capitalist state is then unlikely to construct a bulwark against attacks on the open distribution of media. Hence the recent court case Hachette v. Internet Archive, in which a kettle of publishers united to try and demolish the Archive’s lending service, and its outcome, in which the court ruled against Internet Archive.
Some bystanders have been blaming the Internet Archive for the suit, saying that they incurred it by “pushing their luck” in 2020 with their National Emergency Library. The emergency lending scheme let users borrow some modern, high-status books as physical libraries shut down in response to the coronavirus pandemic. But the organisation was acting in a scenario for which there was no legal precedent, and they were resisting the hermitic sealing away of important art and literature. Their only sin was to try and provide people basic educational resources and a little comfort at a time of great fear and societal lockup, and there is no respectable way to stand against that.
The Internet Archive is appealing the ruling, but if the organisation is prevented from lending, you’re not just burning several Library of Alexandria’s worth of resources, you’re threatening the security of libraries and free exchange of information in general. Keep in mind, the Archive only lends as many copies of books as they physically have and only allows borrowing for a maximum of two weeks. If the courts declare the Archive’s program illegal, it’s hard to see how they’re not just saying that the concept of a library is illegal.
Attacks against the Internet Archive compound with LGBT book banning, state neglect of the public in the face of the coronavirus, the disadvantaging of the poor and minorities, and the bushwacking of media criticism via the recent wave of writer lay-offs. Make no mistake, if you care about education, quality media, free of information, or equality, you care about the Internet Archive. And the people who are waging war against it are the people who, when it comes down it, don’t give a fuck about any of those things. Please check out the Archive’s list of actions you can take to help them, and thanks for reading.
