If you walk into the Internet Archive headquarters on a Friday after lunch, when it offers public tours, you’ll likely be greeted by its founder and most cheerful entertainer, Brewster Kahle.
You can’t miss the building; It looks like it was designed for some kind of Greek-themed Las Vegas attraction and was randomly dropped into San Francisco’s foggy, sleepy Richmond district. Once you pass the white Corinthian columns at the entrance, Kahle will show you the antique Prince of Persia arcade game and a gramophone that can play century-old phonograph cylinders on display in the lobby. He will lead you into the large room, filled with rows of wooden benches sloping toward a pulpit. Baroque ceiling moldings frame a large stained glass dome. Before being the headquarters of the Archive, the building housed a Christian Science church.
I made this pilgrimage on a windy afternoon last May. Along with about a dozen other visitors, I followed Kahle, 63, dressed in a rumpled orange shirt and round, wire-rimmed glasses, as he showed us his life’s work. When the afternoon light hits the dome of the great hall, it creates a halo for everyone. Especially Kahle, whose silver curls reflect the sun and who preaches her gospel with gentle evangelism, talking with her hands and laughing easily. “I think people feel overwhelmed by technology today,” says Kahle. “We need to rehumanize him.”
In the large room, where the tour ends, hundreds of colorful, hand-made clay statues line the walls. They represent the employees of the Internet Archive, Kahle’s peculiar way of immortalizing her circle. They are beautiful and strange, but they are not the grand finale. Against the back wall, where one might find confessionals in a different type of church, is a tower of humming black servants. These servers contain about 10 percent of the Internet Archive’s vast digital holdings, which include 835 billion web pages, 44 million books and texts, and 15 million audio recordings, among other artifacts. Little lights on each server blink every time someone opens an old web page, checks out a book, or uses the Archive’s services. The constant, arrhythmic flashing creates a hypnotic light show. No one seems more delighted by this exhibition than Kahle.
It is no exaggeration to say that the digital archive as we know it would not exist without the Internet Archive and that, as the world’s knowledge repositories become increasingly online, the archive as we know it would not be as functional. His most famous project, Wayback Machine, is a repository of web pages that serves as an unrivaled record of the Internet. Remotely, the Internet Archive is one of the largest historical preservation organizations in the world. The Wayback Machine has assumed a default position as a safety valve against digital oblivion. The enthusiastic consideration that the Internet Archive inspires is earned: without it, the world would lose its best public resource on the history of the Internet.
His employees are some of his most devoted parishioners. “It’s the best of the old Internet, and it’s the best of the old San Francisco, and neither of those things exist to a large extent anymore,” says Internet Archive director of library services Chris Freeland, another former staff member, who She loves to ride her bike and prefers black nail polish. “It’s a window to the web spirit of the late ’90s and the culture of late ’90s San Francisco: the crunchy side, before it went all technological. It is utopian, it is idealistic.”