Interview to Brewster Kahle
For the occasion of the second radio show of Special Issue 28, I interviewed Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. I also interviewed his wife, Mary Austin, about her marvellous work on punctuation, and her interview is here.
Here is the audio of the entire interview to Brewster.
Full transcription
Tommi: Here is Tommi, recording from the Internet Archive Europe’s newly founded headquarters. The organization has been existing since 2004 already. And I am together with Brewster Kahle, its founder, and I have the honour to interview him today and get him out of his comfort zone a little, because we are gonna experiment. And the first question I want to ask you, it’s more about your approach to your information and knowledge management. Because as a person who founded the greatest and biggest digital library in the world, or the biggest library at all in the world, I was wondering, how do you handle so much inflow of information and, in particular, how do you take notes?
Brewster: You mean personally or how does the organization take in information?
Tommi: No, no, you personally.
Brewster: Oh, I fumble it badly. Um, There’s all these darned communication systems now, and it just floods in with messages. And unfortunately, everybody that sends messages thinks they should be seen immediately. It’s a disaster. So there are other people that help a great deal. Caitlyn Olsen in the United States, Beatrice Murch here in Europe.
Tommi: And about the process you used to learn, I follow you on the Fediverse and I see that sometimes you post about things from centuries ago as well as contemporary stuff you discover. And I’m wondering how do you stumble upon them and how do you deal with processing this information and these interesting things that you learn?
Brewster: I’m mostly find out about things from the people I know, and also, you know, and they refer things and it sort of bounces around, reading, of course, helps a whole heck of a lot. So I don’t think I’m all that unusual for somebody that was, you know, born in the late 20th century.
Tommi: I understand. Yeah, maybe my struggle and our struggle as a generation is more with the fact that we have never been in a moment where there are no new information or no new things that bounce around us, except if we isolate ourselves into nature. And this is something that it’s very hard to keep up with, and this is exactly why I asked you this question. But getting more into the broader topic, I would love to ask you, first of all, how do you believe protocols can shape our way of understanding things and accessing them?
Brewster: McLan said
the medium is the message
, how things are framed actually determines what’s said. The webpages or blog posts, all kind of look and feel kind of like each other. All tweets look like each other, all Mastodon posts kind of look like each other. So, yeah, that’s those that create a framework or a medium or a protocol or a messaging system, they have a great deal of influence about how people use it, and even when people use it, and they think that they’re thinking for themselves, they’re often within the framework of the people that set things up.
Tommi: And this brings me to like the second question, more to the core of what we are exploring with the XPUB master, which is how does the defining the protocol define the way we process things? Let me frame it better, in a more timely manner: AI right now, it’s something that we feel as end users, we can ask anything and get the results, right? But behind the scenes, as you said, as we know, there is a lot of information, a huge dataset and a protocol, a software that manages how that dataset is turned into a reply. I was wondering, since you have a project with the Internet Archive Europe that tries to tackle exactly this aspect of having different approaches, different framing of the same reply, how do you think AI can be shaped in a better way in this sense?
Brewster: Well, garbage in garbage out is a big problem. Everybody under the age of 40 was pretty much brought up on what they read on screens. And we’re seeing civil discourse just dissolve that basically people are not understanding what’s true, what’s not true, and the like. And so I think one of the problems that we saw sort of during this sort of “search engine era” is we didn’t put the best we know on the net, and people will learn from whatever they can get a hold of. So it shouldn’t be any surprise that people are learning from, well, not the best. So we have a Current Affairs editor as the way he put it is:
The Truth is paywalled and the lies are free.
And during the “search engine era”, we had SEO, paywalled, you know, the book publishers sued anybody and tried to make it so the books would be even somewhat available on the net. The academic literature has been kept from the Internet… So we have people being brought up on not on the shoulders of giants, which are the Newtons and even before Newton. The reason why we can see so far is because we stood on the shoulders of giants. This was the idea of the enlightenment, the idea that we can have access to the published works of humankind, published
meaning public
. And that just has stopped and has been put under a large amount of corporate control. So not only is the framing of the internet interactions being corporately controlled, but actually the information on it, even though these might be writers that would like to be read by people, are being kept from being read by people. So that was that era, and now we have the “AI era” with the incredible number of lawsuits that are going on. The only thing really seemingly safe to go and bring up these AI engines is based on common crawl data, which is things that you can get from the Internet with no permissions. Anything where anybody goes and says: no, I don’t want the AI to call me
, then it’s not in it. And so we’re going to end up with AI models that we have ended up with AI models that know a lot of discourse, a lot of words, a lot of interaction, so it gets all of that right. But the depth isn’t there. And so people are accusing them of, you know, being hallucinating. Well, why don’t we give it real things to put in its memory banks? Or it’s biased because it doesn’t have this… Well, is that a surprise? We made sure that we sued the companies to make sure that they didn’t have this is or that. So, we’re building information systems now that have the capability of being a digital library of Alexandria, of being able to have people be able to get to all the published works of humankind, yet we’re not living that possibility. We actually have libraries, the Internet is the library, but it is a poorer place than the libraries I grew up with. They’re much quicker to interact with, but it’s doesn’t have the periodicals and the scientific literature or the books in it. It’s made up of derivative materials. And some of it is really great. Wikipedia is tremendous, but have you ever thought of why we have to have Wikipedia? I mean, why? Why did we have to try to write all knowledge again, from scratch? And it’s because of copyright. The copyright industry opted out and made sure that all of the other encyclopedias or all the other reference works weren’t available. So we had to rewrite all knowledge, again, from scratch to put it under the GNU Public License or the CC, not Share-Alike License. This is nuts. This is absolutely a terrible way to run a culture and we’re seeing our civic discourse in the United States absolutely dissolve. We have kids, really not understanding what’s true or not true, and when I say kids, it’s anybody under the age of 40. Did the Holocaust happen? Are vaccinations helpful? I mean, really fundamental things are being made inaccessible to a generation, a whole generation, and we’re seeing the repercussions of screwing up our publishing system and giving way too much control to a few corporations, and if these corporations aren’t the tech giants, these are the publishing giants.
Tommi: I guess they go hand in hand, though. the tech giants and the publishers.
Brewster: They’re gonna start to become the same. So they’ll start buying each other. So, for instance, Amazon, now has many different book imprints. So they’re a publisher now. Amazon bought MGM Studios, the movie studios. So they’re going to start buying each other in the same sense that Comcast, the cable company, owns movie studios. The lack of antitrust and the collapsing of the number of these gigantic corporations into just a few gigantic media giants. We’re starting to see the repercussions of this in a very real way on the streets and in our schools, in our elections, and our public discourse and how people relate to each other. If you screw around with the information ecosystem in the wrong way, things will go very wrong. And the technology made a very different future possible.
Tommi: How do you think we can fight back? With grassroots initiatives, from the bottom up, as people.
Brewster: Easy. Sell things.
Tommi: Sell things?
Brewster: Sell things. Okay, it may sound like a strange thing for a librarian to say. But if we were to either publish open access or publish and sell copies to people, we would have a completely different Internet. We would have a completely different world. What do I mean by that? So if you write a book, an ebook, sell it to somebody in such a way that they own it, sell it to libraries so they can lend it. This would make an enormous difference. Or, if you are a professor, go and write your article and make it open access, and then anybody can read it. If you’re gonna write a textbook as a professor, then sell it. Actually sell it. Don’t put it through a licensing system. Maybe it’s a little strange, but the big mega publishers don’t allow libraries or individuals to buy anything anymore. They can just license things. We just have a Netflix of books, a Netflix of journal literature, which means that the publishers are keeping control and can change and delete it at any time. And this doesn’t make any sense. It also works for only a few big players that control platforms, that control the licensing infrastructure. If you sold things, you can actually sell something to somebody on the street. You can sell somebody directly from one person to another over the Internet. It’s a decentralized system. It’s what brought us from the feudal system in Europe to the Renaissance and the Enlightenment! It was actually people selling things. It’s not perfect, it’s not a panacea, but where we are right now, where we’ve left control over what people think to a few corporations being able to do things with license, to be able to surveil what it is people see and can change and delete things at any time. They can change any page, and they do. Every page you look at on these big platforms is different what somebody else sees. This doesn’t make any sense. Well, it may make sense for a few big players to try to get monopoly access to money and mind control, but it doesn’t make any sense for a society.
Tommi: I totally agree with you, and also, at a practical level, for the people who are listening, what you already mentioned to me a few days ago OPDS, a protocol that is open, a book server. A protocol that allows people who author things to directly stream their books as if it was RSS, to individuals who want to buy them, or libraries, anybody who wants.
Brewster: No, actually not stream it, sell it. And they sell it to a library, sell it to individuals. So this is what what we’re doing, and the library system has been leading in this. The idea is to have a client that, instead of being a web client (we’re talking web servers and web search engines) it’s a book client, a book server, and a book search engine. So your client on your phone would contact the search engine and go and say:
I want books about basketball
or whatever. And it might recommend some things in the search engine that, you know, it’s the sort of thing you like. And then you can either buy that from here or you can borrow it from over there. And any library could join in by joining the protocol, or any bookseller could join in. So it’s not a platform, it’s a protocol. A protocol for going and finding things that you want, and then going and buying it, or borrowing it. And that way, we can get, well, most of the money from the reader back to at least the bookseller, and if we do competition correctly, as opposed to, you know, the monopolies that we’ve ended up with, then we can then get most of the money to the author. Wouldn’t it be great if you actually, 80 cents out of your one Euro would go back to the author? That is not what happens now. What goes back to an author is pennies.
Tommi: It’s paradoxical that it’s the opposite of what’s happening right now with most of the books, but I truly believe that at this point, we can revert it! Otherwise, we are kind of doomed. I have one last question for you, and then I have a little game to propose to you. The last question is, who is the Aaron Swartz that we need today?
Brewster: You are, you are. When Aaron Schwartz did that was so radical as he lived in open source life, he lived a life talking to people, learning from people, and then making what he’s thinking, available to others to react to. He was one of the original bloggers, and he lived in open source life. That meant that he got feedback from all sorts of people and learned at a very, very rapid rate. Yes, he was bright. True. But many people are bright. What he did is he exposed himself. Unfortunately, he got crushed for it. When he wanted more information, public domain information to be publicly accessible, the government agency that was trying to contain that information called the FBI and had them surveil his house. When he was trying to do other open projects, people tried to shut him down. Even JSTOR, which is a nonprofit collection of journal literature. When Aaron Schwartz was going and doing a study of those by going and analyzing a large number of documents, they called and tried to chase down who was downloading that and shut him down, got him arrested. The United States government basically stripped through the couple million dollars that he made by helping found Reddit on lawyer’ fees, and then he committed suicide before going to trial. So you may say,
Brewster, why are you holding this guy in positive esteem?
He was one of the bright shining people of our generation. He was doing things that we actively encourage others to do with our library, but the old style institutions like JSTOR wanted to shut him down and didn’t go and understand what was happening. So it’s bittersweet. He lived in open life. He went and shared what he knew, he learned very rapidly from many people, and he was one of the most publicly spirited people I’ve ever known. But in that time, that age, he got shut down.
Tommi: Can we say that authoritarianism and capitalism, hand in hand, inherently are against any kind of openness?
Brewster: I would not say capitalism. Monopolies aren’t about openness. Capitalism requires markets, regulated markets, where there’s prices that are transparent that you can go in competition. All of that is actually good. It’s the gigantic corporations that are for monopolies, as Peter Thiel put it,
competition is for losers
. What we actually need is competition. Actually, I would say authoritarianism and monopolies go hand in hand.
Tommi: Thank you very much!
The Internet Archive Feelings Writing Machine
In the last part of the interview, Tommi and Brewster played The Internet Archive Feelings Writing Machine.
| Query | Work | Excerpt | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brewster | New publishing paradigms and the ‘free-for-education’ licence |
Using Free and Open Source Software to Create Free and Open Courseware |
|
| Tommi | anxiety hope thrill |
It's in his kiss |
|
Merged outputs, following the structure article + adjective + noun + verb
The
new
realization
publishing
a
free
feeling
publishing
the
new
education
pushing out
the
inky black
Internet
pushing out
the
equally
open source software
wasn’t [a new problem]
