Keen On

“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 corporat