For a future of human thriving: Fight’s Congratulations to the Internet Archive

The Internet Archive has achieved a once-in-a-generation milestone of one trillion webpages preserved. We’ve gotta fight for the next trillion.

This month, the Internet Archive is celebrating and being honored for the archiving of its trillionth webpage. Its WayBack Machine is an archive spanning 30 years of the Internet that is unprecedentedly vital, necessary, and downright cool. Whether you’re a millennial looking back on your own LiveJournal, an activist pulling up the receipts to hold a public figure to account, or an artist studying music or gaming in the 2000s, the Archive is the best resource out there. It holds one of the most wild and unwieldy creations in the history of our species: the public Internet. And it offers all that wealth and strangeness to anyone, anywhere, for free.

Across the past five years in particular, my organization, Fight for the Future has been on the front lines of defending the Archive from the forces that would erase it for profit, including major publishers and the world’s largest record labels. We are a collective led by queer women, artists, and defiant activists who push back against contemptible power on every digital front. The Archive has easily proven time and again whether they are saving MTV news or working with rural libraries to preserve local history, that capitalist interests intent on paywalling select history and culture will leave the rest to rot.

And to us, definitionally marginalized and accountable to communities that are among the most marginalized in our society, we have lived the disinterest and erasure of capitalism for our work, our stories, our legacy. Many of the wealthiest individuals, institutions, and politicians would like nothing more than to purge our history. After all, Nazi book burnings started with the torching of a queer library.

The library of our work, the full story of our art and what we’ve done, exists wholly online. It’s housed in our own systems, but also within social media networks and the archives of hundreds of news publications. All of these are vulnerable to wholesale deletion by the forces that would pretend we never fought, never existed at all—and, importantly, never used the Internet to win. Even absent malicious intent, the link rot of social media and journalistic institutions may prove just as much a threat to the stories of this moment. Which is unfortunate, because the Internet is offering us a new thing: the first time “history” could sustain for more than the wealthiest dominators. We have the technology for the record to include all of our voices, and that technology is the Internet Archive.

This is why we fight for the Internet Archive. The community around this essential preservation project has shown dogged and extraordinary resilience in the face of threats from Big Content and beyond. They’ve stayed true to their mission of leveraging their technology from a place of values and caring, not commercial incentives. And in doing this, they’ve created a vessel that could hold our history for the future. What we said, how we said it, and to whom—and who stood against us. The Internet Archive is taking action every day for one of the most slippery concepts of the modern era: the truth.

Brewster likes to call the Archive the next library of Alexandria, and I used to flinch to hear him say that, remembering how Alexandria burned. But across the years of standing for the Archive, I’ve come to see that fact of history as a challenge, more than a threat. A promise that if we don’t all show up for knowledge and truth and the richness of human experience housed in the Archive, it will be ravaged.

One of the threats to the Archive most on my mind today is that it might become a preservation society for a mere 30 years of the Internet. The way that this would happen is a solidification of the concept that the tools the Archive has used since the beginning—scraping bots—are inherently bad, and should always be blocked. The age of AI is inciting some websites—like Reddit—to misguidedly ask that all their history be removed. This also means that the Internet Archive’s good scraping bots might never again save the crucial work of subs like r/auntienetwork.

All that care among strangers may be lost to time, invisible to the next generation. So, too, will the outstanding work of many journalists be lost if publications keep asking the Archive to delete and stop preserving their works. If nothing else, I selfishly want to be able to revisit a time when the journalistic profession moved our hearts and minds in pursuit of accountability. Instead, a new harm of AI is being created by our own fears and reactions to it. There has to be another way.

Whether or not we will have the tools to point back to a diverse history, to learn from it, and see our own culturally relevant contributions join the long story of the Internet in a vital, living archive is deeply in question today. No one knows this better than the workers and volunteers at the Archive itself, and in the face of mounting odds I’ve come to recognize their diligence as more than that: as bravery. Because it is brave to hope, and celebrate, and keep preserving into an uncertain future. It could be for nothing—or it could mean everything.

At Fight for the Future, we hope, too. That the Internet’s capacity for good can still be expanded in the face of repression and escalating social ills. Honestly, the desperation and anger that come from a lack of resources for basic human health and dignity can make it hard to believe that human connection is worthwhile. For that, you also have to be brave, to fight back. The first step is to dismantle the power of Big Tech and their surveillance capitalist business model, which will always work in extractive ways against the true interests of humanity. These, the richest companies in the world in the midst of the Internet’s Gilded Age, may feel that they hold the inescapable right of kings. How gross, and how shortsighted.

It’s almost as if they would benefit from a study of history as told by everyone who broke up the monopolies the last time. While some of these stories exist, many are lost. And so I posit this: one of our greatest gifts to the future will be the story we’re about to write, across billions of posts and pages, of how we all got here, and then came through this moment. And so we stand for the Archive and prepare to fight for the next trillion pages, in the hopes that our stories will contribute to human thriving on the other side.