The Deadline by Jill Lepore

Author:Jill Lepore
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright

WHEN THE INTERNET ARCHIVE bought the church, Kahle recalls, “we had the idea that we’d convert it into a library, but what does a library look like anymore? So we’ve been settling in, and figuring that out.”

From the lobby, we headed up a flight of yellow-carpeted stairs to the chapel, an enormous dome-ceilinged room filled with rows of oak pews. There are arched stained glass windows, and the dome is a stained glass window, too, open to the sky, like an eye of God. The chapel seats seven hundred people. The floor is sloped. “At first, we thought we’d flatten the floor and pull up the pews,” Kahle said, as he gestured around the room. “But we couldn’t. They’re just too beautiful.”

On the wall on either side of the altar, wooden slates display what, when this was a church, had been the listing of the day’s hymn numbers. The archivists of the internet have changed those numbers. One hymn number was 314. “Do you know what that is?” Kahle asked. It was a test, and something of a trick question, like when someone asks you what’s your favorite B track on the White Album. “Pi,” I said, dutifully, or its first three digits, anyway. Another number was 42. Kahle gave me an inquiring look. I rolled my eyes. Seriously? But it is serious, in a way. It’s hard not to worry that the Wayback Machine will end up like the computer in Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which is asked what is the meaning of “life, the universe, and everything,” and, after thinking for millions of years, says, “Forty-two.” If the internet can be archived, will it ever have anything to tell us? Honestly, isn’t most of the web trash? And, if everything’s saved, won’t there be too much of it for anyone to make sense of any of it? Won’t it be useless?

The Wayback Machine is humongous, and getting humongouser. You can’t search it the way you can search the web, because it’s too big and what’s in there isn’t sorted, or indexed, or catalogued in any of the many ways in which a paper archive is organized; it’s not ordered in any way at all, except by URL and by date. To use it, all you can do is type in a URL, and choose the date for it that you’d like to look at. It’s more like a phone book than like an archive. Also, it’s riddled with errors. One kind is created when the dead web grabs content from the live web, sometimes because web archives often crawl different parts of the same page at different times: text in one year, photographs in another. In October 2012, if you asked the Wayback Machine to show you what cnn.com looked like on September 3, 2008, it would have shown you a page featuring stories about the 2008 McCain-Obama presidential race, but the advertisement alongside it would have been for the 2012 Romney-Obama debate. Another problem is that there is no equivalent to what, in a physical archive, is a perfect provenance.

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