Audio Interview: Brewster Kahle Chats With Recode’s Kara Swisher: “The Internet Must Be Preserved”
UPDATE March 9, 2017 A text transcript of the Kahle/Swisher Interview is Now Available
As we’ve said many times on infoDOCKET, when Brewster talks, we listen. A new opportunity is found below via an approx. 1 hour interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher that debuted online today.
From Recode:
Brewster Kahle, the entepreneur-turned-chairman of the Internet Archive, has a George Orwell saying on his mind: “If we allow those who control the present to control the past, then they control the future.”
This thought, pulled from Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” guides today’s work at the nonprofit Archive, which turned 20 years old last fall. The average life of a web page is 100 days, Kahle said on the latest Recode Decode, hosted by Kara Swisher, and “most of the best of the web is already off the web.”
“What we try to do is, if people saw it before, they can see it again,” Kahle said. “If you can’t refer back to things, if you can’t quote what happened before, then you can’t compare and contrast. I have kids in college — that’s what thinking critically is.”
Speaking with Swisher before Donald Trump’s inauguration, Kahle expressed concern about the new presidential administration’s opposition to both journalism and net neutrality. He warned that the openness of the world wide web is “just embedded in a few laws” and could easily be torn down.
“It’s not fun and games any more,” Kahle said. “It’s not, ‘Oh, isn’t this a cool new widget?’ It’s how we understand our world, it’s how we interact with each other, and it’s all quite controllable.”
Direct to Interview Web Page (Audio File Also Embedded Below)
UPDATE ON A RELATED NOTE…
One of the many important and useful (and free) resources the Internet Archive provides is the Donald Trump Video Archive that launched on January 5th. Today, Katie Dahl from the IA, provides a very useful online guide to using the Trump Archive to find TV news appearances, fact checks, and share clips.
Filed under: Interviews, News, Profiles

About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.