Universal Access to All Knowledge / Brewster Kahle

Transcript

well thank you very much really appreciate this and so I hope to both be somewhat useful but also just thought thought provoking uh my name is Brewster kale I'm the founder of the internet archive a large library on the internet um the idea was to try to build the internet into the Library of Alexandria version two could you make all the published works of humankind available to anybody wanting to have access to it that was the dream of uh of the internet in many ways and it was the goal of my career unfortunately we're still at it um uh so why I mean you know it technologically it's just not that hard so um what can we do to try to make this all go forward but the real goal out of

this talk is going to be actually on a much narrower concept of decentralization but who am I to actually talk about any of this so I guess I'm just one of the old old guard uh the original gangsters of the of the internet to try to build this this is a picture of the internet archives building in San Francisco please come and visit us we have an open doors we have an open lunch on Fridays and tours and and and fun things we can see petabytes of blinking lights which is kind of fun um we're probably best known for the Wayback machine we archive the World Wide Web we collect over a billion URLs every day the idea is to try to keep the the record of human life that's going on

on the web alive and it's used a lot um now it's uh I guess two and a half trillion captures or URLs over time that gets queried five or six thousand times a second we're about the 300th most popular website but we also have television books music video uh and and the like um but this uh talk is really sort of responding to a call that I made to try to fix the web trying to make a better web a web that works for more of us can we build a decentralized web could we go and make something better that is than just having a few walled Gardens

grow up and monopolization happen could we go and restore some of this ideas um to build a decentralized web so there's been uh a lot of work towards this in different camps and things are are are moving along this was the original paper I'm kind of proud of this one because it was signed by Vince Cerf Tim berners-lee and my myself at our first Gathering to try to pull this together we're going to have another decentralized webcam in San in the Bay Area Under the Redwoods in a couple of weeks of gathering those that are trying to figure out how to build an Internet that serves more of us so in that General theme I'd like to just discuss and register a question of

decentralization it's gotten to the point where decentralization is kind of like the word open you just sort of sprinkle it on things and it's supposed to give an aura of positiveness to it like the world's going to be better because it's open or this technology is awesome because it's decentralized really true I think it there is this concept of decentralization um but what is it really and why are we thinking that it is uh desirable and if we achieve decentralization are we going to look back on this uh part of our Lives of industriousness and go and say you know

we just got shafted and that something you know yes some P some people got rich it was a different bunch of people that got rich and we in the world sort of is worse for it um that would be bad so I would like to bring up in this short talk and then to think about questions because it's going to be short enough that you're going to be able to ask questions I'm going to think I'm going to suggest that the real goal of what we mean by decentralization is we want a game with many winners we want a society with many winners not just a few and then everybody else gets to sort of grovel around but that there's lots of Independence Freedom playing uh in a more decentralized uh uh way are we

getting there with some of these Technologies such as ethereum or any of the blockchain I think we should worry about this um so let's go over for a moment uh what do we mean by decentralization and to kind of ground this so it's not just a philosophical talk I would like to just say the internet archive committed to this by going and you know publishing a paper and and trying to get people to go towards a decentralized web by decentralizing the internet archive the internet archive I spent my career going and making websites working on a very December in a distributed way probably not decentralized distributed way and then the internet archive tried to Hoover it back together again which is kind of weird and so how if we try to

make the internet archive a bit more decentralized so uh one was to go and have copies in different jurisdictions because what happens to libraries is they're burned they're burned on purpose usually um by either um uh used to be king or church um and now it's governments and corporations um so that's what happens to libraries the powerful don't like having this stuff come back around and undermine their power so they tend to destroy the libraries they tend to be sorry about it later but it's already too late because the libraries are destroyed so let's design for that so the internet archive has partial copies but only partial

copies sorry to say um in Alexandria Egypt which is kind of cool um uh in Amsterdam uh and in Canada um working really hard in Canada this is what some of the servers look like in San Francisco there are two full copies in the Bay Area so that there's some Geographic distinction but not jurisdictional to try to build some level of redundancy and robustness to this by having it in different places controlled by different people uh and and the like um this is what the uh the the website looks like um but we tried to then make this website but decentralized could you go

and make websites decentralized in the sense like BitTorrent that basically things come from everywhere and nowhere that with content-based addressability you could go and ask for uh the home page and whoever happened to have downloaded that home page matches the hatch hash and gives it to you you can go and have a website that lives everywhere and nowhere it's much closer to how libraries used to work where um you would libraries Publishers would come out with books or whatever and lots of libraries would buy it and so even if a couple of libraries went down that work was still available the web doesn't work that way the the web works is that there's one server or one organization

that's on top of that materials and if they want to change it or delete it they can at will the average life of a web page is 100 days so when Tim berner's Lee called web pages Pages it was kind of a cruel joke you think of pages Gutenberg or you know things that last for hundreds it's a hundred days um so can we go and uh rethink some of the structures of the internet uh and the web using some of our new crypto Technologies and cryptographic and content-based addressability uh to be able to make this go and that's some of the goals of d-web.archive.org so it integrates and tries to put it so that our movies and things like that are in different places so that was one step towards

decentralization another step is um uh one of the things that came up right around the time of our whole decentralized web thing and I think it's somewhat causal is filecoin and ipfs and they've been helping us and we've been helping them by going and reaming an enormous amount of material faster and faster into it and we're right around 500 terabytes uh in it which is kind of awesome and they've been helping out uh try to make this work so think of it as an Amazon web services of storage S3 that is decentralized where there's lots of different players that are going and Mining and Mining means storing and you pay for it with these coins with

this whole incentive structure which is kind of insanely complicated but we're trying it and it's uh We've now got 500 terabytes in and it's it's moving along pretty well here is our dashboard of of it and uh we just crossed over 503.5 terabytes which is kind of awesome hooray we've packed up 1.3 petabytes and offered it to the miners but they don't quite know how to take things as fast as we can produce them and things are going up and to the right this is a list of some of the collections common crawl some of the end of term crawls of government information uh uh our big movie collections uh and things like that so that's uh so the internet archive is trying to encourage

and going and putting our materials into some of these more decentralized systems there's another one called storage with a J where about 84 petabyte terabytes uh in that system uh and thanks to them to have granted Us free access to it which is kind of great um but what do we want out of decentralization so let's go back to the philosophical thing so I'm trying to you know okay at least the internet archive is trying but what do we want out of it one is we want no Central points of control right so that's a I'd say a key component like the internet Plumbing the I the IP infrastructure you just needed a router and somebody to talk to or a few people to talk to and

you then part of the internet there wasn't a centralized point of control of how the internet was built the web is different and now that we've gotten to like the Facebooks and the twitters it's even worse but I would say that that's not enough I'd say within the sort of The Ether youth Community the Bitcoin Community we've made some progress in the no Central points of control but if we achieve that have we really gotten what we want and I would say there are a couple other goals that we also want and I've been feeling that we're getting really some problematic responses out of our society based on runaway wealth inequality and I'm not sure that these Bitcoin or eth world uh uh will help but it's a

goal I would suggest if we're going to build a decentralized a game with many winners we're going to have to curb the idea of a few people uh accumulating a lot of the wealth then there's also power um and uh so can we curb the powerful with our decentralized Technologies and I'm not sure that's built into our blockchain type worlds very well so what do I mean by that um so we want um no centralized points of control I would suggest the easiest one-liner on that was we want protocols not platforms we want to know how we're going to interact with each other but there won't be kings that go and control the platform uh and the like and we need

some mechanism to have governance by uh some understandable system as opposed to benevolent dictators and I think actually in this area some of the experiments in in governance in the blockchain world have been really quite encouraging and I'm really very encouraged by the ethereum uh community of going and making a fundamental switch from proof of work to proof of stake that's a big deal and that that kind of evolution happened is really a big step forward beyond the Bitcoin uh world so I just you know right there's some uh there's some sense there's a responsive system that is getting uh better now let's go for wealth inequality this is a tougher one

how are we going to do this um and I'm a big fan of David graber's work um and the debt with interest so if you just by holding wealth by lending it out add interest it tends towards a runaway concentration of wealth and it happens very quickly uh 25 to 50 years and if you don't have a mechanism of doing a reset things come apart and you can kind of have a civil unrest leading to Civil Wars um say um Michael Hudson said that during the Sumerian the Babylonian times that all the civil wars were debt Wars

that basically people ended up with too much wealth they forced uh the commoners to be very very unhappy um and they came back with pitchforks um so they devised mechanisms of wiping the Slate clean at the beginning of every Monarch to go and wipe away debts and the farmers could go back uh to actually having their their fields again uh that their daughters and uh that were put into bondage would kind of be restored to the families um and you'd actually have Civic Life Again by facing down the very very rich um uh Jubilee was how it was built by the built into the uh Jewish system if you don't have this you're going to end up at the Bolshevik Revolution the maoist revolution in the United States

we had a bloodless Revolution which was called the New Deal which faced down the very rich and uh and brought them under control using taxes um but crypto world thinks of inflation or as a bug that the idea of going having an ability to go and do a reset as a bug that should be reamed out of the system and if you have debt with interest is what you can get with smart contracts um It's Not Gold really that we're talking about here we're talking about smart contracts and there's debt with interest um that this crypto thing uh actually might really come back to haunt us in the wealth inequality area so I would just like to just put out there that

this is a uh an issue that we may be on the wrong side of within the crypto Community um but how can we decentralize power and um so let's let's Okay so that's wealth inequality is it the same as power I'm going to use power in the sense of like corporate power um the ability to go and make uh limit your choices and um I'm going to use this object um as a uh a packed uh idea so this is uh the book The Power of the powerless by hovel um and it is a book translated into English

um that at this wonderful Shakespeare Bookshop uh uh that in the Centrum or right on the other anyway a great bookstore a friend of mine Althea uh went and bought it and gave it to me and I've been reading it it's like oh that sounds cool what's revolutionary about that what's revolutionary about that is almost nothing of that is going to be offered to us in the electronic world so what do I mean by that ebooks that are offered by the the big Publishers aren't for sale in that same way they cannot be given in the same way um they are probably going to uh

constrain what it is that's published so this book is um published um on Vantage uh vintage books which is owned by penguin Random House UK penguin Random House Is This Global Corporation that's suing the internet archive and assuming the internet archive um because um where we wanted to buy ebooks they will not sell ebooks they will only license them in weird ways in such a way that they can change them or delete them at any time and they do and they're changing uh electronic books such that in all libraries all at

once there's a new addition you don't even have a copy that libraries don't have the bits to be evil and able to compare them against the new one to find out is it changed it's really that bad and because the internet archive is not allowed to buy books like buy them we can pay the money to rent them such that actually the way it works in most libraries if you're getting if you have a Kindle or whatever and you're going to your library to go and borrow a book what your library is doing is shuffling you to the database product of the publisher so the publisher surveils on all of the patrons books that they are downloading and controls every one of

those bits and the libraries don't have a copy the libraries cannot preserve those books so in the electronic World we're running into real troubles and that's sort of I I take it as in sort of analogous towards what we're trying to do in the uh in the uh crypto or digital world is try to build a world where you have many winners but now we have an ability for Publishers to hold on to things even after you've paid for them in fact it's not even clear what it is you own or have it's clear that you've paid but you don't have the ability to preserve it or give it away or hold on to it compare it to a new one

um and also there are fewer and fewer of these very very big players so penguin random house again suing us is one of four big companies multi-billion dollar companies that are suing us um about and why they're suing us just that is because we couldn't buy the e-books we buy the physical books we digitize them put the physical books away and then we lend our electronic you know crappy PDF using their same DRM technologies that they use so that only one reader at a time can borrow that book right so that's what we do with a large number of books mostly people read them for about five minutes to check a reference or get a quotation for their

high school projects uh whatever it is um that's how mostly people use our our research library but the library but the idea to the Publishers that there could be anything in the electronic world that could be owned was so anathema to this to them that they sued us over it so they think they've basically wiped out the idea of digital ownership already now this book is called the power of the powerless right and it was published by hovel on during the Soviet era and he uh it was Anonymous but not Anonymous enough and he went to jail for three years for having done this the um but the idea of having small-scale Publishers be able to sprout up and sell their Works

um is is a problem so what does a book mean if you cannot own it and you cannot own an e-book so this is putting way too much power way Upstream uh Pearson The Textbook Company is really thrilled about nfts because it means that they can stomp out the resale Market they want to stop resale so I would suggest a key meme is free market is an oxymoron markets have rules and I would rather live under uh rules than arbitrary uh licenses of the powerful we need digital ownership that

is goes and transfers something that then it can go and evolve in a new and different way as opposed to always having uh things attached to them that would be what I would hope as decentralized power so indecent what do we mean by decentralization I'm going to try to sum it into we want to make a game with many winners let's as we go through this period of inventing a new set of Technologies I've seen the Arpin at the web the you know different of these search engines through my career this community is really involved in some of the crypto worlds let's go and make things that we don't look back on in 20 30 years and say oops right let's go make sure we have our goals straight and

try to optimize our Technologies towards that the three uh problems is is uh decentralization of control try to curb wealth inequality and curb power thank you very much did I use up all of my time did I use up all my time or do we have opportunity for questions please if that was not insulting enough or or controversial enough I've failed please ask questions thank you it was a very interesting speech I was wondering whether the wealth inequality issue would it not only be an issue should crypto become

big potentially a global Reserve assets especially Bitcoin in terms of deflation I so what I want out of my coin or the problem the currency aspect is alipay that's not creepy right so we can go and pay people easily and smoothly and um not have it all be watched and controlled by well the government right that's what I want out of it what I think we may be building unfortunately is debt with interest where there's going to be runaway fewer and fewer entities that control more and more of a fixed asset and we have no reset ability we have no mechanism of making a jubilee there's no way of inflating the currency in such a way that those are just

holding huddling this stuff don't have ever more inherited power over time so that's that's my that's my worry of where we're going uh with this thank you thank you hey thank you for the talk and my question is regarding um well you mentioned that the average lifespan of a website is 100 days and you're concerned with preserving information digitally yes and I wonder um what are the difficulties in regarding to then selecting let's say

worthy information because if you preserve a lot you also need to kind of Select do we select um we try uh yes uh we we do um a total collections of the internet archive is right around 100 petabytes maybe a bit more at this point so 100 petabytes which is a lot right a television channel for a year is 10 terabytes um so and we collect a lot of Television um we collect a billion web pages a day um but it's it's you know sort of ever bigger right so you know can we scale the answer is yes we actually can we're only about 20 25 million dollars a year organization

and just the San Francisco Public Library is 180 million okay I'm a little envious right they get 100 maybe a million we get 20 million but it means that there's a lot of growth as long as people care and we get our money from libraries paying us to collect web pages for them like the library Congress and thousand other organizations um and but a lot of it is by basically the 130 000 people every year that hit the Donate button um so there's room to grow um it's not infinite but culturally cultural information is limited people could only be typing all of the time and it just doesn't come out to very much video is bigger right so we we can't collect all of YouTube so we just try to

get the popular stuff out of YouTube so we are selective but we try towards what people uh care uh about and then we digitize a lot anything else you can shout out go we need it for lifestyle oh okay live stream I I'll repeat oh so you said that a Pearson is excited about nfts because they can tap into the secondary market and like stomp it I love the idea of nfts in the sense of digital ownership that you can register your ownership which is great but

there's this contract thing that allows you to like get royalties on down the line and it's a very Un-American way of doing it where there's this right of first sale that you basically once it kind of goes I was talking with um one of the royalty of of Prague and um his his family way back when helped um uh uh Beethoven was the sort of the the the helper the the funder of Beethoven and Heroica but imagine of eroica that wonderful Symphony never went into the public domain how would you do that a contract right you know contracts don't expire they don't evolve over time by a base of

rule of law so I think we have a possible problem of things being held on to for too long and also this sort of micro optimization of Rights maybe make it so that libraries just can't exist in the future because you can't figure out what it is you're allowed to have so I think we need some basic Norms I'm not saying that the Norms that have been built up by our current governments and our current copyright system are any good but right now the corporations even though they've corrupted the copyright scheme such as completely tilted towards them they say that's not good enough we want licenses that never end they don't allow anything for the Blind and dyslexic there's no preservation in the uh in their in their world view

um it it's it's a it's a problem that we've we've now with our Technologies we've made some things possible that can make it so the abuse of power will make us wish for the old days so how do we go and bring balance to that and it's not just a technical problem um so how do we go and make it so people can sell things on the internet really sell them right by dropping a couple eats and then they get a in crypto a way of decrypting that banned songs how can we go and make that kind of thing happen so we don't end up with more iTunes uh Amazons I mean what the hell with that right so why don't we go and build the

decentralized system for making a lot of human activities more possible but beware that the big guys are looking for how they're going to crush it in such a way that it will be a very small number of winners and they're at the center of it thank you so much [Applause] [Music]