Full transcript: Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle on Recode Decode

We have a real change in what’s going on. We have at least a fire drill to go and say, “What kind of world do we want to live in?” In a world that’s got a lot of different points of view going on

If we want to understand what AIs are going to look like, I think the proto AI that we have are corporations. Corporations are sort of these funny little beasts. They’re not small. I guess they’re not little beasts, but they’re strange. It takes special training to have humans be able to fit within them. They’re made out of humans mostly but they’r... See more

With all the stuff going on, it’s all going on on social media now. A lot of the information.

A lot of it’s there. We’re trying to adapt as best we can to these platforms. That’s a big shift of how the internet ... We thought it was going to be a very ...

Easy thing.

Easy, democratic. Anybody can go and be a player. Now we have these large platforms... See more

Maybe we should be spending more time and effort within academia, within government, within our general lives to go and invest in things that aren’t going to end up putting us in a cage that we’re going to regret later. Is that a bit of a plea and a cry? Yes, it is. But Wikipedia is the No. 5 most popular website of all websites. That’s pretty stun... See more

I really kind of like the American project. The experiment of, “Hey, let’s go try out a bunch of different things and allow people to build things that they would like to have built.” Why don’t we enable and empower more people in that way? Fortunately the technologies can work that way, but we need people to think ethically. As Larry Lessig put it... See more

We’ve digitized 2.5 million books. Google has as well, but they’re locked up. They locked up the public domain, which we think of as a sin. The library sort of made elite services around it just for themselves.

Books play a very special role in our society. It’s the long-form way of expressing an idea. It’s not just an interview. It’s not just a speech. It’s a long-form discourse. We want to see that continue. The long-form narrative

We’ve seen Wikipedia, Mozilla, Internet Archive, Electronic Frontier Foundation, Public Library of Science. These are infrastructure-type companies, but they’re not-for-profits.

If we allow those who control the present to control the past then they control the future. That’s George Orwell. We need to know what came before. Because the web flips on and off, actually most of the best of the web is already off the web.

What does it really mean to be a good citizen?” Being a good citizen participating in the corporate world.