Full transcript: Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle on Recode Decode

Sometimes I find some of the open systems to be some of the most interesting things going on. I think it’s interesting when Linux can go and be an operating system that competes with the very biggest companies. IBM is now supporting and has moved over to Linux. What does that mean? That the open world can work. It does require a large amount of inv... 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

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.

These enormous players have absolute roles and responsibilities in how things work. The medium is the message. We are living in Marshall McLuhan land where the medium forms how we think about things. The way the web is coded determines a lot of how we live our lives online. It’s now not just the web, it’s how Facebook is coded, how Google is coded.

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.

The United States, as you point out, has been actually freer than most in terms of offering access to information. It doesn’t have to be this way. Openness is not the default in terms of how if you look back in time, or even around the world. We need to show how openness works better. That you end up with companies that thrive better. That you have... See more

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

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

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