Vanishing Culture at Internet Archive

On Thursday evening, I walked over to the Internet Archive's headquarters on Clement and Funston for the launch of Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record. It is the first title from the new Internet Archive Press. After checking in, I was handed a physical copy of the book. Its cover depicts the artifacts of our culture (books, movies, web pages, music) either dissolving into nothing or being saved in digital form. The Internet Archive exists to ensure it’s the latter. Heading downstairs, I grabbed a glass of red wine and found a spot at a shared round table.

Founder Brewster Kahle opened by announcing the launch of Internet Archive Press, then handed the floor to Luca Messarra, the Archive's Public Humanities Fellow and a primary author of the book. Messarra drove home exactly how fragile our cultural record really is. He brought up the sudden erasure of MTV.com's news archive, decades of music journalism that vanished overnight. He also talked about the "long tail" of culture. Donnie Darko was a box office disappointment on release but found its devoted audience through home video and cable. Had it been a streaming-only release, Messarra argued, it might never have survived long enough for that audience to find it.

The next morning, I took my copy of the book down to Blue Danube and read it over a few cups of coffee. Given that the theme of the previous night was about the rapid decay of our digital world, I thought it was appropriate to read a physical copy of the book.

The book argues that we have collectively traded ownership for conditional access. We don't own our media anymore, we rent it. I think about it like furnishing your living room at Rent-A-Center: you pay indefinitely, and the moment the company pulls the plug, the sofa disappears. Creative works can also vanish when licensing terms shift and something you thought you had access to is suddenly gone.

The book's first half surveys the causes of digital loss across journalism, film, music, and the web. The second half gets more personal, presenting essays by scholars and preservationists on why preservation matters for specific media and communities. One contributor makes the case for archiving television news, arguing that the most damaging misinformation doesn't come from Uncle Bob's Facebook posts but from politicians and celebrities whose falsehoods get amplified by mainstream media. If we don't keep exact records of how that misinformation was broadcast, we lose the ability to hold the powerful accountable.

The Wayback Machine quietly does that work, letting anyone pull up a snapshot of what a politician's website said four years ago, or track how a local news story changed over time. For a publication like the Fogline, trying to make sense of local politics and elections, that kind of institutional memory is invaluable. Unfortunately, that work is under active threat. Some publishers are now lobbying to block archiving services like the Wayback Machine from capturing their content at all.

Other essays in the second half get even more granular. Contributor Katie Livingston (who also spoke at the launch event) writes about digitizing her grandmother's copy of Down Home Cookin', a small-print community cookbook from Oklahoma, its pages stained and margins filled with handwritten notes. When we save something like that, we capture the granular texture of how people actually lived.

That resonated with me personally. I've gone looking for records of subcultures I was part of and been surprised to find many of them still there: policy debate results and mailing list archives from the 90s, NFO files from the early warez scene preserved on textfiles.com, concert recordings from the metal and hardcore shows I went to captured by hate5six, and the Little Zine Library saved by the SF Public Library. None of it survived by accident. Someone cared enough to save it.

Preservation also enables new creation. The Archive digitized the entire run of the Whole Earth Catalog, the publication that defined California's counterculture. A developer used those scans to build a fully searchable index, which I saw demoed at an event at Gray Area. The digitized Catalog also gave a new generation of Bay Area writers the raw material to produce a fresh collection of essays.

Kahle mentioned at the launch that they're already taking ideas for a second book. While The Internet Archive is a vault for preserving the web's past, the Internet Archive Press is a platform for publishing new ideas. They want to know what's worth publishing next.

You can purchase a physical copy of Vanishing Culture at Better World Books or read it for free at archive.org.