Brewster Is the Rooster: Cockdoodle-de-doo!
by John Kendall Hawkins
I'm mad as purgatory and I shan't take it much longer, probably.
- toilet stall wall, Rockefeller Center, NYC
Platform squabbles here. Loudmouths over there. Aggressive algos. Monetized desires. Pop-up ads. PayWalls. Books you thought you bought online turn out to be merely leased. Google. Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Instagram -- working with The Man to keep us accounted for and grazing, putting "dissidents" and people who follow Glen Greenwald in special databases for further scrutiny (and, in some cases, recruitment, IMHO). Oy!
Put up your hand if you've had enough.
You wouldn't always know it from the noise you must wade through these days to browse in peace, but there are people out there, like you, trying to fix the quality, resources, and safety of the Internet. Brewster Kahle, Founder & Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive (IA), is one of those people. Recently, the IA celebrated its 25th Anniversary (and held a big chuffy party). Recently, I interviewed him by Zoom, and the delightful conversation we had reawakened my hope buds and had me seeing a bonny future that returned the Internet to the first glad days of its Alexandrian library promise. What a nice man. And the summary anecdote he told about the still unfolding meaning of the Internet Archive was as beautiful as watching the reddest rose unfold its petals before you in time-elapsed splendor.
Unfortunately, I fucked up. I didn't take side notes. And when I discovered that there was a fly in my unguent, my video ointment -- the Zoom file wouldn't convert from its proprietary form to an MP4, as it does automatically -- I knew then the meaning of Gloomy Gus's funk. There was/is a small file that did convert, but alas had no sound, and that's too bad because Brewster the Rooster is really laying on thick about the beauty of the Archive in that scene. (Full Disclosure: I may yet use that footage and make sh*t up about what he's saying, upload a silent film with dialogue cards.) Below were the main topics (written down on Notepad) that we addressed in our conversation.
I've gotta say, I can't be objective here. Brewster Kahle has created an extraordinary tool and resource library for the real deal Internet users. I got back to Brewster after my catastrophe and he well-hid -- the kind man -- the frustration and sneering derision he must have felt at dealing with a "journalist" nincompoop too incompetent to at least be taking notes as we spoke for an hour that was far more valuable to him than it seemed to be for me. However, he didn't agree to do it again, as I soberly suggested. His kindness lay in not making eye contact in the email exchange. Thank you, Brewster, for that. I couldn't take one more hit to my esteem. He ain't God, but he'll do until the next one, who Voltaire said it is necessary to have, arrives to sort out our species' tea leaves.
And I hope that, below, I am able to remember his words verbatim a few weeks later (I got distracted by voices), and, more importantly, that I have the cajones to fess up when I misquote him. Although I own that, in my dotage, I can barely remember where I left the teeth of my wits on any given morning. I'm pretty sure he said the things I recall, but, luckily, when I contacted IA people, like Wendy Hanamura, Director of Partnerships, I was very quickly emailed a cornucopia of media materials -- jpegs, interviews, articles, TED talks, blog entries, and festive party photos of the anniversary celebration. It was an embarrassment of riches. But also -- and amazingly -- Brewster had already developed his thoughts somewhat along the lines of subject areas I wanted to explore below, so quotes from that cache will guide my memory of our talk.
ArpaNet/TimBL/Internet/ A New 'Retro' Internet
I said to Brewster that not many people realize that today's vibrant Internet is actually the product of the Department of Defense (DoD). He nodded, and that's a quote. And I went on and said that back in the Fall of '57 the Soviets (today's Russians, and Ukrainians some say) launched the Sputnik satellite and it scared the bejeezus out of Pentagon types, some of whom can be jumpy (have you noticed?) and are prone to having feelings of magical powers (I mean, Abbie Hoffman is said to have actually negotiated how high he'd levitate the Pentagon if they didn't stop the Vietnam war -- 'three feet, with a handshake') that they felt a new communication system was needed in case the f*ckers exploded a nuke whose electromagnetic pulses wiped out "our" grids (for the record, the Yanks and Russians are t he only nations to have exploded such a device in space, endangering us all). So, the Internet begins as a byproduct of paranoia.
Eventually, the DoD got around to sharing Arpanet with partners, such as universities, who immediately saw the benefit in being able to share information at the speed of copper. The first network was up and running 50 years ago, in 1971. Transmission Control Protocol and Internet Protocol (TCP/IP), developed by the DoD, became and continues to be the standard framework for online communications -- TCP builds a frame around data sent and received, and guarantees delivery, IP provides an electronic address. New software and protocol innovations -- remote login, file transfer and email -- made the new network even more user friendly.
Eventually, Tim Berners-Lee (TimBL) came along and, to make sharing research data easier, developed a way of replacing ip addresses (ex. 139.73.22.8) with associated names, such as Google.com: we type in the word, the nice Domain Naming Service (DNS) machine translates it to an electronic address for us. TimBL further developed the use of hypertext (HTTP) and web pages were born, culminating in the now familiar World Wide Web.
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