Memory in the age of the utterly now: The precarious state of the Internet Archive

"Information wants to be free" has been the watchword of the so-called free culture movement which has manifested itself in such phenomena as the free and open source software community and as Creative Commons. (For those who don't know, Creative Commons is a way to establish rights and authorship of creative works while also specifying how those works can be distributed and used by others in ways that are far less restrictive than traditional copyright—for instance, by allowing for varying levels of sharing, editing and incorporation in the works of others.)

It is in this tradition that following the sale of his web crawling company to Amazon for $250 million in 1999, Brewster Kahle increasingly devoted himself to his nonprofit startup, the Internet Archive, a project which became his full-time pursuit as of 2002 and remains so today. But today, the future of the Internet Archive is highly uncertain.

It is very likely that almost everyone reading this sentence has used the Internet Archive at some point to retrieve internet pages no longer available, to do research, or to archive internet pages for future reference.

Just the clash of opinions or different facts? Facing the epistemological divide

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late U.S. senator from New York, was famous for saying, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts." It turns out that not everyone today agrees with Moynihan. It might seem that the rancor in political life that we are witnessing across the globe is merely the result of a clash of opinions. But, this upheaval is actually the product of a vast epistemological divide. (Epistemology is, of course, the study of how we know what we know.) There is no longer a consensus about how to determine what is, in fact, a fact.

I know this because those on each side look at the other and say, "How can they believe that that's true?" What they mean is not the other side's opinions; they mean what the other side believes are facts. In the realm of politics, the ledger on "mistaken" facts may seem lopsided. But politics is the realm of exaggeration and so no side is immune from mistakes.

But I'm more interested in the broader cultural and scientific battle over how to construct facts. Out of habit we think of facts as something freestanding. Facts are true whether we acknowledge them or not. Water boils at 212 degrees F. That's a fact one can't dispute. But, of course, even that fact is context-dependent. The statement is true for water containing no impurities under one atmosphere of pressure. If you add salt, it will raise the boiling point. Even simple statements of fact, it turns out, are more complicated that we think.

Going bananas: Why the approach to the latest banana blight misses the point

You may not know it. But your bananas have been under attack for more than a decade by a small fungus, Fusarium oxysporum. Half of the global production of bananas is in a variety called Cavendish which has become susceptible to a new strain of the fungus. A previous strain of Fusarium wiped out the Gros Michel variety of bananas which used to dominate world markets until the 1950s.

The Cavendish seemed immune to the previous strain and could therefore be planted on the same land—Fusarium lives in the soil—that the Gros Michel occupied. The Cavendish is what is mostly exported to countries that do not grow bananas and therefore what most people see in modern supermarkets and greengrocers. It is named after William Cavendish, the sixth Duke of Devonshire, who received a shipment from a friend who had gotten them from Mauritius. Cavendish's gardener proceeded to cultivate them in the duke's greenhouses.

If you are a banana eater, you may have noticed that the Cavendish you peel and eat every morning has no seeds. It turns out that the Cavendish is propagated by cloning—which means that Cavendish banana trees around the world are genetically identical. And so, every one of them will likely eventually succumb to the new strain of Fusarium as it spreads worldwide.

From Plato to AI: Are we losing our minds?

Plato, through the words of the central character in his famous dialogues, the philosopher Socrates, tells us that the invention of writing severely impaired human memory. The impairment resulted in part from disuse. We humans no longer had to commit to memory important information that could now be rendered on the page. Socrates insists that living memory is far better and far more responsive to inquiry than the written word.

Human learning has not, however, disappeared or even diminished in the age of the written word, but rather prospered as the wisdom of the ages can be readily passed down to each generation. The invention of moveable type in the 15th century spread the written word across world, making it accessible as never before. Plato must have realized the irony that he was preserving Socrates' argument against writing for future generations by writing it down. Plato could not have guessed, however, that 2500 years later his writings would be part of the canon of Western philosophy and that moveable type and modern transportation and communications would make his writings available practically anywhere.

Modern communications devices and adjuncts to learning and investigation such as artificial intelligence (AI) programs bid us to remember how writing itself was once critiqued and how that critique in large part was dispelled by subsequent events. But ought we be so sanguine about our reliance on such devices as cellphones, computers, and the emerging AI programs? Do these aid us or dull our abilities? Do they allow us to inquire deeper into the human world or become more divorced from it?

I suppose the general answer is: It all depends on how we use these tools.

Taking a holiday break - no post this week

I am taking a holiday break this week and plan to post again on Sunday, September 8.