the words weren’t mine

The Internet Archive has been around for 30 years and has archived over a trillion web pages. The nonprofit has weathered several major legal fights since 2020. Most recently, it settled with a group of major music publishers that had been seeking damages of up to $700 million over the Archive’s Great 78s project, which archived vintage recordings. Although there’s no major financial penalty at stake right now, the growing trend of media outlets blocking the Wayback Machine still poses a serious threat to its mission.

There is no widely available public tool comparable to the Wayback Machine, and if it continues to lose access to major news sources, its preservation efforts could erode to the point where early digital records of history become much harder to access, or are even lost altogether. Notably, the tool has been used in reporting on The New York Times: In 2016, the paper came under scrutiny for editorial changes it made to an article on US senator and then-presidential candidate Bernie Sanders of Vermont. The revisions were first tracked using the Wayback Machine. read more

IMAGE: Clyfford Still