World spec'mode

Internet Arch

In 2034, the Internet Archive continues, for better or worse, its mission to preserve as much web content as possible: videos, books, movies, web pages, databases, audio files, etc. Despite increasingly strict regulation of web content and mounting pressure from rights holders, all sorts of content—not necessarily in the public domain—manages to slip through the cracks and end up on the Internet Archive’s servers. It must be said that for some, this is also a way to save certain information from censorship and thus preserve a country’s scientific culture and artistic life without fear of reprisals. In any case, the Internet Archive has now reached another milestone: the institution is now equipped with state-of-the-art 5D optical discs as well as servers that store information at the molecular level. For the first time in history, it is now possible to back up a significant portion of the Internet in a single dedicated location, rather than across a multitude of data centers scattered far and wide. This somewhat changes the usual philosophy of web preservation, since it is now possible to consider the idea of “restarting” the Internet in the event of a large-scale disaster leading to the destruction of servers worldwide. The “Internet Arch”—as the project is called—no longer aims merely to preserve information from censorship or technological obsolescence, but also to serve as an ark for all scientific knowledge available on the Internet, as well as for all cultural contributions from around the world. While not exhaustive, the Internet Archive nonetheless centralizes such a vast quantity of scientific articles and educational resources that it’s fair to say that science now fits into just a few cubic meters. And this repository of scientific knowledge is housed in an underground facility near San Francisco.