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CHAPTER NINE: Collectors
In April 1996, millions of “bots”—computer codes designed to
“spider,” or automatically search the Internet and copy content—began
running across the Net. Page by page, these bots copied Internet-based
information onto a small set of computers located in a basement in San
Francisco’s Presidio. Once the bots finished the whole of the Internet,
they started again. Over and over again, once every two months, these
bits of code took copies of the Internet and stored them.
By October 2001, the bots had collected more than five years of
copies. And at a small announcement in Berkeley, California, the archive
that these copies created, the Internet Archive, was opened to the
world. Using a technology called “the Way Back Machine,” you could
enter a Web page, and see all of its copies going back to 1996, as well
as when those pages changed.
This is the thing about the Internet that Orwell would have appreciated.
In the dystopia described in 1984, old newspapers were constantly
updated to assure that the current view of the world, approved
of by the government, was not contradicted by previous news reports.
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