As season 2 of Traceroute comes to a close, we take an in-depth look at one of the most important issues in tech today: the intersection between information, access, and ownership. In part one, we’re introduced to Alexis Rossi, the Director of Collections at the Internet Archive, a different kind of librarian (at a different kind of library) that’s attempting to back up the entire internet, as well as the breadth of human knowledge.
But undertaking this mammoth tasks forces Alexis—and indeed all of us—to ask some critical questions: who or what decides what gets preserved…and why. To help answer these questions, we also talk with Dr. Carl Haber, a particle physicist who created IRENE, a digital imaging system that preserves sound recordings without touching them.
We also talk with Bryce Roe and Julia Hawkins of the Northeastern Document Conservation Center, whose hands-on work with IRENE is saving artifacts deeply tied to our culture. But even as we made huge technical strides in preserving our history, more questions arise: as our analog history turns to dust, is the digital representation we replace it with actually history? Is history lost when all the artifacts are replicas, or do we qualify it somehow as an approximation of history?
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Grace Eruwa-Esi :
You're listening to Traceroute, a podcast about the inner workings of our digital world. I'm Grace Ewura-Esi.
Fen Aldrich:
I'm Fen Aldrich.
Amy Tobey:
I'm Amy Toby.
John Taylor:
And I'm John Taylor. And we've got the whole crew here this week to kick off the two part season finale of Traceroute. And I, I think it's important that we're all here for this one because I believe the story that we're about to tell is a culmination of everything that we've talked about this season. With every episode that we've done, we've tried to peel back the layers of the stack and find the human fingerprints on the hardware and software we create. So now it's time to ask one of the most important questions of all, how do we immortalize those fingerprints? This is the story of Alexis Rossi. She might be the world's strangest librarian and she wants to digitize the entirety of human knowledge, which sounds crazy, but it just might save the future of history.
Big stakes, right? Well, let me see if I can put this in perspective. It's 1977 and I'm like 10 years old. And I've been standing outside the Vineyard Twin Cinema in Escondido, California for the past eight hours waiting to get my ticket to the premiere of Star Wars. And I've been absolutely obsessed with this movie since seeing the first trailer during an episode of The Bionic Woman because I was 10 and Lindsay Wagner haunted my prepubescent thoughts. So my friends finally joined me and they pay for my ticket because I stood in line cuz that's the way it worked back then. And then we all go in and sit in our usual seats five rows up from the screen and have our tiny minds completely blown away by this epic motion picture. Now, if you're a Star Wars fan, you will of course remember the iconic scene in the Mos Eisley Cantina, where we're introduced to Han Solo, the smuggler who Obi-Wan wants to hire to get him and Luke off Tattooine.
But Han Solo is cornered by Greedo an alien to whom Han apparently owes money. So as Greedo explains to Han at gunpoint how much he's looked forward to this encounter, Han surreptitiously unholsters his blaster under the table and totally kills Greedo, just absolutely murders this dude in cold blood. And you know, that's cool. Like what do you expect? He's Han Solo, galactic ne'er-do-well, I mean, I'm just sitting there going ham on a box of bon bons and having my hypothalamus completely overloaded. So it's all good with me, but apparently it wasn't all good with everyone.
Amy Tobey:
Han shot first. So in Star Wars, right, like the originals were shot on film and then they were remastered and they were remastered again and then they changed the plot.
Fen Aldrich:
I think it's actually such a great like, pre-example of all of it too, cuz like it still exists. The trilogy without it like it, it still, there's a copy of this thing somewhere that someone can find. What I think is actually like the most indicative of these are HBO retroactively editing Game of Thrones and Netflix going back and re-editing Stranger Things. Stranger Things did a continuity edit to the first season, I believe to make like the most recent one accurate in one of the things they did.
John Taylor:
Oh, that's interesting.
Fen Aldrich:
And Game of Thrones edited out that Starbucks cup, like there was the big, there was the Starbucks Cup left in one of the shots. They went and fixed it and re-uploaded it. So like you cannot find a version of Game of Thrones that includes the Starbucks Cup unless you like recorded it on VCR off of your television when it aired, right? Like,
Amy Tobey:
And so that experience we all had when it was new is gone. It's not available to future generations,
Fen Aldrich:
Right? Like you can't go back and watch the original. There's no, like, this is the original trilogy versus the special. Like it just does, it's gone. And the source of record is like, no, this is the way that it is now, which is a very interesting like, ministry of truth moment
John Taylor:
So they have the legal right to do whatever they want to with the material. If you own the copyright to a thing, that thing is yours. And you can buy, sell, or even alter that thing any way you want to. And you don't have to tell anybody you did. When a kid watches episode four now and doesn't see Han Solo going straight up 187 on Guido, she takes it as a given as Canon. There's nothing to compel this new fan to seek the truth to her. What she has seen is the truth. So I think you might see where I'm going with this. What if the copyrighted material in question is not something as innocuous as a fictional character's murderous proclivities? In fact, what if the copyrighted material isn't a movie or a song or a story? What if it's a non-fiction work like a textbook?
And it's not just the book that's copyrighted, it's the information inside. And since this is the blockbuster season finale, our conflict can't end there. That would be like Thanos obtaining all five of the infinity stones and then deciding to turn them into a necklace for the prom. You see, the problem is this, everything that we know as ancient history is being converted from analog to digital. While everything we consider to be recent history is already digital. It was created on a computer, recorded on a server, and lives as a bunch of ones and zeros in the kind of cloud that doesn't rain. Now this is completely contrary to what we were taught as kids. If you want to see history, you take a walk through a museum, history is stone tablets and dinosaur bones and paintings by Renoir. You know, it's real because you can see it and touch it and point to it and say that thing right? There is a 16th century manuscript about the Ottoman Empire written by Ottomans, but that version of history is turning to dust quicker than you think. And that doesn't include the fact that artifacts can be destroyed in natural and manmade disasters. So how do we define history when its analog component is dust? How do we verify it if our entire history becomes digital copies? How do we know they're accurate copies? Hmm. If only there was like some kind of weird librarian who archived this kind of thing
Alexis Rossi:
For me, my picture of a librarian is Marian the librarian from The Music Man
John Taylor:
That's Alexis Rossi and she's the director of collections at the Internet Archive in San Francisco. And yes, Alexis is the librarian for the archive sort of. And she's the one who keeps all of this information available at the archive. What information? All of it. Like literally all information.
Alexis Rossi:
You know, I think if you look at most libraries, you're talking about tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of books. Some of the very big libraries might have a million or something like that. I think we have I believe it's over 30 million books, just books and, you know, millions of movies, millions of hours of television, millions of hours of audio. I think we're at about 700 billion (with a b) webpages in the way back machine. What
John Taylor:
Alexis is trying to do is back up the entire internet, everything, and at the same time digitize every book ever written, every movie ever made. And most of our audio history as well.
Alexis Rossi:
In general, the idea is to collect all of human information and make it available to everyone so you don't get to pick and choose. If we start to pick and choose too much, I, I feel like we are messing with the historical timeline of what happened. That's what we are here for. Maintain that record of what happened. And I think that it's absolutely crucial to what we do, that we don't pick and choose as much as we possibly can.
John Taylor:
And that means that some of the information being immortalized at the Internet Archive is misinformation. But Alexis is passionate about the idea that if we don't save all of it, then the information we choose to save is potentially biased.
Alexis Rossi:
Anyone can upload to the Internet Archive, which I think is an amazing thing. It means that the librarians are not the arbiters of what gets saved. People being able to hit an upload button also comes with hmm, bad things that you don't want, right? Like war imagery or artifacts of our political process where, you know, these things might even start edging into the area of hate speech, for example. But it is still an important thing to preserve for a library. Our motivation is to save history as it's happening. But with all of that comes the issue of having things on your website that you might not want or that you might want to warn people about before they see it. You know, you kind of have to have walk this line between no one wants to see hate speech, but you also need to know that the hate speech was happening. And you know, how do you deal with that? I think that as a memory-based institution, our role in the world is to try to save history as it's happening. And that includes history that you wish was not happening.
Grace Eruwa-Esi:
I see librarians as gatekeepers, but not just of these stories and these narratives and these pieces of information, but they are gatekeepers of the curiosity that makes us human. It's like librarians are real life superheroes. And hearing Alexis talk, you kind of start to think about that, right? It's like that is, this is the last defense if this is a intergalactic war for the truth, right? You know, cue cool sci-fi music, it's librarians who they're our heroes. They don't battle the way we think of warriors battling, but they battle in the ways that will be remembered by time. It's a very timeless kind of role.
Fen Aldrich:
It really is a battle against time too, right? Like librarians as a, as a role like library science's, concerned deeply with combating what time does to information and artifacts and mm-hmm.
John Taylor:
Or in the case of the Internet Archive knowledge and things that they save both because the Internet Archive is an actual physical place. It's this huge building right in the middle of San Francisco. Which kind of begs the question, why does a digital library need a physical location?
Alexis Rossi:
So as a library, one of the things we're really concerned about is provenance. And this applies to the books that you see on the Internet Archive. It applies to the way back machine, the webpages you see there. Knowing how we got it and where it's been and who has had access to it is really important. If someone could put whatever they wanted into the Wayback Machine, they could make a pretend webpage that never actually existed and then point at it and say, no, look, really this was real. Right? So we really care about the provenance of where webpages came from. So knowing that, you know, either we scanned the book or it came from a trusted partner, knowing where things came from, that sense of provenance is really an important to understanding whether that item has integrity. And we can vouch for the, the veracity of that thing having existed.
John Taylor:
Providence, the dictionary defines it as the place of origin or earliest known history of something. And it's a key idea in Alexis's work at the Internet Archive, by having a physical object that correlates to the digital copy, she's able to establish authenticity. This is how we know our digital copy represents the original. In other words, at the Internet Archive someday you might find the original episode four where Han drops the hammer on Greedo as well as a digital copy of George Lucas's modified version. And that's one reason why I love their work. Another reason, because Alexis believes in this.
Alexis Rossi:
Back when I was running the way back machine, we got an email from a woman whose son had passed away. She was thanking us for saving his GeoCities page. She had found photos that she had never seen before. And it's a different scale, but it's not less meaningful. It, it really puts things into perspective. I do my job because I think it's important regardless, but it really pushes you to see things from a different, much more human scaled perspective. When you realize that what you're doing really, really affects people.
Amy Tobey:
And we're starting to see this in the software world a little bit too, with things like digital bill of materials mm-hmm.
Fen Aldrich:
I was having a moment where I was like, did I, is this the one use of the blockchain? I can come up with God, like having a, having a well is a well agreed upon history of ownership of an asset, right? Like that's, that's more of what it is. It becomes recordkeeping like it like it has been for any bill of materials, right? Like, how do I know that this material you're giving me was sourced? The way you say it was, it's like, well, here's the records of where I got everything.
Amy Tobey:
Van Gogh, right?
Fen Aldrich:
Art forgery is such a wild thing.
Amy Tobey:
There's a ton of folks that try to, to duplicate those images to make new ones and pass them off. And the way that we validate is we carbon date the paint, we look at the paint materials, the canvas materials. We basically, we were looking back at the bill of materials to figure out what the provenance of that painting is to determine if it's a real Van Gogh.
Fen Aldrich:
That's basically the only thing that like stops art forgery at this point is like, well literally this pigment didn't exist then, so it's impossible for this painting to be authentic, right? Yeah. Like, or like, well at the time they would've used this pigment, which was like deadly and poisonous and we don't have now. So like that's the only reason we could tell this one is fake, otherwise it's an exact replica
John Taylor:
This is sounding like, like metadata as provenance, right? And that
Fen Aldrich:
Was always its intention, right? From, from a digital standpoint. Like metadata was always intended to give away where this came from or like what this file is about, right? Maybe it's not its intention, but it's been the use.
John Taylor:
So metadata or perhaps even blockchain authentication, maybe our best way of verifying the provenance of historical artifacts that we digitize. But what if the artifact itself is pretty much already dust? Like in the case of the Stanley Brothers? Wait, wait, wait, wait. You haven't heard of the Stanley Brothers? All right. Looks like we need a little side trip to the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia. World War II has ended and the troops are coming home among the army veterans returning to Dickinson County, Virginia. Our brothers Ralph and Carter Stanley and as many brothers have done throughout the years, they decide it's time to put the band back together. You see, Ralph is a mighty fine banjo picker with a high tenor voice while Carter is a rhythmic guitar player and lead vocalist. So in November of 1946, Ralph and Carter form the Stanley Brothers and the Clinch Mountain Boys.
The style of bluegrass they played was fast and powerful and in a word loud. I mean, the term wouldn't be invented for another five years, but the Stanley Brothers rocked. Fun fact. My brother started a bluegrass band when I was 12 years old and he wanted it to be like the Stanley Brothers loud, fast, precise, all the qualities you'd attribute to like death metal, but with only half the death or maybe two thirds, you'd be stunned at how much death there is in bluegrass. Anyway, the only reason he let me in the band was one. So we could have a brother band and two, my voice hadn't changed yet, so I could hit those insanely high notes like Ralph Stanley. So only a month after reforming the Stanley Brothers become regulars on the farm and Fun Time radio show a daily broadcast out of W C Y B in Bristol, Virginia.
This is where the brothers would get their first regional exposure and their popularity exploded. W C Y B regularly played songs like Mother No Longer Awaits Me at Home and the Girl Behind the Bar songs that the DJ recorded live on acetate during the farm and Fun time broadcasts. This eventually led to the Stanley Brothers first record deal on the richer tone label, followed by a bigger deal on Columbia records in 1949. Now the word acetate is somewhat of a misnomer as these recordings don't actually contain any acetate at all. They're made from a very thin lacquer material glued onto a metal disc. And all of these recordings, including the Stanley Brothers original live broadcasts are crumbling and breaking apart. Now I know you're sitting there saying to yourself, yeah, totally. What we really need to do is preserve a recording of a couple of hillbillies singing about drowning their girlfriend in the Ohio River.
And yes, that's an actual song called Banks of the Ohio because like I said, bluegrass pretty much all about death and drinking so much drinking. But if you were to say this, you'd be missing a much bigger picture, historical context. You see, the Stanley Brothers story is really part of the story of the genesis of pop culture in America. Rock and roll got its start the same way the Stanley brothers did. A radio station would find a regional performer and record their performances on an acetate at the radio station. The station would then replay those acetates over and over until they became hits. And then the record companies would come a call and the performers would create more permanent and higher quality vinyl recordings of their songs. Now side note, this is almost the exact same thing that happened with Elvis Presley. And if all those live recordings were to perish, it wouldn't simply be the end of that music. It would erase the context we have for a uniquely American part of our history. Fortunately, the problem of disintegrating acetates did not go unnoticed, especially by people within the music industry. In fact, none other than Mickey Hart, one of the percussionists for the Grateful Dead, expressed his concern about this issue on an episode of Public Radio's Commonwealth Club broadcast. And as it just so happened, Dr. Carl Haber, a particle physicist from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, was listening to the broadcast during his evening commute.
Dr. Carl Haber:
It was pretty happenstance. I mean, I was specifically, you know, in a traffic jam on the highway between Berkeley and Silicon Valley, which was a route that I was tra traversing frequently at that time. And I happened to listen to it and it just kind of set off a light bulb kind of thing in my head. It was just one of those moments like, wow, what if, what if we tried that? It occurred to me that some of the ways in which we're thinking about applying the technology that we used in particle physics to other other fields could possibly relate to solving some of the problems that Mickey Hart discussed in his lecture.
John Taylor:
Simply put, the problem is that playing the record will destroy the record. If you set a turntable needle down on the fragile material, the needle will rip the record to shreds. So this creates a whole different problem than what Alexis Rossi faces at the Internet Archive with recordings like these duplication will destroy the provenance of the object itself. But Dr. Haber had a plan,
Dr. Carl Haber:
Perhaps we could use various optical tools to create a a, an image of the record and that image would be now digital on a computer, and then we could write software that would analyze the image and be able to calculate what the sound would be if you had actually played it with a needle. So the idea was replace the physical contact of the, of a needle with imaging.
John Taylor:
Dr. Haran, his team, decided to call this new technology Irene, which stands for image, reconstruct, erase noise, et cetera, which I love because the et cetera part is all the cool science stuff.
Dr. Carl Haber:
So the thing that is referred to now as Irene is essentially just a collection of technologies, both hardware and software that allow us to do imaging of the physical objects, the sound recording material, the media itself, transition it into a digital domain where it's a three dimensional, might be a two dimensional or a three dimensional image, and then analyze it with a growing large suite of software tools to extract the audio and optionally even clean it up by removing damage or scratches or dirt through digital image processing.
John Taylor:
Once developed and tested news of Irene spread throughout the preservation community, including to a nonprofit in Andover, Massachusetts called the Northeast Document Conservation Center, the NEDCC licensed the technology and began using it for a variety of projects, including the restoration of the original acetates of our old friends, the Stanley Brothers, Julia Hawkins, and Irene Audio preservation engineer at the NEDCC remembers the project. Well,
Julia Hawkins:
The groove bottoms were awful.
John Taylor:
That's terrific. Alright, so there you are. The client comes in with their one of a kind, in this case, their one of a kind acetate that was recorded at the radio station in 1946. This is it, this is the only copy, this is everything we have, it's falling apart. Do you feel stressed out when it's time to put this thing back together or are you like a brain surgeon now where it's, you know, what you're doing and no problem?
Julia Hawkins:
I mean, that sounds a little narcissistic, but it's probably more accurate.
John Taylor:
So for Julia Hawkins, it's like putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle when some of the pieces are missing and others are crumbling in your hand. But once she has those pieces in place, Irene snaps an image of the grooves and creates what's called a preservation surrogate. Bryce Rowe, the director of audio preservation at the NEDCC explains it this way.
Bryce Rowe:
One of the cool parts about a system like Irene where we produce an image file or sort of transferring the entire object into the digital domain and then just applying large scale data analysis tools, is that we have that image file as as another preservation surrogate for the object that isn't just the audio file. So years down the line, if you wanted to reprocess the image for whatever reason, let's say our processing software has improved, you could return to the image as opposed to returning to the original object, which may have continued to deteriorate over time or suffer further damage. So we've kind of frozen the object in time by imaging it as part of the processing, creating audio.
John Taylor:
Excellent preservation surrogate has become my new favorite expression of this episode,
Bryce Rowe:
Is it a representation, is it a copy? I mean, I think, I think it is a new representation. We're trying to be as accurate as possible to the recording that we have at hand, but all preservation work involves subjective decisions on the part of the operator. That's just the nature of the work. And so I think we have to, in describing the provenance, be really transparent about the original object, how we got from point A to point B, the original object, its condition, and the steps that we took to create a surrogate for exactly the reasons you described. You know, you're, you're kind of even further removing it from, its from its context. And so how do we preserve its context along the way mm-hmm.
John Taylor:
So I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go back in time here a little bit when we were talking about blockchain. Yeah. Do you think it's possible and do you think it would be a good idea to have a blockchain of history? Like we take, let's just call, let's say American history, all right? It's like,
Fen Aldrich:
No, that's right. It should just be Git
Amy Tobey:
So, so that the, the problem with the blockchain, as most people know it is what those folks were trying to do is to create funny money. And so they chose a lot of techniques that are just impractical from a computing standpoint. The core of it though, the idea of a blockchain is, is basically being redeveloped in a number of areas outside of Git for things like software, bill of materials. Mm-Hmm.
Fen Aldrich:
Right? Like using cryptographic techniques to like be able to prove this a zero trust, proof of origin. Mm-Hmm.
John Taylor:
Methods. Got Sure. Got. Yeah. And I, I guess that's not good and slow, that's what I mean too. And, and, and is that, is that the future though? Is that the future of Providence that we create or settle upon something like that?
Fen Aldrich:
I guess that's the question right now in, in the realm of everyone making that software.
John Taylor:
So from a tech standpoint, this all sounds like good news. There are a few hardware and software problems to work out, but ostensibly we could create a blockchain of provenance that we all agree to follow. It would start at the pile of dust that was formerly the historical artifact in question, and then it would verify the digital replication efforts from people like Bryce Rowe and Julia Hawkins, and then go all the way through that object's final archiving by Alexis Rossi. So we have a way of verifying a historical artifacts when its analog component has turned to dust, and we have a way of knowing that our digital copies are accurate copies. I'd say we're very close to a happy ending, but if you believe that, you probably believe that Guido shot first. You see there's an issue that not only threatens all of Alexis's work at the Internet Archive, but raises the specter that our history could be owned by the highest bidder. And one of the first technologists to fully understand the implications of this issue and start waving the red flag was Aaron Swartz, one of Alexis's colleagues. Here's how he framed the problem in a keynote speech regarding the defeat of sopa, the Stop Online Piracy Act. This was in 2012,
Aaron Swartz:
Their blind spot was copyright. When it came to copyright. It was like the part of the justice's brain shut off and they just totally forgot about the First Amendment. You got the sense that deep down, they didn't even think the First Amendment applied when copyright was an issue, which means that if you did want to censor the internet, if you wanted to come up with some way that the government could shut down access to particular websites, this bill might be the only way to do it. And that was especially terrifying because as you know, copyright is everywhere. If you wanna shut down WikiLeaks, it's a bit of a stretch to claim that you're doing it because they have too much pornography. But it's not hard at all to claim that WikiLeaks is violating copyright because everything is copyrighted. The speech, you know the thing I'm giving right now, these words are copyrighted.
John Taylor:
In other words, if you could prove ownership of a piece of information, then accessing that information without permission would be a crime. Even if that information was a piece of your own history, Aaron knew that the arbiters of history could end up being a handful of people who simply bought the rights and the implications of this hit Aaron personally, on the night of January 6th, 2011, Schwartz was arrested near the Harvard campus and eventually charged with wire fraud, could computer fraud, and a host of other federal charges that could land him in prison for 35 years. In 2020, the Internet Archive was sued by a group representing several major publishing houses over infringements and copyright law, the ramifications of which threatened to close the archives doors forever. Here's Alexis again.
Alexis Rossi:
Libraries are supposed to preserve books. We're supposed to preserve the things that aren't profitable anymore and make sure that those things exist for a hundred years. For 500 years. Publishers don't have any reason to do that. If they decide they don't want something out there anymore, they just take it off of your device. But as a library, our mission is to preserve books, and we can't do that if we can't buy them
John Taylor:
On part two of the season finale of Traceroute, a decision is made in the case against the Internet Archive. Okay, I'll save you a click. They lost. But the fallout of the decision we was handed down in March of this year begs the biggest question of them all, who will become the arbiter of history? Find out next week on the season finale of Traceroute.
Grace Eruwa-Esi:
Traceroute is a podcast from Equinix and Stories Bureau. This episode was produced by John Taylor with help from Tim Balint and production assistance from Cat Bagsic. It was edited by Joshua Ramsey and mixed by Jeremy Tuttle with additional editing and sound design by Mathr de Leon. Our theme song was composed by Ty Gibbons. If you wanna check us out, you can find us on Twitter at origins underscore dev, that's D-E-V and type origins.dev into your browser for even more stories about the human layer of the stack. If you enjoyed this story, please share it wherever you hang out online and in person. And consider leaving a five star rating on Apple and Spotify because it really helps other people find the show. I'm Grace Ewura-Esi. Thanks for listening.
- Traceroute is a podcast from Equinix and Stories Bureau.
- This episode was produced by John Taylor with help from Tim Balint and Cat Bagsic
- It was edited by Joshua Ramsey and mixed by Jeremy Tuttle, with additional editing and sound design by Mathr de Leon
- Theme song was composed by Ty Gibbons