You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.™
Preserving the written word for all time – For all humanity!
Cave men did it with rocks.
Gutenberg did it with his press.
Larry Flynt did it with Hustler – well sort of.
For most of human existence, the written word has been recorded in books.
But now the world wide web is the “ether” in which words live.
Where words once lived on paper, they now float on interminable screens of white and move with a dimensional shift that would awe even Einstein.
The written word is alive. AndyCordan.Com is proof of that.
The question is where is it being stored? When I push save, it goes to a place owned by Google Products. Like a puppy, it usually comes to me when I call for it, but what if….
Preserving the written word! It’s a major undertaking, Yo.
In a world where the Internet is the electronic card catalogue of language, I bring you the story of Brewster Kahle – a man bringing back OLD SCHOOL.
Kahle is a man who has looked into the eye of Y2K and seen the apocalypse looming on the digital horizon.
DATELINE: RICHMOND, Calif.
It’s here in a small warehouse, on a non-descript dead-end-street that Kahle, an internet pioneer and computer scientist has become a one man library.
Straight from an Apple commercial circa 1984, Kahle is the new millennium messiah.
Apparently afraid that books will one day go the way of the Brontosaurus, Kahle has initiated a societal endeavor to collect all of the books of the world and store them in one place.
Some people collect stamps, some collect baseball cards, some collect hair ribbons. This man collects hard cover history.
This is a colossal undertaking on a global level. First of all, there are way more books than one guy can warehouse.
Estimates say there are close to 130 million books that have been published over the course of time. Half of them are from Stephen King.
Kahle will never get his hands on them all. But if he can warehouse the classics – Hemingway – War and Peace – and maybe Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, then perhaps our culture can survive.
This hard cover Houdini has a decent start on preserving the written word.
According to published reports, tucked away, in his book bunker – he has stock-piled close to 500,000 works.
The book bunker is a climate controlled group of shipping containers. Unlike the cockroach, the bunker won’t withstand a nuclear blast, but it might survive neglect, by a future generation who thinks a book has an on / off switch.
A book to my grand kids will be a thimble with a view screen. A book to their grand kids might be a neural implant where your thoughts are projected into a cyber collaborative that is immediate for all to see.
So it’s crazy, but I salute you Mr. Kahle. You are a man who has made it his duty to preserve the written word. You are making sure that when the sands of time bury our world and only the
cock-roaches crawl out of the chaos – there is something to remember us by.
When the internet shuts down like a plug pulled on a lap top – history will be little more than a blinking cursor in the great
“control-alt-delete” of existence.
It is then that someone will say – Hey look at all these paper things in this box.
That will be the moment when the written history of our species is preserved and the name Kahle will live on as the book messiah.