I love libraries and museums, but I think that Internet Archive has done an incredible job.

If I didn’t have a job or responsibilities and was told that I was allowed to just be curious and have fun, I would spend a tremendous amount of time just reading, listening, watching, playing, etc. on IA.

Visiting IA is the closest feeling I can get to visiting the library when I was young. The library used to be the only place where you could just read swaths of magazines, newspapers, and books, and also check out music- for free.

Also, I love random stuff. IA has digitized tape recordings that used to play in K-Mart. While Wikipedia spends time culling history that people have submitted, IA keeps it. They understand the duty they have when you donate part of human history to them, instead of some person that didn’t care about some part of history just deleting it.

IA is not just its storage and the Wayback machine, even though those things are incredible and a massive part of its value to humanity. It’s someone that just cares.

At the end of the day, big companies just need to make profit. Do big companies care about your digitized 8-track collection you have in cloud storage? One day maybe they will take it away from you to avoid a lawsuit or to get you to rent music from them.

And your local NAS and backups? Do you think your niche archive will survive a space heater safety mechanism failure, a pipe bursting, when your house is collateral damage in a war, or your accidental death? I understand wanting to keep your own copies of things just-in-case, but if you want those things to survive, why not also host them at IA if others generally would find joy or knowledge from them?

My lil NAS won't survive, but do you also believe the IA's San Francisco office will survive"the big one" when it hits the San Andreas fault? Geographically redudndant storage is the only way to do it, and that goes goes for installations big and small.