Opening Words – San Francisco 2025

[Music] all right good morning everyone and welcome to funding the comons my name is David and uh instead of doing a a more traditional introduction like I usually do I wanted to share a little story so I'll take you guys back to 1999 I was 13 years old and uh I got really excited about this video game Final Fantasy 7 yeah uh so I built a website this like HTML 1 and I haven't looked at it for like probably a decade or two and uh yesterday I just got curious and uh went into the Wayback machine how many of you guys have used the Wayback machine before oh wow that's a lot um yeah you guys see the servers back there yeah those little blinky dots are people using the wayb back machine right now in real time so uh yeah this was 13-year-old David um you guys can see like signing the guest book where's the fan art so this was my favorite um anime character when I was 13 uh people would submit fan art and then I would post it there's Cloud Strife all right so yeah a little bit about um about this like the the the history here in this building and and stored in the archive um it's not just a storage facility for websites it is a living cultural Archive of memory and knowledge and um since I have been running funding the commons it's always been a dream for me to uh organize an event here and bring together some of the ogs from around the San Francisco Bay area that have built some of the foundational Technologies of the internet together with the younger generation of Founders and Builders of emerging Technologies blockchain AI Etc um and bring those people together in this space and um really grateful for Wendy for giving such an effort to do that and for everything that you've done for this space and um for the commons I think the the archive itself is such a beautiful um embodiment of a digital Commons of a universal knowledge Commons and yeah just thank you so much Wendy hey everyone my name is Wendy hanamura and for the last decade it has been my pleasure to be a part of the hundreds of people who make this place we call this our Temple to knowledge and being in this room which is called the great room I think you can understand why we do that and we think of ourselves as the Library of Alexandria for the digital age and as a library what do you have on the shelves you have the books but in our case the books the films the web pages the 78s the images and if you turn back there as David alluded these are just some of the storage units that we ourselves engineered and every time one of those little blue lights blinks on and off it means that there's somebody somewhere in the world either uploading or downloading a kernel of Knowledge from the internet archive now when our founder Brewster kale who sends his his regrets and his deepest welcome he's in Amsterdam uh starting a new hub for us in Europe because in these uncertain times I think you want to have knowledge here and in Canada and in Europe and all over the world and that's what he's busy doing but when he founded this place 28 years ago it was at the very beginning of a new epic the internet era and he had the pressence to think wow someday this thing the worldwide web it might actually amount to something and maybe there might be a guy named David Casey who 28 years later wants to see his geoc City's website and not only David Casey but David Casey's children and grandchildren can go back and see this and why was that an important Insight because he put it on geoc cities which at the time was the fifth largest website in the world then they sold it to Yahoo and in under a decade it went under so if it weren't for the Crawlers that went back and forth quite eal Arian I must say they did not take Tim burner's Lee's website but say David Casey I don't need that thing they took everything because who knows what Brilliance David Casey would have today to bring you all together who are we to say what is important and is not important so Brewster and his team built the first crawlers that would go back and forth across the web and capture every website and store it forever and how big was that at the time at the time we can tell you it was 63 in big because we commissioned Alan wrath the MIT sculptor we said how big is the is the web and he said oh well it's 63 inches because I can store it in this piece of sculpture and if you were to stand there and I encourage you to you would see almost every web page that was in existence in 1997 passed through and when they would ask Brewster tale how big is this thing you're trying to preserve he would say I don't know it's enormous it's maybe two terabytes big well today Mark Graham and his team who you're going to hear from they do two terabytes before breakfast right so it has changed but our mission has never changed our mission is to capture preserve and make accessible the knowledge of the world world forever for free because knowledge Bel belongs to all of us I think we could have made a proprietary uh version of the Wayback machine and charged you quite a lot of money David Casey to see that website but uh it doesn't belong to us it doesn't belong to any company it belongs to everyone and that's what we have dedicated ourselves to doing for the last 28 years to preserving the books the records the music the social media and the web pages of all of all of us for all of us and it is a huge huge task and we need Partners like filecoin and ethereum and others because we cannot keep up with the task of saving everything I mean in the Tik Tock era it's impossible but we're heading into the AI era how do you save the outputs of a chat GPT for God's sake these are some of the tasks before us and we're here today and so honored to be the hosts of funding the commons uh a group that came out of protocol Labs uh which in many ways started here too because a young Juan Benet the founder of filecoin ipfs and protocol Labs he was a grad student at Stanford and he came to us and he said you know this is so important we've got to we've got to preserve OB erve the universe and I have this vision and it should be like the Bell Labs of of this era and he went out and built that and he showed us the first uh instance of ipfs in the browser from this stage and vitalic buan announced ethereum from the foyer over Pizza in 2014 we have always loved the builders and the dreamers here and I think if you're here today it's because you are a dreamer or or a builder or a believer that technology is a lever for Change and if we could just get the resources to use it for good we could change the world we are changing the world the world is changing whether we use our values to steer it or not so we have to lock arms and make sure that we steer it in the right way and resource the people who are doing it in the right way so that's why we're here today and it is my great honor to introduce the first speaker but I want to show you a slide today when I opened up my phone so many people had sent me this there was a unit called the 442nd regimental combat team which during World War II was made up of all Japanese Americans including my father and they were sent to some of the bloodiest battles of World War II in France and Italy and they became the most most decorated unit of all time for their size and length of service because they were fighting for something greater even than democracy my grandparents my mother my uncles were all in concentration camps in the US internment camps and they were fighting to prove that they were Americans and they did so stunningly so this video about their service reminding us that we are all Americans uh was taken down this week from the Army website because it does no longer fit in the ndei Mandate of the recent executive order signed by President Trump so history can be erased in a second folks and one of our jobs at the internet archive is to make sure that we have a copy of every iteration of History so every every four years we do something called the end of term crawl we crawl every government website in the Biden Administration and then everyone in the Trump Administration and that work is just a tiny fraction of the work led by our next speaker a man who works I have to say tirelessly 247 seven days a week uh with a small team whose job it is to preserve our digital record in the Wayback machine so so please welcome my colleague Mark Graham director of the Wayback machine thank you [Music]