Nathan J. Robinson, editor-in-chief of Current Affairs.
An independent magazine published in New Orleans is proving that it’s possible to succeed without accepting advertising or putting up barriers requiring readers to pay for content.
In 2015, Nathan J. Robinson and Oren Nimni raised more than $16,000 in a Kickstarter campaign to launch Current Affairs, a print magazine featuring political analysis and satire. Its lean staff of six produces six issues a year, as well as a podcast and digital newsletter. To operate, the magazine relies on donations, grants and individual subscriptions—although its content is available to the public online for free.
Robinson said he’s motivated by the all-too-common and damaging problem that “the truth is paywalled but the lies are free,” which he’s famously written about in the magazine. Outrageous stories and misinformation are easy to access, while factual news stories often require subscriptions to read.
“The moment you put in a paywall, you’re cutting down the potential audience—and you’re cutting it down to the people who are really committed, rather than those who need to read the piece the most. I want to reach the people who need to read it closely,” Robinson said. “It’s really important for democracy, because people need to be able to make informed decisions.”
Running a progressive magazine not backed by corporate interests gives the editorial staff latitude to tackle issues with a different lens, said Robinson, 35, who has a law degree and PhD in sociology. With so many distractions in the daily news, Current Affairs tries to keep people focused on what matters; for instance, critiquing how climate change policies should be addressed, and analyzing U.S. policy with Haiti over time. In 2023, Robinson wrote an article on the history of the New Masses magazine, exploring its mission as a left-leaning publication from 1926-1948.
“Being independent gives us so much creative freedom,” Robinson said. “We’re very experimental.”
Current Affairs has 3,000 subscribers (who pay about $70 a year), and staff work to build deep connections to secure their loyalty. Robinson hosts regular online Zoom sessions to get feedback from subscribers and extends an open invitation to stop by the magazine’s office in the Central Business District of New Orleans for a cup of tea.
Current Affairs covers
Robinson’s goal: cultivate a community that wants to support the publication, rather than thinking of subscribing as transactions. When there is a new project or initiative, the magazine reaches out to subscribers for additional donations and often finds they are responsive.
“We’re trying to demonstrate the viability of independent media,” Robinson said. “We hope we inspire others to believe it’s possible and not accept the conventional wisdom that you need to put content behind paywalls, because you don’t.”
Content is produced by three editors (the other staff members cover graphics and operations) and freelance writers. Robinson said salaries and payments for submissions are modest to keep costs down, with an annual budget of just $600,000. The publication relies on traffic from social media to attract new readers. The team is dedicated to do what it can to persuade others about policy and culture, he said, and provides easy access to the public to join in the discourse.
Robinson said the work of Current Affairs and the Internet Archive intersects, as both strive to remove barriers to knowledge.
“The Internet Archive functions as a library should, putting out a lot of raw information,” Robinson said. “Our job is to sift through the information. Collection is important, but analysis is also important.”
In his work, Robinson said he frequently turns to the Internet Archive. After finishing graduate school at Harvard University, he lost access to the campus library. “The Wayback Machine is unbelievably important to anyone who wants to seriously research anything, because stuff goes away,” he said.
Robinson co-authored a book with Noam Chomsky, The Myth of American Idealism, which was released by Penguin Random House last year. Since many of the books cited in endnotes were out of print, Robinson said the Internet Archive was invaluable in verifying sources.
Recently, the magazine became registered with the Internal Revenue Services as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. With that new designation, it began to seek additional support and just received its first grant from the Craigslist Foundation. The hope is to expand its funding to be able to hire reporters to do more original reporting, Robinson said.
New start-ups, especially in the media space, struggle to find a sustainable business model, but Current Affairs continues to grow: “It feels amazing to bring something into the world that isn’t like everything else,” he said. “We’ve been around for eight years now, and we’re going to stay around many more.”
Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) is urging the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on digital platforms that mislead consumers into believing they own purchased content when, in reality, they are only granted temporary access. In his statement, Wyden highlights how companies selling digital TV shows, e-books, music, and video games often retain the right to revoke access, leaving consumers without the content they paid for. He calls on the FTC to enforce transparency and prevent these deceptive sales practices. Read the full letter.
This push for fairness and transparency in digital media sales is important for libraries as well as consumers. Over the last decade, publishers have fundamentally changed the relationship between libraries and their collections, phasing out digital sales and even “perpetual access” license models in favor of subscription-only access models. While the companies behind these changes claim they will improve library services through enhanced discovery and integration of research content, librarians and scholars argue that renting rather than owning materials ultimately harms the libraries and their patrons.
“[T]he transition to subscription-only access represents more than a change in purchasing models – it fundamentally undermines the ability of academic libraries to build collections that serve their specific institutional needs. It is likely to impede our ability to maintain comprehensive research — let alone teaching — collections.”
Siobhan Haimé, Birkbeck, University of London
The shift to a streaming-only model doesn’t just harm libraries and consumers—it’s also devastating for artists, authors, and independent publishers. Without the ability to sell their work outright, creators are forced into licensing arrangements that give platforms control over distribution, pricing, and even availability. Independent publishers are pushing back, albeit unsuccessfully, as seen in their failed lawsuit against Amazon, alleging that the company’s dominance in digital books forces unfair terms on publishers and authors alike. Musicians, too, are speaking out—Max Collins, lead singer of famed alt-rock band Eve 6, explains how his band with popular songs averages a million streams each month on Spotify, paying out $3,000, on average, per month. As Collins writes in his op-ed, “It’s a pretty sick deal…for the corporations.”
Senator Wyden’s letter isn’t a sudden development—it’s the culmination of years of warnings about the risks of a “streaming-only” model and its impact on libraries and the communities they support. The shift away from ownership to perpetual leasing threatens long-term access to knowledge and culture. To explore what’s at stake, check out these additional resources:
The End of Ownership: Personal Property in the Digital Economy
By Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz From the publisher, MIT Press: If you buy a book at the bookstore, you own it. You can take it home, scribble in the margins, put it on the shelf, lend it to a friend, sell it at a garage sale. But is the same thing true for the ebooks or other digital goods you buy? Retailers and copyright holders argue that you don’t own those purchases, you merely license them. That means your ebook vendor can delete the book from your device without warning or explanation—as Amazon deleted Orwell’s 1984 from the Kindles of surprised readers several years ago. These readers thought they owned their copies of 1984. Until, it turned out, they didn’t. In The End of Ownership, Aaron Perzanowski and Jason Schultz explore how notions of ownership have shifted in the digital marketplace, and make an argument for the benefits of personal property.
Data Cartels: The Companies that Control and Monopolize Our Information
By Sarah Lamdan From the publisher, Stanford University Press: In our digital world, data is power. Information hoarding businesses reign supreme, using intimidation, aggression, and force to maintain influence and control. Sarah Lamdan brings us into the unregulated underworld of these “data cartels”, demonstrating how the entities mining, commodifying, and selling our data and informational resources perpetuate social inequalities and threaten the democratic sharing of knowledge.
Four Digital Rights For Protecting Memory Institutions Online
By Lila Bailey, Michael Lind Menna The rights and responsibilities that memory institutions have always enjoyed offline must also be protected online. To accomplish this goal, libraries, archives and museums must have the legal rights and practical ability to:
Collect materials in digital form, whether through digitization of physical collections, or through purchase on the open market or by other legal means;
Preserve digital materials, and where necessary repair, back up, or reformat them, to ensure their long-term existence and availability;
Provide controlled access to digital materials for advanced research techniques and to patrons where they are—online;
Cooperate with other memory institutions, by sharing or transferring digital collections, so as to aid preservation and access.
The Publisher Playbook: A Brief History of the Publishing Industry’s Obstruction of the Library Mission.
By Kyle K. Courtney and Juliya Ziskina Abstract: Libraries have continuously evolved their ability to provide access to collections in innovative ways. Many of these advancements in access, however, were not achieved without overcoming serious resistance and obstruction from the rightsholder and publishing industry. The struggle to maintain the library’s access-based mission and serve the public interest began as early as the late 1800s and continues through today. We call these tactics the “publishers’ playbook.” Libraries and their readers have routinely engaged in lengthy battles to defend the ability for libraries to fulfill their mission and serve the public good. The following is a brief review of the times and methods that publishers and rightsholder interests have attempted to hinder the library mission. This pattern of conduct, as reflected in ongoing controlled digital lending litigation, is not unexpected and belies a historical playbook on the part of publishers and rightsholders to maximize their own profits and control over the public’s informational needs. Thankfully, as outlined in this paper, Congress and the courts have historically upheld libraries’ attempts to expand access to information for the public’s benefit.
Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record
By Luca Messarra, Chris Freeland and Juliya Ziskina In today’s digital landscape, corporate interests, shifting distribution models, and malicious cyber attacks are threatening public access to our shared cultural history. Vanishing Culture: A Report on Our Fragile Cultural Record aims to raise awareness of these growing issues. The report details recent instances of cultural loss, highlights the underlying causes, and emphasizes the critical role that public-serving libraries and archives must play in preserving these materials for future generations. By empowering libraries and archives legally, culturally, and financially, we can safeguard the public’s ability to maintain access to our cultural history and our digital future.
Chokepoint Capitalism: How Big Tech and Big Content Captured Creative Labor Markets and How We’ll Win Them Back
By Cory Doctorow & Rebecca Giblin This book examines how monopolistic corporations have structured markets—especially in digital media—to extract wealth while limiting access and competition. It also explores ways creators and the public can push back against these restrictive systems.
As an Artist in Residence, Swilk said the Internet Archive provided them with the time, space, and support to create a meaningful piece of art that has opened up new possibilities.
“When you’re looking for something, it’s important to know who was in love” by Swilk.
Unveiled in November 2024, their immersive art exhibit combined weaving and technology to highlight the critical role of the internet during the HIV/AIDS crisis. Swilk, a 30-year-old artist based in Oakland, California, spent six months on the project with their colleague, Patty Pacheco — researching, designing and producing it for a show at the Internet Archive’s headquarters in San Francisco.
“I felt like the Archive placed a lot of trust in me,” said Swilk of the sprawling installation in the Great Room. “They let me experiment in a space that was very important to them. I was grateful to be among people who would let me really dream.”
The finished piece, When you’re looking for something, it’s important to know who was in love, drew on thousands of historic HIV/AIDS documents and web resources in the Archive’s collection — many of which have since been altered or scrubbed off the live web. Swilk’s weavings were programmed with motors to breathe and pulse whenever users interacted with those archived resources on Internet Archive servers.
The idea for the project, like much of Swilk’s work, centers on concepts of home and historic origins.
Swilk’s weavings were programmed with motors to breathe and pulse whenever users interacted with those archived resources on Internet Archive servers.
“As a queer person growing up in the Midwest, I found a lot of solace on the internet, and community,” Swilk said. “The more I was able to connect with my own history through content I found on the internet, the more at home I felt.”
In their household, HIV was a very charged subject, and misinformation swirled around, so Swilk turned online for answers.
“The internet was this deeply impactful, incredible resource that was harboring so much information,” Swilk said. “I wanted to make something that highlighted that.”
Swilk said they long wanted to automate their work, and the Internet Archive provided the appropriate development space to mount motors and technical assistance to make the piece come to life.
“I didn’t know anything about computers,” Swilk said, prior to coming into the Artist in Residence program. “Being able to incorporate mechanization into my art feels like I have a completely new medium to paint with now — and that feels really exciting.”
Swilk credits the team at the Archive (Amir Esfahani, Evan Sirchuk, David Eisenberg) for helping make the exhibit happen.
Artist in Residence Program The Internet Archive’s Artist in Residency is organized by Amir Saber Esfahani, and is designed to connect artists with the archive’s collections to show what is possible when open access to information meets the arts. Please contact Amir at [email protected] for any inquiries.
Swilk was pleased with the response to the installation, which was viewed by hundreds of people during the Archive’s annual event in October and a reception in November. They look forward to incorporating more technology into their art. Swilk also composed music that played in the background with the exhibit. It was composed over field recordings of spaces HIV information was traditionally spread, such as coffee shops, night clubs, and hospitals. It included a quote from a 1997 interview by HIV activist Kiyoshi Kuromiya. Other synths were made from modulated retro computer sounds.
“Whenever I’m given the opportunity to be a resident artist somewhere, my work explodes,” Swilk said. “I really feel like this is putting my work in a different direction. I don’t think I’m going to make something that doesn’t move again.”
Although the program ended with the show, Swilk said it doesn’t feel like it’s over. “I very much feel like this is the start of something. I’m very excited about what comes next,” they said. “I think that’s the point of a successful residency: to develop work that we can use to jump off.”
Swilk said there are so many ways to use the Internet Archive, both digitally and physically, to do creative and interesting projects outside of the box. “It’s a place where you can come with big ideas and leave with them realized.”
Yesterday, every major newspaper in the UK had the exact same headline, demanding the government “Make It Fair” by ensuring that the country’s copyright laws make it impossible, or at least very expensive, for AI models to be trained there.
This stunt is apparently a response to the UK’s open consultation on the topic of AI and Copyright that welcomed anyone with an interest in the subject to weigh in on the government’s proposed “plan to deliver a copyright and AI framework that rewards human creativity, incentivises innovation and provides the legal certainty required for long-term growth in both sectors.”
There are, of course, legitimate concerns surrounding AI development and its impact across all sectors of society. While this consultation is ostensibly focused on commercial players, libraries and archives—and the public they serve—would be affected by possible sweeping new copyright rules. These are mission-driven organizations that can help with giving citizens historical background to current issues and help counter propaganda campaigns, among other social benefits.
Without a change to its current law, universities and libraries in the UK might not be able to work with universities in other countries on many research projects. While we urge the UK government to retain some form of noncommercial exception for text and data mining (TDM), as we point out in our submission, the current version is burdensome—for example, requiring that any digitized versions of physical materials made for the purpose of one project be scanned again and again for any other projects. Non-commercial actors, many of which are government-funded, should be encouraged to work together and be efficient, not to have to digitize the same materials over and over.
Unfortunately, libraries and other cultural heritage institutions do not control the front pages of newspapers. Nevertheless, we hope the UK government will pay attention to what such noncommercial public interest organizations have to say about the future of our information ecosystem and the development of AI tools that work for everybody.
You can read the Internet Archive’s full comments here.
Rhapsody in Blue stands as an iconic piece of American music with riveting orchestration, and a cultural footprint that reflects the modernity of the early 20th century. Beyond its artistic merits, the composition has provided numerous cultural touchstones, including its usage as the theme for United Airlines commercials, score backing for films such as “Fantasia 2000,” and countless memorable recorded performances, including a personal favorite by Leonard Bernstein. Among these recordings is a significant one performed by George Gershwin himself at the piano, with accompaniment by the Paul Whiteman Orchestra.
Recorded on June 10, 1924, and released that October, this version is not just historic for its timing, produced shortly after the piece’s premiere in February of the same year, but also for its details. While today’s audiences might not find it unusual, the phenomenon of a composer or musical artist performing their own work is rare in the history of human experience. Until the late 19th Century, the only way to experience music was in a live setting. By 1924, it had become more and more commonplace to experience music through commercially available recordings. When listening to the 1924 recording by Gershwin, listeners today have a direct auditory link to the piece’s 1924 inception. This is in stark contrast to classical pieces by composers like Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach, who never had the opportunity to record their works. Our understanding of these compositions is shaped by interpretations that are decades or centuries removed from their original creation. Yet, Gershwin’s personal interpretation of his composition offers a unique connection to the moment of its creation, allowing us to hear the piano played with the intensity Gershwin intended. It invokes a feeling of closeness to a time long removed from the current moment.
The accessibility of Gershwin’s 1924 recording is enhanced by its passage into the public domain. Such accessibility enriches our cultural heritage and allows for a deeper understanding of the moment in which it was produced. It is not some far-off German or French musical masterpiece, but a living document in which we can hear the direct influence of the composer. This direct access to Gershwin’s performance is an invaluable resource, providing a rare auditory bridge to the past. So, the next time you listen to “Rhapsody in Blue,” consider choosing the 1924 version performed by Gershwin. Imagine the uniqueness of that experience and the profound connection to history it offers, replicating the original sound and transporting us to the moment of a bygone era.
The following guest post from digital humanities scholar Nichole Misako Nomura is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
Punch cards are a fascinating binary data storage format that aren’t just history—they’re still used by knitting machines today! Thanks to the Internet Archive and other collections, we still have access to historic punch cards, but there are some technical challenges to using them in the format they’re stored in. Meet a few folx working on those challenges.
Punch card computation—the good old days, or the bad old days, depending on who you talk to—lives firmly in the land of “the old days” for most—a piece of history, with pedagogical and nostalgic benefit—but it’s alive and well in the textile world.
While the Jacquard loom gets all the attention for being the first code, the punch card knitting machine transitioned from being a Jacquard attachment on lace and knitting machines in industrial textile production to the kind of local, DIY code that a lot of people in textiles interacted with—many of whom were women. By the 1970s, they were used by people knitting for themselves and their families, for take-home piece-work, and in textile factory settings. The punch card machine was eventually replaced in commercial and, if you can afford it, home contexts by machines that could control individual needles, instead of depending on a punch card’s repeat—but the machines are still in use in a number of hobbyist workshops (like my own!) and are even still in production (albeit much-reduced).
The knitting machines I own share their punch card dimensions (24 stitches wide) with one of the first punch cards (the Hollerith card, used for the 1890 census, was a 24-column punch card). They’re an important piece of computing history—and crucially, one of the few that isn’t only history because a broad community of people, on- and off-line, are still sharing knowledge on how to hack, restore, and use them.
All punch cards are fundamentally digital, even if we don’t generally think of “digital” as a property physical objects can have. It is only recently that our associations of computing with “the cloud” and other ephemeral metaphors have superseded the fundamentally physical processes that support computation. Working with knitting machine punch cards reminds me that the cloud is a metaphor, and lets me own and manipulate my code in a way I find both challenging and creatively liberating.
The coolest thing about knitting punch cards is that they really are just sequences of “yes” and “no”—and that information is actionable in a wide variety of machines, all of which perform different functions based on that information. Some machines can knit two different colors at once—one color is “yes,” and the other is “no.” Others can skip the stitches marked as “no.” Some machines can make tuck or slip stitches, and others still do something called “weaving,” a variation on the aforementioned two-color knitting. The information encoded by these punch cards, regardless of the actual dimensions of the cards, is interoperable across most machines—and when it is not, it is because the number of holes in the punch card doesn’t permit the same numeric repeat (30 and 24 are divisible by a similar, but not identical, set of numbers).
There are a lot of punch card knitting patterns stored on the internet, found in multi-purpose archives like the Internet Archive and in countless community-hosted Google Drives. Unlike a pattern written for hand-knitting, these punch cards are not, strictly-speaking, usable in the format they are stored in. While I could knit a sweater from a set of directions that look like knit 1, purl 40 from an image, working with images of punch card knitting patterns requires a different workflow—one that, counterintuitively, is challenging because of the digital nature of the punch card itself.
Digitizing the already-digital
Knitting machine punchcards are relatively easy to digitize in a way that preserves the information, but relatively difficult to digitize in a way that makes the transition back from stored-on-the-computer to stored-in-physical-material feasible. It is entirely possible to recreate a punch card using an image—by hand, laboriously, with a physical hole punch. (Image: https://archive.org/details/handypunch/HandyPunchDirections/mode/2up) Usually I work row-by-row, with a ruler across the image, to make sure I’m putting holes in the right spots and chanting things like “3 yes, 1 no, 3 yes, 4 no” in repeating patterns. It is error-prone, but consistent with how generations pre-internet worked with these patterns—translating an image in a book or magazine into binary data of “punch this, not that.”
However, those with more patience for debugging than patience for tedious card-punching have been experimenting with a variety of methods that allow for computer-controlled punching—or, more often, cutting that imitates punching. The Cricut is the standout piece of hardware here, although any machine that can precision cut paper using code will do. These machines, called CNC machines (CNC stands for “computer numerical control”), can have laser or blade attachments, and they work the same way as the massive plasma cutters used for cutting steel. A layer of software, which can be open-source or proprietary, translates an image stored as a SVG (scalable vector graphic) into strings of numbers that control the cutting head.
SVGs aren’t that hard to generate off of images; the challenge here is generating an SVG off an image that actually fits in a punch card knitting machine. There is exactly one spot a hole can go that will work with the dimensions of a knitting machine, and unfortunately, low-quality scans (even pretty-good quality scans) are often too noisy to make it possible to blow up the image and then cut out all the dark spots. I tried, and was rewarded with a punch card that jammed, ripped, and complained loudly for several rows before I gave up. With higher-quality scans, this one-to-one kind of reproduction might work—but only for the machine the punch card was originally designed for. So there’s an incentive to extract the information in those punch cards in a way that is not tied to the specific dimensions of one knitting machine or another. Knitting magazines frequently turned to standardized grid formats for this, preserving the information (“yes, no, yes, yes, no”) but not the specific dimensions of any given punch card.
I work with punch cards in my home workshop for fun, but I’m also fortunate enough to work with them at Stanford’s Textile Makerspace, where Quinn Dombrowski has been teaching data visualization using textiles on an assortment of knitting machines, looms, and sewing machines. Quinn’s colleague Simon Wiles, a Digital Scholarship Research Developer at Stanford’s Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research, has worked on a computer-vision approach for converting images of punch cards into data that could be used to generate new physical punch cards. He previously worked on an incredible digitization effort on behalf of the Stanford Libraries to digitize their player piano rolls, which posed related technical challenges, so knitting-machine punch cards seemed like a challenge right up his alley.
When I asked Simon to describe his ideal digitization and preservation workflow for knitting machine punch cards, he said something that surprised me—that the encoded information preserved in magazines and books might be a better starting place than the punch cards themselves, depending on the goals of the project. It’s really hard to scan a punch card well. He pointed out that all sorts of things happen to physical punch cards that make them harder to digitize—they get bent or torn (and in the case of the player piano rolls he’s worked on, people repair and modify them in a variety of ways)—all of which are interesting material information about use, but which pose challenges for computer vision. The question of what to do with a hole that has been taped over is not only a creative decision, but also a technical one: will the scan be able to capture that? Do we introduce a new character to represent the tape in the encoding? Not that magazines are foolproof, he stresses—there are plenty of challenges in digitizing shiny paper, especially if one is trying to do it quickly or automatically.
Regardless of source material, Simon stresses the importance of high-quality scans: “From the point of view of posterity: the scan quality is really important—preserve it the best you can: things that are difficult to parse now will only get easier to parse in the future.”
Punch Card Encoding
Storing the parse—and circulating that information without having to repeat the process of either manual or computer-vision-assisted encoding—relies, at the moment, on community-supported infrastructure.
The format accepted by Brenda A. Bell’s generator, which generates SVGs for a given punch card style based on a user’s plain text file, has become one of the de facto encodings for this information as a .txt file encoded in ASCII—a way to archive and share punch cards that skips over the limitations of image-based archiving, even as it requires more upfront investment in labor. See image below for an example of what this looks like.
Text files are a lot smaller than images, and can be stored easily on both personal hard drives and cloud storage. There are many community-run Google Drives that act as repositories for these punch cards. As far as storing and circulating go, the ASCII format accepted by Bell’s generator offers a lot in terms of flexibility—allowing us to quickly remix, edit, and modify punch card patterns using lightweight, open-source software, even if the current format decontextualizes the information from its original conditions of use. Simon pointed out that a standardized metadata structure could do a lot there—maybe a standardized plain-text header—and I imagine what I could do with a corpus of punch card encoding linked to metadata about its provenance and digitization and to source images stored somewhere like the Internet Archive. What would we learn about knitting and textile history? What creative remixes would be possible?
Punch cards preserve the past and future
Knitting punch cards are an important part of any feminist computing history, and surprisingly resilient. They’re interoperable across machines with the same repeat, can be stored as physical (but still fundamentally digital) copies without worrying about hard drives going bad or requiring ongoing power consumption, and are also, in the age of seemingly-endless proprietary software and terms and conditions, refreshingly punk, in a minimal computing, open-source sort of way. How many people actually read the source code of the open-source software they use? Punch cards are the source, in something so fundamentally binary that fluency is not hard to come by. (Fluency in binary for almost all other tasks is nearly impossible.) I can repeat a row as many times as I wish. I can change whether my machine ignores the 1s, knits the 1s, purls the 1s, etc. I can perform subsequent operations on the punch card’s outputs with manual manipulation. And I own it. I own my knitting machine, can take it apart and repair it without violating some terms of service, and can hack and modify it and my punch cards to my heart’s content.
In a dream world, we’d have naming conventions or databases that let us link the .txt files to their corresponding stored images, in a system that balances the practicalities of storage and future use with the incredibly rich history available to us in the images. Punch card archiving supports an active, developing space where folx continue to develop computational and coding expertise in a variety of formats and ways—from working with mathematical modeling software to generate new punch cards to working out new designs with a hole punch and the memory cartridges at their machine. Our digitization and archiving practices can help us better understand the history of computing at the same time as they support an ongoing community working in creative computation. The Internet Archive and other community archives—which Simon says “are our best hope against enclosure”—don’t only preserve history, they enable communities to continue using and developing our technological resources.
About the author
Nichole Misako Nomura has a PhD from Stanford in English and an MA in Education, and studies digital humanities pedagogy. She’s currently an Associate Director at the Stanford Literary Lab, a digital-humanities research collective, and a lecturer in the Stanford Department of English.
Every four years, before and after the U.S. presidential election, a team of libraries and research organizations, including the Internet Archive, work together to preserve material from U.S. government websites during the transition of administrations.
These “End of Term” (EOT) Web Archive projects have been completed for term transitions in 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020, with 2024 well underway. The effort preserves a record of the U.S. government as it changes over time for historical and research purposes.
With two-thirds of the process complete, the 2024/2025 EOT crawl has collected more than 500 terabytes of material, including more than 100 million unique web pages. All this information, produced by the U.S. government—the largest publisher in the world—is preserved and available for public access at the Internet Archive.
“Access by the people to the records and output of the government is critical,” said Mark Graham, director of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and a participant in the EOT Web Archive project. “Much of the material published by the government has health, safety, security and education benefits for us all.”
The EOT Web Archive project is part of the Internet Archive’s daily routine of recording what’s happening on the web. For more than 25 years, the Internet Archive has worked to preserve material from web-based social media platforms, news sources, governments, and elsewhere across the web. Access to these preserved web pages is provided by the Wayback Machine. “It’s just part of what we do day in and day out,” Graham said.
To support the EOT Web Archive project, the Internet Archive devotes staff and technical infrastructure to focus on preserving U.S. government sites. The web archives are based on seed lists of government websites and nominations from the general public. Coverage includes websites in the .gov and .mil web domains, as well as government websites hosted on .org, .edu, and other top level domains.
The Internet Archive provides a variety of discovery and access interfaces to help the public search and understand the material, including APIs and a full text index of the collection. Researchers, journalists, students, and citizens from across the political spectrum rely on these archives to help understand changes on policy, regulations, staffing and other dimensions of the U.S. government.
As an added layer of preservation, the 2024/2025 EOT Web Archive will be uploaded to the Filecoin network for long-term storage, where previous term archives are already stored. While separate from the EOT collaboration, this effort is part of the Internet Archive’s Democracy’s Library project. Filecoin Foundation (FF) and Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web (FFDW) support Democracy’s Library to ensure public access to government research and publications worldwide.
According to Graham, the large volume of material in the 2024/2025 EOT crawl is because the team gets better with experience every term, and an increasing use of the web as a publishing platform means more material to archive. He also credits the EOT Web Archive’s success to the support and collaboration from its partners.
Web archiving is more than just preserving history—it’s about ensuring access to information for future generations.The End of Term Web Archive serves to safeguard versions of government websites that might otherwise be lost. By preserving this information and making it accessible, the EOT Web Archive has empowered researchers, journalists and citizens to trace the evolution of government policies and decisions.
The following guest post from writer and editorial director JD Shadel is part of our Vanishing Culture series, highlighting the power and importance of preservation in our digital age. Read more essays online or download the full report now.
Once upon a time, everything on the Internet existed in one single location: on a Wal-Mart flat-pack desk in my childhood home. OK, that’s not technically accurate, but it felt very true to me then. When I sat on that height-adjustable ergonomic desk chair, the whole Internet seemed to rest on that particle-board desk, which sagged under the weight of the chonky desktop computer it held.
I first glimpsed the World Wide Web through an off-white monitor four times the size of my young skull. The first sound the Internet made was, of course, a screech—i.e., the symphonic shriek of dial-up. A kid in the hills of Appalachia, I turned up the volume knob on the clunky speakers to hear 19 or so screaming seconds of skooo skeee skooo skeee dooo skahhh skaaaaaaahhhh skahhhhhh on full blast.It made my mom cringe, which made me love it more. This was the fanfare for us early cybersurfers, a sound announcing that we were all logging on. And when this sound concluded, I saw this new world. Internet Explorer would load the web’s jittery rhythms: a seemingly endless sea of constantly looping GIFs that felt as cheeky and comical as they felt fresh.
For those who came of age with the early days of the World Wide Web as I did, that dial up shriek sounded like the future. And that future looked like the web’s emergent image filetype: the new Graphics Interchange Format combined multiple frames into a single file, displaying basic animations on repeat. It quickly came to define the dot-com aesthetic.
The limited bandwidth and capabilities of the day’s desktop computers helped GIFs transcend technical barriers to become an icon of the time. Soon, everything seemingly imaginable had been GIFed: dancing babies, dancing skeletons, and, of course, loads of cat GIFs. There were timely GIFs for everything from “The Simpsons” cartoons and e-pet like Tamagotchi keychains and a Furby blowing bubble gum (like those I have sampled on my writing website, which highlights a few dozen from my personal collection saved through the years).
As culture increasingly flourished on the Internet throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, culture increasingly looked like GIFs. GIFs became the first widely adopted computer art, the vernacular for the first-wave of Internet memes, and the way contemporary Internet users then expressed what we today might call our “personal brand.” If you click around a few personal pages from GeoCities, the first major platform that let individuals host their own websites (archived on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine), you’ll see how early Internet users would select a series of decorative GIFs like clip-art to express their identities and interests in these emerging virtual spaces. GIFs served functional purposes, too—they were used as spacers to define different sections of a page, for instance. They were also an animated way to invite someone to take some desired action, such as send you an email or sign your guestbook. On forums, GIFs even became avatars and the visual representation of our “netizen” personas at a time when not everyone was comfortable using real names or photos online.
But in my mind, nothing captures the creative spirit of the early-Internet era quite like the rich “under construction” subgenre, which I’ve cataloged in my own personal GIF collection I began archiving during the pandemic using GifCities.
Due to easier-to-use hosting services and the relative ease of learning HTML essentials, the landscape of personal websites in the web 1.0 felt handmade and do-it-yourself. If you were working on a new website but it wasn’t quite done, you’d be prone to make the incomplete version live and highlight the pages that weren’t finished with a litany of GIFs themed around building physical infrastructure—think animated flaggers holding signs, jittery construction workers operating jackhammers, and dump trucks and the like.
The physical construction metaphor speaks to the collective sense then that the World Wide Web was a place we were engaged in making together. Dropping a few construction GIFs on your page was a way to indicate “hey, this is a work in progress”—and it was a continual reminder that this new medium was something we could all play some small role in shaping. I don’t want to indulge in undue nostalgia. The early web was a capitalist place built on the backs of government-funded networking systems that had become accessible to folks outside academic circles with the World Wide Web. Many of our current challenges have roots in decisions made during the early Internet days. But there is a lesson inherent in that era that a lot of us have forgotten, as the Internet has started to feel more like a generic shopping mall as opposed to the digital public square it’s always been mythologized as.
Back then, there was a more palpable sense that we were all netizens—even the “noobs,” the irritating new kids like me logging on every evening from their parents’ computers. We were citizens of something collective. I might’ve been a nobody queer kid living on farmland in coal country. But when I got online, I was participating in building some corner of this wild thing we called the web. The web was never truly democratic, of course, but those early days did have a sense of openness and humanness that was apparent in its incompleteness. Whenever we advertised that the current reality was soon to change, we were drawing attention to the fact that we were all working on figuring out what this could become.
As with a lot of things on the web, GIFs were everywhere until the moment they weren’t.
As connection speeds increased and web 2.0 shifted toward a glossier and more sanitized user experience, early web GIFs faded into obscurity—looking as dated as the candy-like iMacs and the much clunkier but still colorful HP tower computer my family had.
Even so, GIFs would not die. While the file format itself may have faded into obscurity, video file formats that mimic the repeating nature of the original GIFs became somewhat incorrectly dubbed “GIFs” and embedded firmly in the meme stylings of Tumblr, Facebook, and soon every messaging app on the planet.
Today, the Internet doesn’t feel like a single place in our lives. The idea of having a designated space in your home where you engage with the digital world is old-fashioned. “I miss the computer room,” culture writer Kyle Raymond Fitzpatrick eulogized earlier this year in a cool short essay in their newsletter, The Trend Report. Many of us do our day jobs on laptops, are programmed to repeatedly check the notifications on our “phones”—which we primarily use to connect to Internet-enabled services rather than actually phone anyone—and if not that, we’re on our iPads or glancing at our smart watches. By referring to an era of the Internet when it was accessible only through designated corners of our physical lives, I’m showing my age—and also drawing attention to how quickly digital culture evolves as the technology fueling it changes.
Early GIFs off GeoCities websites are really only accessible thanks to the work of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and the GifCities search engine that the Archive launched in 2016 in commemoration of its 20th anniversary. That, to me, underscores a fact about the modern Internet that we take for granted: with 5G common, including in many subway tunnels, and Wi-Fi in some jurisdictions a publicly funded utility freely accessible in certain cities’ streets, the Internet can seem like the air around us.
But the Internet isn’t invisible. It’s a very physical thing encompassing mind-boggling maps of wires and undersea cables, and networks including countless privately owned and operated data centers—and in this current era of the web, where so-called “artificial intelligence” is causing an up-tick in the environmental and human impacts of this technological infrastructure, it’s good to be reminded of the physicality of the digital world.
When somebody flips off the servers, as GeoCities did when it shuttered in the late 2000s, the world risks losing all artifacts of that culture if they’re not preserved. GIFs that seemed like they’d dance forever simply disappear—for example, if the only copy of the file existed on a floppy disk that was, say, burned in 1999.
This is, after all, the ephemeral truth of the Internet: if you don’t save it, even if it seems like it’s everywhere momentarily, it will just as quickly disappear.
When we preserve digital culture that would otherwise vanish, we don’t necessarily gain the keys to a richer creative future. Again, the web has largely moved on from early GIFs. I’ll be the first to admit that we don’t become more virtuous by being enthusiasts of outdated image types (in the same way that listening to music on vinyl records doesn’t necessarily make you cooler or a more conscious listener).
But when we preserve and revisit the remnants of digital culture’s recent history, it behooves us to remember that this networked realm, as imperfect and as frustrating as it can feel sometimes, is what we make it. And maybe if we realize that, we can start to again play a more active role in shaping a better collective future that many of us want. In the meantime, the GifCities database of millions of GIFs provides plenty of entertaining throwback material for your browsing pleasure. Heck, maybe it’ll even inspire your own GifCities-themed website, as it did with my recent website update. (I spoke to Chris Freeland, the Director of the Internet Archive’s Library Services, about it earlier this year. Yeah, it obviously features the bubble-gum blowing Furby.)
About the author
JD Shadel is a writer and editorial director from the Appalachian Mountains and now based in London, where they recently launched ESC KEY .CO, a new media outlet examining tech and modern life with skeptical curiosity. Their work often focuses on trends where the online and offline worlds blur. Before moving to the United Kingdom, they spent nearly a decade in Portland, Ore., where they freelanced widely as an editor and served as The Washington Post’s travel writer for one of America’s most consciously “weird” cities. Shadel launched the Future of Travel column for Condé Nast Traveler in 2023, serves as editor-at-large at Good On You, and has contributed to VICE, BBC News, Them, Bloomberg CityLab and other outlets. Their long-form reporting was named among VICE’s Best of 2017. They completed their MA with Distinction in international relations at the University of Exeter.
Lights, camera, preservation! On a star-studded evening at the Internet Archive, we rolled out the red carpet to honor the creative works from 1929 and the sound recordings from 1924 that entered the public domain in 2025. And what better way to celebrate than with a glamorous, Oscar-inspired soirée?
Guests arrived in true 1920s fashion, riding in a vintage convertible before stepping onto the red carpet, where they were met by the spirited Raining Chainsaws street theater troupe, who transformed into a fleet of eager, old-time paparazzi—flashing cameras, barking questions, and adding a touch of whimsy and Hollywood magic to the night.
📸 Check out photos from the red carpet!
Inside the Internet Archive, attendees sipped on French 75s and Old-Fashioneds, classic cocktails that transported us back to the final, glittering moments of the Roaring Twenties. The theme of the night? 1929—the year of the very first Academy Awards—and we honored this cinematic milestone with an evening of film, history, and remixing of the past.
🎞 Lecture by George Evelyn on Disney’s The Skeleton Dance Animation historian George Evelyn enlightened the audience with a viewing of The Skeleton Dance, the first of Disney’s Silly Symphonies. With its pioneering use of synchronized sound and animation, the 1929 short was a perfect reminder of how creativity from the past continues to shape the present.
🎬 Public Domain Film Remix Contest Screening What happens when today’s creators remix yesterday’s masterpieces? Our Public Domain Film Remix Contest showcased the most inventive reinterpretations of public domain classics, where old Hollywood met modern storytelling in unexpected and thrilling ways. View all the winners, honorable mentions and submissions from this year’s contest.
👀 Watch the livestream of the night’s festivities
As the evening came to a close, guests toasted to the future of open culture, celebrating the power of preservation, creativity, and the public domain. Thank you to everyone who joined us for this dazzling night of history, cinema, and community!
We’re thrilled to unveil the creativity of our top three winners and three honorable mentions in this year’s Public Domain Day Film Remix Contest. These remarkable films not only reimagined and transformed public domain works but also demonstrated the boundless potential of remixing creative works to create something new.
Watch the winning entries & honorable mentions below. Renowned film archivist Rick Prelinger returned to lead the jury, comprised of film professionals and enthusiasts including Simone Elias, Lara Gabrielle, BZ Petroff, and Theo Unkrich, offering insightful commentary on each selection and its standout qualities.
From Rick: The jury was deeply impressed by Queline Meadows’s inspired mix of movies, images, music and text woven into a subtle and emotionally affecting video expressing a strong sense of nostalgia and the irretrievable passage of time.
Second Place: “The Archive Boogie” by Samantha Close
1929 was a great year for the movies! Filmmaker Samantha Close expresses both the breadth of 1929’s production and the eternal bounty of the public domain, using images from 1929’s films and public domain images from elsewhere and elsewhen.
Meyer’s crowdpleasing film features the daring, dazzling “It Girl,” Clara Bow, who lights up the screen in more ways than one in this Sapphic love story.
Honorable Mention – History: “Moving Pictures Aren’t What They Used to Be” by Jeremy Floyd
Jeremy Floyd’s enjoyable piece pays tribute to an uninhibited period of filmmaking — Hollywood before the passage of the restrictive Production Code, when movies were filled with roguish suggestion and undisguised violence.
Honorable Mention – Home Movies: “Hoffman’s Honeymoon” by William Webb
Of all film genres, home movies are the most numerous yet the least seen and known. Webb’s engaging video brings them into the foreground, adding voices from dramatic films in the public domain, to build a goofy but endearing narrative.
Honorable Mention – Live Action: “The Wayback Machine” by DIEGO DIAZ & CAN SARK
Diaz and Sark’s film is an audacious and yes, dopey exploration of the essential greatness of Internet Archive and the dread near-infinity of copyright.
