Hi, welcome to the A16Z podcast I'm Zoran.

Conventional wisdom has it that most everything important is accessible online

and that it will exist forever.

But in fact, more than 98% of the information on the web

is lost within 20 years and huge gaps exist

in our cultural history.

This includes published works like news reports, books, music, and video.

A16Z Investment Partner Alex Pruden and I interviewed Brewster Kale and Sam Williams,

who are using different approaches to attack this problem. Brewster co-founded the Internet Archive.

It's well known for creating the way back machine which crawls

a billion URLs every day. Sam co-founded Arweave, a company that uses decentralized crypto networks

to store information forever. For both of them this issue has implications that go far beyond just data storage.

It touches on issues of censorship, government manipulation of information, and how historical

context is necessary for well-functioning societies. We talk about the

challenges of trying to preserve digital history in an era of deep fakes and fake news,

how decentralized models like Arweave can fit in in and what types of economic models will help sustain

data preservation. We also discuss base layer protocols versus archive layers and evolving standards

for the cryptographic hash functions crucial for tagging in metadata.

But we begin with Brewster and how he started his quest to preserve digital history.

The idea is to build the Library of Alexandria for the digital age.

Could we go and make all the published works of mankind available to everybody and in computer

readable forms so we could build a global brain?

...