At the Internet Archive, a single search can yield a 1970s instructional film on meatpacking (“How Sausage Is Made”), followed by a Danish pornographic film from 1998, followed by a Linux distribution, followed by a recorded lecture on Byzantine theology.
Why keep this? Because, as Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle once said, “We don’t know what will be important in 100 years.” And in 2124, some digital historian will need to understand how late 20th-century children learned math via processed meat. The phrase “sausage party” also evokes the old adage: “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” Attributed to Bismarck, though probably apocryphal. The same applies to digital archives. internet archive sausage party
That’s the sausage party : the glorious, awkward, algorithmically bizarre juxtaposition of high and low, sacred and profane, educational and deeply, deeply odd. Let’s start with the literal. Search “sausage” on the Internet Archive. Go ahead. I’ll wait. At the Internet Archive, a single search can
You know the Internet Archive as the noble savior of the web. The Wayback Machine. The rescuer of dead GeoCities pages, obsolete software, and millions of books. It’s a digital Library of Alexandria, staffed by librarians, archivists, and idealistic engineers. The phrase “sausage party” also evokes the old
The Internet Archive is not Netflix. It is not a curated museum. It is a , and that is its greatest strength. It preserves the embarrassing, the erotic, the educational, and the edible — often in the same search result.