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Comment by Apocryphon | Hacker News Reader

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Sure, but the guy who would conceive and execute on this idea was never going to be a guy who would stop there.

Folks like this don’t aim at some point and then achieve it and stay there. They aim higher, land where they do, and continue to target the higher point. It’s how it is.

You can tell because how many of the rest of the people who would have stopped and flown under the radar have duplicated the Archive and served it without the taint of the ebook lending? Precisely zero.

Hm, what's that Carl Sagan quote, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Brewster Kahle's vision for the Internet Archive as an electronic repository for human knowledge is the former. His belief that he can just blithely tussle with the entire copyright regime in such a half-cocked manner is the latter. You should not confuse folly for audacity. Especially when it might completely jeopardize the former.

I'll believe it when the pragmatic someone will replicate the Archive in all but ebook lending. Exactly zero of these wise men have done anything which is what I expect from those who speak who never do.

Slavish "the man in the arena" worship isn't particularly audacious. Unquestioning support for audacity for the sake of it speaks to lack of discernment. And to parrot a HN truism- a failure to account for survivor bias.

By all means, romanticize recklessness even when it results in self-defeating catastrophe. Yet there are plenty of other worthier figures to lionize and archives to patronize- Alexandra Elbakyan and Sci-Hub, the anonymous samizdat dissidents and LibGen.

It's not worship. It's an observation. Those who talk, say they would stop at a precise stopping point, but they never start. Those who do, almost always overshoot this precise stopping point that the talkers refer to. An IA that has the precise stopping point is possible today. But zero people have made it. This is not unique.

In fact, I'll tell you what, you make it and I will dedicate my ArchiveTeam Warrior to your project instead for a year.

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