Speaker · Vancouver 2026

Brewster Kahle

Founder & Digital Librarian

Internet Archive

October 28–30 · Vancouver

Illustrated Futureproof Festival featured speaker poster for Brewster Kahle, seated at a table with a raven and salmon while a painted river flows through an open door. Hand-lettered card text includes The Library of Everything and the festival dates, October 28–30, 2026, in Vancouver.
Download original WEBPDownload JPG for postingSpeaker sharing kit

Brewster Kahle artwork

The complete artwork, in its original proportions. Zoom to inspect the details.

What they’re bringing

Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet Archive. He’ll talk about saving the web, keeping knowledge open, and what a library owes the people who haven’t been born yet.

A different sense of what a library is for, and a debt you'll feel to people who haven't been born yet.

Explore the other speakers →

Wed 28 · 7:55–8:35 PM

Public memory, and who it belongs to

Session details →

Vancouver time · Times may change

Start here

  • Explore

    The Wayback Machine

    More than a trillion web pages, saved. Paste in a dead link from your own past and see what the Archive kept.

  • Explore

    Generative AI is a New Drug

    His February 2026 day with Claude Code: the rush, the flattery, the $100 upgrade. Read it before you ask him about AI.

  • Explore

    Ethics of Digital Librarianship

    Written at Thinking Machines in 1992 about who can see your questions. Swap in chatbot logs and it holds up.

Explore more speakers

All 40 speaker profiles →
Saved speakers (0)

Saved in this browser. Your list does not register you for the festival.

Save a speaker to find their profile here.

About

About Brewster Kahle

Brewster Kahle is the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive, the nonprofit library he started in 1996 to offer universal access to all knowledge. Its Wayback Machine passed 1 trillion archived web pages in October 2025. He studied artificial intelligence at MIT, helped found Thinking Machines, and in 1989 created WAIS, an early internet publishing system. In 1992 he wrote an essay on the ethics of digital librarianship, shipped with every copy of WAIS, that reads like a memo to today's AI companies: serve and protect each patron as if she is your only employer. In February 2026 he tried vibe coding with Claude Code and blogged it as a report on his first trip.

At the festival

Where to find Brewster

  1. Wednesday · October 28
    7:55–8:35 PM

    Public memory, and who it belongs to

    Brewster built the Internet Archive. Public memory, the open web, libraries, and what a civic AI owes the people who have not been born yet. Then ten minutes of questions from the audience.

    Add to calendar

Times are Vancouver time and can still move. See the full program

Ticket checkout

Checkout is processed securely by Luma.