Archive Stumbler

The Archive Stumbler was a fun toy I built on Glitch, announced on motd.co, and migrated to verysafe.click that allows you to fetch random items from collections of media on The Internet Archive. The IA's web interface only lets you sort by deterministic orders of sortable metadata fields like name, date, size, etc., but I wanted to introduce some more serendipity into the process of looking though large collections. It got a really nice writeup by Camille Butera for the newsletter Today In Tabs:

Casey Kolderup’s Archive Stumbler for the Internet Archive (of recent publishing lawsuit fame) hearkens back to a vital part of being Online: accidentally discovering obscure media. Lately, those discoveries feel curtailed, especially as the evolution of search engines has tamped down on the serendipitous.

I love the Internet Archive because it offers a return to that enigmatic excitement. In using it I've found Doctor Who fan videos removed from YouTube, a meta season of the podcast “Mabel” taken down from the main feed, and hyper-specific books that are hard to find outside of academic libraries.

The Archive Stumbler takes that a step further: it provides avenues of approach that I wouldn't have considered. With it I've found French samplecore music from 2005, vintage fountain pen ads, and 2000s video game demos of dubious quality.  While the Stumbler comes with preloaded collections to parse through, I can also recommend: the Community Collection, featuring user uploads with little rhyme or reason; Console Living Room, a collection of emulated classic console games; and Belgian Telecards, which are an aesthetic surprise.

At their heart, the Archive and the Archive Stumbler remind me of Jonathan Zittrain's 2021 The Atlantic article on the rotting internet. In it, he argues that the internet is a morass of decaying dead links pointing nowhere. The Archive and the act of stumbling through it serve as the inverse. If the internet is rotting, then the Internet Archive serves as a sort of scar tissue, webbing over the damage to hold it together. Meandering through it allows us to hold the past close, if only for a moment.

(note: links from the original writeup have been sanitized due to the fact that they were all clickthrough-metrics links for an email provider that the owners of Today in Tabs no longer use; in some cases URLs were already linkrot at the time of this citation but have been preserved for posterity)