Interviewer
If you were given unlimited funding to design a system for storing and preserving digital information for at least a century, what would you do?
Tyler McMullen
My first step is to take that money and turn it into a self-sustaining fund. This is not a creative answer to your question, but it seems to me that that’s a problem with almost all of the systems that I can think of. The economics and the motivations of people involved don’t match up with extremely long-term thinking. I feel like you covered this well in your piece about this, but the motivations of major cloud companies do not align with long-term preservation, right? So that’s my first answer to the question.
I can think of lots of really cool ways to store data. Most of them look like very large-scale distributed systems that are based in multiple countries, based in space, based everywhere. With all the data stored in a bunch of different ways, error-correcting codes throughout, all sorts of constant low-level background processes, making sure everything is still correct. But the problem, of course, is that no one wants to pay for it. I can’t see a way for it to become viable without that sort of long-term self-sustaining funding. And it’s not clear to me who wants it, other than everybody, but no one wants to pay for it.
One of the things that was popping around my head a little bit before we got on the phone was this idea of distributed systems being kind of the only reliable way to store data over a very long period of time. One of the reasons that I say that is it kind of relates it to ancient oral storytelling traditions.We also spoke with Michelle Lee, product lead at Protocol Labs and Executive Director of the IPFS Foundation. Her perspective on the state of distributed solutions might surprise you. Because stories are passed down, they go through many, many generations. The number of stories we have from a thousand years ago or two thousand years ago or four thousand years ago seems significantly higher than the number of written documents that have actually been able to be preserved. Distributed systems are kind of like that.
Interviewer
I’m curious now, in 2025, how you think about the state of, for lack of a better term, the cloud? So much human culture and production is being held in this particular business/technology arrangement. How resilient or long-lived can it be in its current configuration?
It seems to me that outside of major metropolitan areas, the future of the internet is almost certainly satellite based.
Tyler McMullen
I’ve been thinking a lot more about the management and corporate structures and things like that as I get more and more disenchanted with technology as an industry. I love programming and engineering, but I am frustrated with “tech.” It seems to me as if there is a lack of interest in funding and improving infrastructure, in core infrastructural projects, which was something that technology was so good at for decades. It seems like we reached a point where we got tired of funding those sorts of efforts and are now like, all right, let’s exploit all of them. Let’s exploit all the things to the point where now, when I’m describing being a founder of a major internet company, I have to be like, “you wouldn’t have heard of it because we’re the thing that everything else is built on top of, but you don’t hear about us because what you hear about are the companies that are building on top of the infrastructure and using it to exploit individuals along the way.”
I think GitHub is a really interesting example of this because GitHub is in many ways core infrastructure for how software is built. And now you have that being moved as part of the CoreAI organization, kind of looked at by Microsoft as a loss leader of some kind. It’s a way to bring people in the door, and that is cool and useful. I’m glad that it has that sort of funding at the moment. But that doesn’t last forever, right? That doesn’t last forever because the economy does change. Eventually the AI team is going to get cut in some way just because time exists. How does that actually play out in the long term? How can I or anyone have faith in these institutions and faith in these systems when that’s the quicksand that it’s built on?
Interviewer
Another way of exploring this question is that there are still an array of internet governance organizations that were founded decades ago, like ICANN, IETF, or W3C, which are very focused on basic infrastructure and stewardship. We probably underrate how well they work given the scale and complexity involved. What would it take to reignite interest in those existing organizations and for that mindset to become part of the industry again?
Tyler McMullen
It does feel like those organizations were created by a lot of well-known leaders in the early internet days. Now it’s only a handful of people inside these million person structures who actually know about and care about them. Frequently, the people who are in those positions within the IETF, the IRTF, the W3C and so on are getting older and older, and in many cases are starting to retire. Where is the next generation going to come from? Where is the funding for that next generation going to come from as well?
They are still just as necessary as they were the entire time. The IRTF, for instance, the Internet Research Foundation, are still putting out incredibly important research and incredibly important documents that are then implemented and standardized inside of the IETF.
As for how to get it back there, that’s a great question. I don’t have an answer for you. But my viewpoint on this is that it almost certainly needs to be government funded. It needs to be funded by the people, for the people, because otherwise, we essentially just cede control to a very small handful of companies that do control where this goes from here.
Interviewer
When speaking with librarians and archivists about digital holdings, access comes up a lot. What do you think needs to be changed within the internet infrastructure right now? Where are the realistic opportunities for potential improvement?
Tyler McMullen
I think this might be a weird answer, but it seems to me that outside of major metropolitan areas, the future of the internet is almost certainly satellite based.
That technology is growing and changing rapidly. It will bring the modern internet experience to huge parts of the global population that don’t have it at the moment. It’s super interesting to me because I can target population centers in San Francisco and in New York and in London and so on, but even geographically close places, like rural Montana, or most of Canada, there’s not really a good way for me to get real infrastructure to them. Getting high speed internet infrastructure there is incredibly expensive and almost certainly never going to pay for itself.
Satellite is a good way to fix this. We have in some ways reached where the terrestrial internet can take us. Outside of access for all those individuals, there’s all sorts of really cool technical stuff you could do if the internet actually was more significantly in space. But it would definitely have a real effect on the world in terms of access.