Jason Scott (Q6042909
on Wikidata) is an American archivist and
historian specialising in electronic media, software and online
communities, he works at the Internet Archive. Scott is most notable for
his archive website textfiles.com and co-founding Archive Team, which primarily
works to archive websites on the brink of closure, most famously
GeoCities in 2009.
As a teenager in the 1980s, Scott was a user of the bulletin board systems reachable from Westchester, New York. As a habit, himself speculating it due to his parent's divorce, Scott made large backups of the various files and «warez» available for download from the boards. Many of these files later made up the initial archives at textfiles.com.
As a result of people approaching him with large physical archives of electronic media, Scott has multiple shipping containers worth of archival items in his backyard. Scott intents to be the custodian of these items, holding them until a better home arrives.
In 2009 Scott co-founded the web archiving group Archive Team, initially as a response to the imminent closure of GeoCities by Yahoo. The archival of GeoCities enabled the work of Olia Lialina and Dragan Espenschied of One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age who comb through the archive and document their findings, GifCities, and endless nostalgia bait screenshots which circulate throughout the Internet. Archive Team uses a custom-build piece of archival software named Warrior which allows multiple users to delegate downloading tasks amongst each other, all vying for a spot on the leaderboard. Archive Team continues to operate toady, notably exclusively using IRC for communication.
Scott gives many talks aided by his enthusiastic presentation style. One of his most famous talks, notably introduced by net historian Olia Lialina, is «Where are the Files?» hosted at Stadtbibliothek Stuttgart in 2012. In the talk he lampoons cloud file hosting solutions due to their transient and unpredictable nature, giving examples of services that shut down in a hurry leaving users without their files. He advises all listeners to start referring to the cloud as «the clown,» claiming that such a trick will help remember the true nature of the beast. It should be noted that early Mozilla employee and prolific blogger «jwz» partakes in this trick today.
Today, Scott's responsibilities at the Internet Archive appear to consist of curating the software archive, community outreach, and being a liaison for those with large prospective archives. In his free time he hosts the Patreon supported podcast «Jason Scott Talks His Way Out Of It» in which he visits various personal and technical stories from his own recent past, and often streams his VHS digitalisation work on Twitch.
Some or all of the text on this page was written by Harry Stanton, CC0.
This page was last edited on 2026-09-13 21:35:18.
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Let there be peace on Earth.