Help Preserve the PHP and JavaScript Ecosystems Before It's Gone Forever
What Is the Bettergist Archive?
Since 2018, I've been building something that has never existed before: a physical, globally-distributed backup of humanity's open-source software heritage.
The Bettergist Archive is a network of waterproof, fire-resistant USB drives buried at locations across the world — the Red Pyramid in Egypt, the Mall of the Emirates in Dubai, Bogotá, Mérida, Versailles, Mendoza, and more — each one containing a bootable environment with the complete Packagist/Composer PHP ecosystem (all 434,397 packages ever published, including 28,830 that no longer exist anywhere else on the internet), a full offline Wikipedia mirror, and a 500-book library curated for post-collapse civilization rebuilding.
This project was directly inspired by Morris Berman's *The Twilight of American Culture* (2000), in which Berman argued that civilizational decline requires dedicated individuals — 21st Century digital nomad monks — to carry the essential record forward. I first read that book in 2001. I've been working toward this ever since.
The archive has no corporate sponsor. No VC funding. No foundation grant. Just one developer, a soldering iron's worth of stubbornness, and a conviction that this matters.
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What I Need Your Help With
**The PHP ecosystem is covered. JavaScript is not.**
NPM is the largest software registry on earth — over 2.5 million packages. It powers everything from Fortune 500 infrastructure to the personal projects of millions of developers worldwide. It is also extraordinarily fragile. Packages disappear without warning. The `left-pad` incident in 2016 took down major chunks of the internet when a single developer unpublished eleven lines of code.
That was a warning. Nobody built the ark.
I want to build it.
Expanding the Bettergist Archive to include NPM requires:
- **Storage hardware** — The PHP archive fits on a high-capacity USB drive. NPM's full corpus requires significantly larger media: high-endurance, high-capacity SSDs per burial site.
- **Bandwidth and compute** — Mirroring, analyzing, and compressing 2.5 million packages is not a weekend task. It requires sustained server time to crawl, deduplicate, run static analysis, and produce the compressed archive.
- **Drive replication** — Each archival site needs its own copy. The current network has 8+ active locations. New media must be produced for each.
- **Travel for physical archive sites** — The archive only exists if it's in the ground. Each refresh requires someone to physically be there.
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## What Your Money Does
| Amount | What It Covers |
|---|---|
| **$50** | Your name enshrined in the Archive — archived at mulitple locations worldwide |
| **$100** | Write a message to future civilizations — your words preserved in the Archive alongside humanity's software heritage |
| **$500** | One high-endurance multi-TB SSD for one burial site |
| **$1,000** | Complete media kit for one archival location (SSD + ruggedized enclosure + waterproofing) |
| **$10,000** | Full NPM archival creation + development efforts |
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## Why This Is Urgent
The open-source ecosystem is not permanent. Maintainers die. Companies shut down. Registries get acquired, defunded, or simply neglected. The `colors` and `faker` sabotage in 2022. The `event-stream` backdoor. The sudden disappearance of packages that underpin thousands of production systems.
Every quarter I run the Bettergist analysis, the count of lost PHP packages grows. There is no reason to believe NPM is different. The packages that vanish today are gone forever — unless someone already has them.
I am trying to be that someone. With your help, I can be that for JavaScript too.
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## About the Project
The Bettergist Archive Project is the only known effort performing corpus-wide static analysis across Packagist on a quarterly cadence. The most recent burial — at the Red Pyramid in Dahshur, Egypt — was completed April 22, 2026 and is fully documented at the project's public GitHub repository.
Bettergist's motto: *To make the world better, all of them.*
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**Documentation & source:** https://github.com/BettergistCo/PackagistArchive
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*Every dollar contributed goes directly to hardware, compute, and travel for physical archive burial. This is not a startup. There is no salary line. There is just the mission.*