Welcome, ghosts
Metadata
Highlights
- The internet houses the greatest museum that the world has ever made. The humble archivists of every rank—from the employees of major institutions to the smallest town’s historical club—have belabored to digitize their treasure. The world’s vast collections of photographs, paintings, drawings, etchings, and letters sit here, among the internet’s drawers. Almost all are pieces that no earthly museum will ever display: They are too obscure, unattractive, ordinary, and above all simply too numerous for the possibility. Many articles, despite their new home, will only ever be seen by a handful of eyes. But they are here, our collective inheritance. The shoebox under the earth’s crust, full of all the things we have forgotten.
- These stories are not so different from each-other, or the invention of the bistro. There is a large danger in over-engineering your plan, and failing to respond to local conditions. There is great bounty in remaining sensitive to context. We understand this individually. Do we understand it collectively? Are we as a civilization still letting uses be discovered?
- Software is attractive to many, myself included, precisely because of its permission-less nature. But instead of praising software, we should think very hard about the ossification of the physical world. On a grand scale, we have come to decide what can be done and what cannot be done, have decided how difficult to make building things that were once permission-less, and have even decided what the nature of work looks like. Ever-rigid systematizing damages the softest fringes of society the most, the tender growth and the deepest roots. The young are more confined to pre-defined destinies. The old are simply confined. A mounting complexity erodes.