Friday, July 10, 2015

retro-quotes #2929834757

retro-quotes: a series of germane remarks, by others, plucked from all over the place, and from all over the time 

"The “web” is not a part of nature. It was not discovered; we don’t have to just accept it. The “web” is an infrastructural system that was built by people, and it was built very recently and very sloppily. It currently has the property that it forgets what must be remembered, and remembers what must be forgotten. It manages to screw up both the sacredness of the common record and the sacredness of private interaction" - Bret Victor, The Web of Alexandia #2,

Follow up to Victor's  The Web of Alexandria. which argued that "very stable and reliable media, DNA and print, owe their stability and reliability to replication and retention -- every reader gets a copy, and every reader keeps their copy. The web, on the other hand, follows the strategy used for books before the printing press -- put a single copy in an institution, allow readers to come visit, hope it doesn't go up in smoke."


"Every cell of every organism has a full copy of the genome. That works pretty well -- DNA gets damaged, cells die, organisms die, the genome lives on. It's been working pretty well for about 4 billion years.
....  going on the web today might feel like visiting the Library of Alexandria. Things didn't work out so well with the Library of Alexandria.
It's not working so well today either.
We, as a species, are currently putting together a universal repository of knowledge and ideas, unprecedented in scope and scale. Which information-handling technology should we model it on? The one that's worked for 4 billion years and is responsible for our existence? Or the one that's led to the greatest intellectual tragedies in history?"

2 comments:

Tim 'Space Debris' said...

'the sacredness of the common record'
I don't usually say this but fuck this deserves it LOL!

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