Why do we collect things?

The Skeleton Library

On Interpolatable Archives, Part 1: Compulsions to Connect, Warburg, Borges and Goldsmith, Cultural Technologies and Digital Oralities

On Taste

An essay by Pierre Vandenberghe

William Blake: the scourge of the tyrants

Discover and share books you love on Goodreads.

Tools for Conviviality

A work of seminal importance, this book presents Ivan I…

Why We Need the Jetsons and Solarpunk

“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Peter Thiel’s famous lament captures the disappointment of those of us raised on mid-20th-century technological optimism.

As We May Think

“Consider a future device ... in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

How to curate your personal canon

"The things won’t exist unless I signify my interest in them by at least noting down their names. Nothing exists unless I maintain it."

Large language memories: Psychosis and antisocial media

Using the fields of memory studies and digital humanities, this article argues that there has been a shift from more collective and social memory to more personalised and individual memory. This shift, it is argued here, can be conceptualised through the psychoanalytic concept of ‘psychosis’. While the causes of the changes in our patterns of memory have been located in capitalist and neoliberal principles, the effects of the changes in our memory habits might be found in psychosis. From falling in love with machinic AI replicas to indulging in conspiracy theories to acting as if we are social media influencers or backing ourselves to win out in impossible job markets, we are inclined towards personal fantasy, often at the expense of participating in social life. But why do we do this? Why is it easier to believe a farfetched conspiracy theory or wild personal dream than it is to participate socially and collectively in the world we live in? Part of the reason, at least, is found in our increasing habitual reliance on new and emergent technologies. Often presented to us as a brand-new form of Artificial Intelligence, these generative tools are the latest update to a longer pattern in our digital world: the trend of developing ‘relationships’ with algorithms that, to larger and smaller degrees, we come to rely on for habits of cognition and recognition. By affecting our patterns of memory, these technologies produce a kind of isolation that lends itself to individual and fantastical – rather than shared and realist – thinking.

Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the…

Humanists Have Done Nothing Wrong | Defector

For many years, I’ve held a pet theory that cultural consumers can be grouped into two broad categories: Primary Source People and Secondary Source People. The former are the book lovers, cinephiles, archive perusers, and history buffs who grew to love their areas of study because of the specific objects that constitute the field: the…

Why Read the Classics?

A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before. In a classic we sometimes discover something we have always known (or thought we knew), but without knowing that this author said it first, or at least is associated with it in a special way. And this, too, is a surprise that gives a lot of pleasure, such as we always gain from the discovery of an origin, a relationship, an affinity. From all this we may derive a definition of this type: The classics are books that we find all the more new, fresh, and unexpected upon reading, the more we thought we knew them from hearing them talked about.

Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content

Collectible but Not Consumeristic

Toward a durable writing stack – Writings and rehearsals by Nathan Schneider

I have benefited over the years from others who have documented their writing setups, and so I feel some obligation to pay the favor forward by doing so with my own. The stack I’ll describe here is one I’ve been iterating on for about twenty years, starting from when I began discovering the pleasures of plain-text writing. Every aspect of it has changed over that period, but the some basic goals and flows have been with me through the writing of my college thesis, five books, and hundreds of articles. I am quite happy with where I am, and others might benefit from what I’ve come up with.