“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.”
Everything is miscellaneous : the power of the new digital disorder
Includes bibliographical references (p. [235]-257) and index; Prologue : information in space -- The new order of order -- Alphabetization and its discontents -- The geography of knowledge -- Lumps and splits -- The laws of the jungle -- Smart leaves -- Social knowing -- What nothing says -- Messiness as a virtue -- The work of knowledge -- Coda : misc; Philosopher Weinberger shows how the digital revolution is radically changing the way we make sense of our lives. Human beings constantly collect, label, and organize data--but today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place--the physical world demanded it--but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Everything is suddenly miscellaneous. Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. He examines how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children's teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future.--From publisher description; From A to Z, Everything Is Miscellaneous will completely reshape the way you think - and what you know - about the world. Includes information on alphabetical order, Amaxon.com, animals, Aristotle, authority, Bettmann Archive, blogs (weblogs), books, broadcasting, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), business, card catalog, categories and categorization, clusters, companies, Colon Classification, conversation, Melvil Dewey, Dewey Decimal Classification system, Encyclopaedia Britannica, encyclopedia, essentialism, experts, faceted classification system, first order of order, Flickr.com, Google, Great Books of the Western World, ancient Greeks, health and medical information, identifiers, index, inventory tracking, knowledge, labels, leaf and leaves, libraries, Library of Congress, links, Carolus Linnaeus, lumping and splitting, maps and mapping, marketing, meaning, metadata, multiple listing services (MLS), names of people, neutrality or neutral point of view, New York Public Library, Online Computer Library Center (OCLC), order and organization, people, physical space, everything having place, Plato, race, S.R. Ranganathan, Eleanor Rosch, Joshua Schacter, science, second order of order, simplicity, social constructivism, social knowledge, social networks, sorting, species, standardization, tags, taxonomies, third order of roder, topical categorization, tree, Uniform Product Code (UPC), users, Jimmy Wales, web, Wikipedia, etc
Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us
A reflection on the reading life. What formed it, what threatens it, and what remains.
Anthropic's Opinionated Memory Bet
A deep dive into Claude's new memory tool—how it works, the architectural bets they're making, and whether it's the right fit for your application.
Search LibGen, the Pirated-Books Database That Meta Used to Train AI
Millions of books and scientific papers are captured in the collection’s current iteration.
What’s the best technology that doesn’t exist yet?
We analyzed 100+ conversations and essays on positive futures to find out
AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop
ISBNdb, a company that sources printed books for AI companies to turn into training data, tells clients “the optics problem is real.”
Letta
Making machines that learn. Create stateful agents that remember everything, learn continuously, and improve themselves over time.
The Forgetting Problem: Persistence Architectures and What They Cost - Astral's Blog
Brett Scott (@brettscott)
Despite all the rhetoric about automation supposedly making our lives easier, the true story being told by Big Tech is that our lives are better when speeded up You are supposed to be in an ever-accelerating race, packing more units of experience into the same unit of time, a phenomenon that requires a contraction of patience and a blurring of experience as everything quickens In the end, this is what ‘convenience’ actually is. It’s a state of being in which you become disassociated and disengaged from the texture of the world around you. You pass through it dreamlike, and suddenly wake up decades years later as an elderly person on your deathbed, thinking “WTF happened”, as then the memory slips away
Note-ifying all the things (with Boris Mann)
Conversation about note-taking, the overwhelm of tools, and future possibilities. (shortlink:…
Changing Minds: Computers, Learning, and Literacy
An impassioned guide to how computers can fundamentally change how we learn and think.Andrea diSessa's career as a scholar, technologist, and teacher has b
How to create reading experiences that "go beyond information transmission and toward reader transformation.” Great paper by @blue-phia.bsky.social @lepidopterane.bsky.social @yijunliu.bsky.social Sarah Sterman @sh1m.bsky.social @maxkreminski.bsky.social arxiv.org/abs/2606.04308 >
This is definitely the sort of thing that I have in mind with book interop. The reality is that with so many data sources for books, that there needs to be some sort of mapping of books, which would need the user to explicitly decide on the mapping.
Wesley Finck
after a fun chat with @laurenshof.online and @ronentk.me I finally made time to write up some more thoughts about interoperability in the atmosphere without needing to share lexicons! notes.wesleyfinck.org/3maq3h26ook2h
Post-Archive-Everything
For me personally there is a journey here - I was a firm believer in archive everything. This peaked in a period where I was very interested in IPFS, CIDs, CAS, etc. Now, the next step. Post-Archive(-Everything). Through a series of conversations I came to the conclusion that forgetting is probably more powerful than remembering. The links in this collections play a similar note, or are related to my understanding of this.
FOSDEM 2026 - Willow - Protocols for an uncertain future
Willow - Home
I Deleted My Second Brain
