"Information retrieval is not about finding how much tannin there is in an apple," he declared in his San Francisco office. "It's about letting everyone publish." With that, he was off on a long rant about how organizing the Web matters, because, as Architext's Spencer had told me, "it's about people finding people, not people finding information." Indexing the Web allows the 40 people interested in Bulgarian folksinging to find each other, it allows fans of long-forgotten TV shows to get together and reminisce. It creates communities.

Quoting Media Theorist & philosopher Wolfgang Ernst on his concept of processual memory: “The web provides immediate feedback, turning all present data into archival entries and archival entries into data – a dynamic agency, with no delay between memory and the present. Archive and memory become meta-phorical; a function of transfer pro-cesses.”, which Ernst describes as an economy of circulation – permanent transformations and updating. There are no places of memory, Ernst states, there are simply urls. In other words; digital memory is built from its archi-tecture, it is embedded in the network and constituted from how it links from one to another.

ON PIRACYComputers, by their nature, copy. Typing this line, the computer has copied the text multiple times in a variety of memory registers. I touch a button to type a letter, this releases a voltage that is then translated into digital value, which is then copied into a memory buffer and sent to another part of the computer, copied again into RAM and sent to the graphics card where it is copied again, and so on. The entire operation of a computer is built around copying data: copying is one of the most essential characteristics of computer science. One of the ontological facts of digital storage is that there is no difference between a computer program, a video, mp3-song, or an e-book. They are all composed of voltage represented by ones and zeros. Therefore they are all subject to the same electronic fact: they exist to be copied and can only ever exist as copies.

I want no local storage anywhere near me other than maybe caches. No disks, no state, my world entirely in the network. Storage needs to be backed up and maintained, which should be someone else's problem, one I'm happy to pay to have them solve. Also, storage on one machine means that machine is different from another machine. At Bell Labs we worked in the Unix Room, which had a bunch of machines we called "terminals". Latterly these were mostly PCs, but the key point is that we didn't use their disks for anything except caching. The terminal was a computer but we didn't compute on it; computing was done in the computer center. The terminal, even though it had a nice color screen and mouse and network and all that, was just a portal to the real computers in the back. When I left work and went home, I could pick up where I left off, pretty much. My dream setup would drop the "pretty much" qualification from that. A bit like phones: You have a phone just so you can access who/what is at the other end of the connection. Twenty years ago, you expected a phone to be provided everywhere you went, and that phone worked the same everywhere. At a friend's house, or a restaurant, or a hotel, or a pay phone, you could pick up the receiver and make a call. You didn't carry a phone around with you; phones were part of the infrastructure. Computers, well, that was a different story. As laptops came in, people started carrying computers around with them everywhere. The reason was to have the state stored on the computer, not the computer itself. You carry around a computer so you can access its disk.

Potrebbe venire da giornali, biblioteche, musei, università, archivi, il cui approccio metodologico potesse diventare una sorta di ispirazione per tecnologie moderne e attente alla qualità dell’informazione. Ma di certo occorre che quelle istituzioni facciano un salto di qualità a loro volta culturale per farcela.

But, unfortunately, so far, Re-sourceSync has not enjoyed wide adoption despite itspower and simplicity. Possible explanations includecompetition with its significantly less powerful and 15year old predecessor OAI-PMH, an overall tendency byportals to resort to rolling their own bespoke APIs, and alack of concrete action regarding interoperability despitea general sentiment that more is needed.

Impermanence

On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite – just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes “treatment” to cure his “problem.” Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them “sublimate” their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.1

L’analogico richiede una cultura del registrare e dunque uno sforzo per incidere qualcosa su pietra, argilla, papiro, pergamena o carta. Il digitale richiede una strategia del dimenticare; oggi tutto viene registrato automaticamente e ogni tanto bisogna fare uno sforzo per togliere, eliminare.

5.3 distributed archives, the peer-to-peer archive model.

A mio avviso pesava prima un retaggio storico negativo su questa possibilità di dialogo, ed era un po' il portato di ciò che avevano sedimentato la nostra cultura e i nostri processi di identificazione: io sono archivista, io sono bibliotecario, io sono museologo o storico dell'arte. Questi processi riposavano su vecchi statuti che per semplicità indicherei con tre sostantivi: godimento, verità, informazione. Così lo storico dell'arte e il museologo erano condizionati dal plot del godimento, l’archivista dall’incubo della verità, il bibliotecario dal mito dell’informazione.

Quanto poi al requisito della pertinenza della notizia ad un rilevante ed attuale interesse generale, non v'e' dubbio alcuno che lo stesso debba ritenersi sussistente ogniqualvolta si discuta del passato di un uomo politico, quale certamente e' l'on. Caradonna, essendo indiscutibile ed indubbio l'interesse del pubblico a conoscere ogni particolare (recente e pregresso) della vita politica di chi continui a sottoporsi al vaglio degli elettori e ricopra, anche nel presente, rilevanti incarichi istituzionali, quale quello di membro del Parlamento italiano. Fuori discussione appare in proposito la pretesa di trincerarsi dietro al "diritto all'oblio", di per se' inconfigurabile in presenza - come detto - di un interesse pubblico attuale alla conoscenza del proprio passato politico.

Lots of 'shadow libraries' have come and gone, but only a few have been as durable or subtle as Aaaaarg. In the process, it moved out of the shadows to become something new. Describing Aaaaarg is hard: it seems to invite every kind of metaphor only to defeat them just as quickly. But whatever it is, it's provided access to political, aesthetic, and theoretical thinking to those who need it most -- maybe because they lack institutional affiliation or maybe because it's the middle of the night, it doesn't matter. We say 'thinking' because Aaaaarg is symmetrical, as much about 'uploading' ideas as 'downloading' texts.

At a fundamental level, URLs have been there right from the start and are a key ingredient of the web. Once you know the name of something, you can pass it around, write it down, or send it in an email. Now someone has access to that exact point within an application or document. That's pretty big. That's where native platforms are trying to compete with the web. They're trying to get what the web already has.