Bit Rot: stories + essays

Our passage into bright contemporaneity has carried a price: The more complex and sophisticated our systems of lateral access, the more we sacrifice in the way of depth.

Benjamin wrote that collectors have a “feeling of responsibility” to their collections. But it’s very difficult to feel such ownership for what we collect on the Internet; we can’t be stewards of the culture we appreciate in the same way as Benjamin. We don’t actually own it and can’t guarantee accessing it in the same way each time.

The CEO did not acknowledge that the reason millennials might be interested in experiences—like the experience of renting things they could never own—was related to student loan debt, or the recession, or the plummeting market value of cultural products in an age of digital distribution. There were no crises in this vision of the future. There were

The disinclination I feel about the digital future is stronger, more certain, but the fear grows from the same root. I see the situation in Faustian terms, as an either/or. To embrace the microchip and all its magic would be to close myself off from a great many habits and attitudes, ones that define me to myself; I would have to reposition myself