Essay: The digital death of collecting

Building a collection on the internet is like building a sandcastle on the beach: eventually the tide washes in and it’s as if it never existed in the first place.

Benjamin’s library was a personal monument, the same kind that we all construct of things we like or identify with. Its importance was dependent on permanence — collections are made up of things that we own, that don’t go away unless we decide they should. “Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects,” Benjamin wrote. “... See more