Can You Imagine? A Library of Possibilities for Reimagining the Web
Notes from the inaugural book of Sublime.
Minsuk Kang 강민석 and
Can You Imagine? A Library of Possibilities for Reimagining the Web
My wife is a painter, and I’ve been paying a lot of attention to her journey these past few years, because she has never put her work online. She might never, because, to put it online is to ask people to have a reaction. To put it online is to say there’s an opinion beyond her own that matters. To her, that’d be a real sacrifice to do that. Becaus... See more
Like Borges’s library, we are tasked with sifting through the internet’s “divine disorder” to find what is worthy of our attention. The question, now, is how to sculpt a better Library of Babel – a better information infrastructure – that lends itself to the advancement of knowledge and wisdom conducive to human flourishing.
I don’t have to care about algorithms if I have people who care about me. And I get people to care about me by first demonstrating that I care about them. Some people I’ve talked with over the years have said that this seems like “too much effort,” but I counter with “it’s effort that actually pays off over time,
contrasted with minimal effort th... See more
When you become who your audience expects at the expense of who you are, the affection you receive is not intended for you but for the character you're playing.
“Sort by recency” is the Internet’s default setting. We’re stuck in an endless cycle of ephemeral content consumption. On the Internet, even though we’re just a click away from the greatest authors of all time, from Plato to Tolstoy, we
default to novelty instead of timelessness.
A digital garden is a framework for speculation around how online space can be designed from the imagination of gardens. Here, the values of gardens, pluralism, interdependence, sustainability, adaptation, and discovery
are centered in the design process of technosocial spaces.
So much genius and money has gone into a metaphor that assumes the zenith of humans desire to be status and likes and influence and conven- ience and efficiency. Humans want all those things. But we also want to be inspired. To be delighted. To express our deepest desires. To seek truth. To be moved. To create. To be challenged.
Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.
The invention of paper in China around 105 AD made writing significantly easier and more accessible. Faster and cheaper to produce than papyrus and parchment – one Bible required the skins of 300 sheep to
produce – it contributed to the spread of literacy to the masses.