dreaming of a better internet

As part of its purpose in slowing news down (hence the name), and taking time to make sense of what’s really going on in the world rather than just react to the immediate, Tortoise’s editorial team hosts weekly online ‘Open News Think-Ins’ at which they discuss the news stories of the week with the subscriber community. They start the conversation

Digital gardens are not about creating utopias. Rather, they design towards the small and slow progress of protopias, as defined by futurist Kevin Kelly as “a state that is better today than yesterday.” We need protopias, alternatives, and the seeds of gardens. We need space to dream, and for that dreaming to connect to concrete action.

Ø was a chance to set our imaginations free, to embrace the opportunities that some technologies provide to dream up better worlds. Celebrate the chance to imagine alternatives to our world, welcoming the supernatural and otherworldly as more-than-human agents to help set us free from our human-created prejudices.

The web has an almost infinite capacity for storage and memory yet its prevailing use is an acceleration of ephemerality. The reasons for this are complex to say the least (of which financial short term gain is probably the most prevalent). But this doesn’t mean the tendency can’t be resisted. Perhaps books as well as their online siblings could