THE ATTIC

Things that refuse to die a natural death.

We are living in an age of ephemera. The greatest body of knowledge in history is written on a cloud of whirring electrons. I have a problem with this.

Bring back cuneiform, I say. It has the best track record for longevity. You can put a spade in the ground in Mesopotamia and dig up a legible text. But try to find something you wrote on a floppy in 1990. Clay is clearly superior to silicon.

An indiscretion you put on your website you can take down a day later. I think that’s cheating. In the old days of the printing press, your published peccadilloes were permanent.

I think websites should be treated like books. You don’t burn old books. You just put them in the attic.

This is my electronic attic.

One River (review of, and extensive quotes from, this 1996 book by my close friend and colleague Wade Davis)


SimCity2000 (a site I created in the 1990’s about a computer game that probably nobody plays anymore)