The Garden and the Stream: A Technopastoral – Hapgood

A concept-ancestor to This is How You Lose the Time War. A discussion of different ways to engage online and different ays of imagining the internet. This article is a stub; I can help my website by expanding it, but no one else can. (But email me if I'm wrong and you can.)

There is an essential tension between how the wider internet is constructed – to surface the latest thing, to operate in time, laid out in some linear order (any at all), in terms of query-and-response – and a collection of objects designed to respond to time in complex organic ways, with a structure that can be accessed in many directions, that will often give you valuable things but not in a predictable way and often not in a keyword-queryable way; whose metadata isn't designed to be accessible from the top down.