summing up is a recurring series on topics & insights on how we can make sense of computers that compose a large part of my thinking and work. drop your email in the box below to get it straight in your inbox or find previous editions here.

Admiral Shovel and the Toilet Roll (transcript), by James Burke

In order to rectify the future I want to spend most of my time looking at the past because there’s nowhere else to look: (a) because the future hasn’t happened yet and never will, and (b) because almost all the time in any case the future is not really much more than the past with extra bits attached.

To predict you extrapolate on what’s there already. We predict the future from the past, working within the local context from within the well-known box, which may be why the future has so often in the past been a surprise. I mean, James Watt’s steam engine was just supposed to drain mines. The printing press was just supposed to print a couple of Bibles. The telephone was invested by Alexander Graham Bell just to teach deaf people to talk. The computer was made specifically to calculate artillery shell trajectories. Viagra was just supposed to be for angina. I mean; what else?

current technology is on a path to fundamentally change how our society operates. nevertheless we fail to predict the impact of technology in our society and culture. an excellent argument for the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to innovation in technology.

Thought as a Technology, by Michael Nielsen

It requires extraordinary imagination to conceive new forms of visual meaning. Many of our best-known artists and visual explorers are famous in part because they discovered such forms. When exposed to that work, other people can internalize those new cognitive technologies, and so expand the range of their own visual thinking.

Images such as these are not natural or obvious. No-one would ever have these visual thoughts without the cognitive technologies developed by Picasso, Edgerton, Beck, and many other pioneers. Of course, only a small fraction of people really internalize these ways of visual thinking. But in principle, once the technologies have been invented, most of us can learn to think in these new ways.

a marvellous article on how user interfaces impact new ways of thinking of the world. technological progress always happens in a fixed context and is almost always a form of optimization. a technological innovation however, would have to happen outside of this given, fixed context and existing rules.

The Long Web, by Jeremy Keith

Next time somebody says to you, “The internet never forgets”, just call bullshit on that. It’s absolute bollocks! Look at the data. The internet forgets all the time. The average lifespan of a web page is months, and yet people are like, “Oh, you’ve got to be careful what you put online, it’ll be there forever: Facebook never forgets, Google never forgets.” No, I would not entrust our collective culture, our society’s memory to some third party servers we don’t even know.

What we need is thinking about our culture, about our society, about our preserving what we’re putting online, and that’s kind of all I ask of you, is to think about The Long Web, to think about the long term consequences of what we’re doing because I don’t think we do it enough.

It isn’t just about what we’re doing today. We are building something greater than the Library of Alexandria could ever have been and that is an awesome—in the true sense of the word—responsibility.

with the web we're building something greater than the library of alexandria. to do this well we have to build our sites for the long haul. it’s something we don’t think about enough in the rush to create the next thing on the web.