Churches managed the cultural archives of our lives for centuries. The approach worked… somewhat. Between damp caves and dusty basements, poorly lit and managed archives, fires, revolutions, and just outright disinterest, we lost as much as we retained. Church interests changed or destroyed truths inconvenient to the power elite, be this the church itself or a ruler to whom it attempted to ingratiate itself.
Today’s Ordo Scriniarii Novum are the Google and Web Archive data centers, its vast methodologies of collecting and analyzing big data. Sometimes, such as the case of Yahoo!’s wanton destruction of Geocities and with it not just the cultural knowledge of a decade of a burgeoning web but also the archives of those who maintained them there. Despite the Archive Team’s heroic efforts, tens of thousands of relevant websites are lost forever.
And, again, the power elites struggle. Between “the right to be forgotten“, the “Glasshole” narrative, anti-StreetView movements, and other attempts at inhibiting or destroying cultural knowledge, courts and streets are today’s dusty cellars, callous destroyers of archives such as Yahoo! are the damp caves.
Such was the case with one of Geocities’ most amazing property: the “Jewish in Germany” collection of Jewish lore and history. Pictures like the one above (taken by me this time and Creative Commons BY-SA-NC-4.0) archived and preserved knowledge otherwise doomed to be lost at some point in time. Moreover it made this knowledge universally accessible to anyone not behind governmental or corporate filters.
Germany’s anti-knowledge vandals blurred this house irrevocably on Street View.
Google Street View is more than just a maps addon. It’s a cultural heritage preservation mechanism of the likes we have never seen before. Imagine walking the streets of 1906 San Francisco, a week before the quake. Imagine seeing the buddha statues and temples in Myanmar before their destruction by Muslim warbands or the Norse temples in Denmark and Sweden before Christian “clean up” efforts. Imagine the Jewish Ghetto in Prague, Budapest, Frankfurt, or Berlin, there for you to see. Imagine Anne Frank’s childhood home, not blurred.
Some may claim that a person’s right to privacy trumps the world’s right to preserve its heritage, the good and the bad, to know about the past, to learn from it in pictures and sounds and search engine preserved news snippets and links. So did the church in Ireland when it destroyed records of thousands of children of single mothers being forcibly given up for adoption or left to die and buried in mass graves. So did China when it suppressed the knowledge of Tiananmen Square or the United States when Texan lawmakers struck women’s suffrage, slavery, and deism from their textbooks and added religious connotations.
The Ordo Scriniarii Novum challenges those attempts at rewriting history. It meets the likes of the Anne Frank house blurrer, the right to be forgotten judge, or the woman ripping Google Glass of a man’s face and running off, to the cheers of her fellow power elite buddies on and offline. But as John Gilmore once so aptly said, “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”
Our cultural knowledge is too important, too valuable, to fall prey to those who oppose openness and the availability to everyone. Where once religious orders, the ultimate in for-profit-with-censorship corporations were entrusted with this task, technology steps in today. Its archivists are fluid and unable to control information, where one descends into censorship or fails to provide information, another will step in.
This scares the power elites. It scares those who have to gain from changing history. It scares those who sell snake oil and offer mythologies where reality is inconvenient. But it will lead, without doubt, to a better world. Not tomorrow, not while we still live, but as we live today we create the catalogue of what worked and what didn’t to those who, unlike us, won’t have to wonder what life in the 21st century really looked like.
With WWDC’s iOS 8 on the horizon, I/O 2014 around the corner, G3, M8, S5 in stores and the N6 and N8 in everyone’s Facebook feed, it’s once again time to go talking about who’s got the bestest phone and whose number is sexier. About subpixel antialiasing, minutes between releases, whose spyware is better, and who gets to win if we drop them all on their head from a small balcony in Tuscany during the annual Fest Of The Dropping Of The Phones.
Only it isn’t. This isn’t the 80s. Every kid with a soldering iron and a bulletproof plan to have complicated invite only schedules and phone smashing competitions can start their own line of amazeball handsets, throw in a slightly exploitative mindset and you can rule the roost, even.
Phones aren’t small miracles bestowed upon mankind by omnipotent technogods, they’re tools. Like knives which, I am sure, were miraculous things to those Bronze Age men trying to whittle sticks into effigies of their enemies for later ritual puncturing with said knives. Or cars.
The only group of people having any level of brand pride in their knives today are hipster San Franciscans with blogs dedicated to filter-treated foodstuffs. And cars? I lived in Texas for a handful of years and with it in the middle of the Hatfield vs. McCoy war between Dodge and Ford drivers, Bud and Miller drinkers, and Longhorns vs. Mavericks.
It’s a phone. A thing that goes beep and shows Facebook messages in a more or less complicated way on a slide to unlock screen with funny little icons that, when tapped, launch into a barrage of entertainment, business decision making, or flapping birds. It’s made from about the same parts, manufactured by one of two or three suicide houses with built in conveyor belt assembly lines in a country pretty damn far away.
Like my car they all look, do, and feel the same, are massively overpriced, and a constant source of spending stress with the spouse who’d prefer we eat every night instead of showing the neighbors that we’re cooler than them by upgrading our model to this year’s.
Don’t be that knife worshipping Westcoaster or slightly inbred Texan Dodge fanatic. It’s a phone, it’s not a cure for cancer. A felt 99 percent of our time is spent on Facebook anyways and until there’s a phone that natively turns my feed into an interesting array of great scientific discourse and entertaining tidbits rather than a constant boring avalanche of cats, kids, and fake news stories, they’re all the same. Close your eyes, turn three times counterclockwise while reciting the second and sixth verse of the Canterbury Tale introduction, and whatever glass, plastic, and toxic material box you point at in the fascist fee grabbing phone service provider sales lounge of your choice, you buy. Simple as that.
A few minutes north-west of Frankfurt, past the Grimm brother’s birthplace of Hoechst, lies Königsberg. A small town in the Taunus forest of Hesse it was founded around 1200 as one of the waypoint security stations for the newly established Cologne-Frankfurt trade route. Upon a hill west of the town lies the Königsberg castle, home of one of Grimm’s most famous stories – Sleeping Beauty. The “good” version at least. There’s an “evil” version, likely a derivative of a Frankish tale (ca. 1400), in which Sleeping Beauty is poisoned by her father, impregnated by him, and only awakes to find herself mother of two children upon which she jumps to her death.
The prince and all … that one supposedly happened here. And there’s some historical evidence. 1418 the castle fell under the control of the Lord of Eppstein who had, supposedly, a beautiful daughter who was pale and fair and lovely on the eyes but shy and withdrawn. So she slept most days in the castle’s tower, walking the grounds at night alone. Around her 28th birthday (keep in mind that 15th Century Germans had life expectancies close to ours after adjusting for infant mortality) she met a knight with whom she fell in love, leading to her leaving the tower. Peasant rumors, maybe driven by the same-century Frankish tale about poisoned looms, just filled out the rest of the story.
Powder tower and outer cloister are all that remains of this side of the castle’s fortifications. Ironically the older structure still mostly stands while the newer, 16th century additions are gone.
Hanau is the birthplace of the Grimm Brothers. Despite a later exile to Berlin (after speaking out against Hessian censorship and the disbanding of the rule of law), the brothers never found a place they liked as much. Many tales have their origin in the area around this town, the woods of the Taunus forest and its people are rather conducive to that.
It’s been a year. A year since I started asking questions of TripIt, the — it seems — trip planner of choice for most of my friends. Part of me can see why: smartphone app, website, automatic confirmation email parsing, delay notifications, bonus program tracking. But then I use it and, like clockwork, five minutes in I am ready to kill someone or drill a hole in my head to make the pain stop.
Google Now does a better job at listening to my inbox and reminding me of trips. It also doesn’t seem to have an issue with confirmation emails TripIt doesn’t understand. If a small subfunction of a much bigger thing does things better than your dedicated app, we have problems. And then there’s the website.
Maybe someone in TripIt’s C-level ranks has a friend whose kid is learning to do HTML and needed a job. Maybe they’re going for lovingly shitty 1990s GeoCities. But for sure they’re not doing a good job. I am a Pro user. I pay TripIt money. For that money I enjoy the privilege of not one, not two, but THREE ads. If there ever was a use case for AdBlock, this is it.
Because there’s little to show (well, there is much to show, TripIt just doesn’t show it), I get to enjoy TripIt’s rather dumb “Secret Sauce Revealed” video. Every. Fucking. Time. I am a Pro user. I have used the app. I have paid for the app. I do not need to be sold on the app. But, yay, stupid gnomes and annoyingly forced-happy SF hipster voice to badly animated graphics trying to sell me the app. Sure, I could turn off the AutoPlay option, which I have, but now I have to stare at the above pictured blue gnomes. That’s not what UX designers mean when they talk about “optimizing whitespace”.
Because all the space is taken by idiotic advergnomes in blue, there seems to be no room for an “add plans” button anywhere. Seriously. This site exists since 2006 and hasn’t been updated much, since. But I can not, for the hell of it, imagine that no one, ever, wanted or could spend a freaking minute to add the “add plans” button to that page. Eight years!
As a pro user I also get to purchase the 99c (it’s just a buck, but still…) Android app extra if I don’t want adverts there as well. Guess those 7M in Series C funding went to the C-level executive’s kid for the website design.
I need a functioning trip tracker. One that doesn’t barf on confirmation emails, bombards me (as a paying customer) with ads and blue gnomes, that puts the “add plans” button on the page with the trip.
jml.is is the personal weblog of Jonas M Luster, racketeer, scoundrel, and storyteller. It contains assorted paraphernalia and should not be taken as a topical cream. more...
Germany’s anti-knowledge vandals blurred this house irrevocably on Street View.
Google Now does a better job at listening to my inbox and reminding me of trips. It also doesn’t seem to have an issue with confirmation emails TripIt doesn’t understand. If a small subfunction of a much bigger thing does things better than your dedicated app, we have problems. And then there’s the website.
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