Info

Bush, Vannevar. 1945. “As We May Think”

“Consider a future device … in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.”

Constantin, Sarah. 2019. “How to Make a Memex”

You get dumber if your thoughts are limited to the bandwidth that you can successfully communicate in a few minutes to arbitrarily many strangers.

The solution is to create a personal memex. A record of your thoughts and associations, which you will only share parts of with others.

(there was also a line by xj9 on one gemini site or another about the importance of building your own memex, which is what sparked this whole endeavor, but i have since lost it…)

which brings us to where we are now: the beautiful and cursed project of putting my own memex together, so that i may more easily utilize the memories i’ve already made. it is doomed to be perpetually under construction, just as my mind should hopefully always be.

the birth of the project and its guiding motivations can be found in identify your replacement, though i’m sure that the aims it lists have shifted since then.

Memex Metacommentary