cristobal.space/writing/ubu

Search, our means of navigating the internet, is dying. Distribution, discovery, and curation of information evolve hand-in-hand. As the information ecology enters in crisis, new techologies arise to address the overload. Fear of too many books preceded the research university. In response to television, Neil Postman's cried out against the increase in information-action ratio. Now, the worry is for Google's page-rank, our entrypoint into the hyperlink-graph. The recent solution has been to append "Reddit" to your query, a shortcut into the nerd-sphere. Perhaps instead you talk to ChatGPT, who has already read everything for you. And so the dialectic goes: new media for distribution (books, newsprint, television, zines, webpages) burgeon production, which are indexed (bookstores, catalogues, web-directories, search, social media) for discovery, and eventually synthesized through curation (libraries, universities, wikis, hipsters). The phases aren't clear-cut; information arbitrage dict

Search, our means of navigating the internet, is dying. Distribution, discovery, and curation of information evolve hand-in-hand. As the information ecology enters in crisis, new techologies arise to address the overload. Fear of too many books preceded the research university. In response to television, Neil Postman's cried out against the increase in information-action ratio. Now, the worry is for Google's page-rank, our entrypoint into the hyperlink-graph. The recent solution has been to append "Reddit" to your query, a shortcut into the nerd-sphere. Perhaps instead you talk to ChatGPT, who