Rewilding My Attention in the Wilderness of a Library

“The Library is a Wilderness of Books” - Henry David Thoreau

If Henry David Thoreau was alive today I’m sure he’d be blogging and saying the library is a wilderness of links.

We imagine libraries as neatly ordered and structured environments. Places that follow rules. But every library I’ve been in always seems more like a wilderness than you might imagine. A library is a hyperobject - it’s ordered but it’s form can’t fit in your field of view in one go and so you are left to grab hold of ghosts, imagined shadows, to chase down half-remembered ideas and stumble upon secret connections.

Anyway. In the year 2025 everyone has a personal library, their own hyperobject in their pocket walking around with them.

I have done a dismal job of blogging recently and so I’m building a kind of personal library. Bram Adams has some lovely writing and thinking about the practice of Personal Library Science:

Personal Library Science is defined as: the discipline concerned with the organization, retrieval, and transformation of an individual's data.

The operative words here are: organization, transformation, and individual. Personal library science is focused on you and your data, not the existence of all data itself. More succinctly, personal library science is focused on your relationship with your information. How do we store information so that it useful at a later date? How do we transform our information into new valuable assets in different creative domains? How do we do all of this while being flexible enough for the idiosyncrasies, proclivities, likes and dislikes of eight billion distinct individuals? How do we chronicle the information diet of a single person as they learn new things, interact with the world at different phases in their life? How do we make sure we can pass down our best knowledge to generations below?

In sum, how do we manage the libraries of us?

After all as Bram says later in Priority list for 2025:

I’m of the strong opinion that personal websites are going to become really important in the continued increase of real world culture from the internet, as well as being able to exist in a language model world. And they’re just really fun.

Amen to that.

A Library of Links

My library is rudimentary right now. It’s really two things:

1. A new linkblog designed for easy sharing of URLs into an archive. I’m heavily using Quotebacks as the foundation of grab a link, grab a quote and publish to my site.

1. An automatic archive of every single external link on the site. Right now I’m at 1586.