Thread · 7 tweets · 23 Sept 2021

You're reading this as "information should be disorganised" which would be a pretty dumb take. The difference is in the "for you." It's the difference between a tool and a service, and between polycentric versus total organisation.

A simple example is a library. They'll have indexed the books. Maybe they use Dewey or maybe they have a DB that I can query to slice and dice my way — either way, I'm in charge. If their selection is bad, I have recourse and I have alternatives. It's not total.

With Search, it's making all the decisions for you. The librarian tells you which book you want to read. You don't know how, you don't know why, you have no agency: you just said cat and that's the book you'll read. You also have no recourse and they plan to run all libraries.

The NYT isn't prescriptive. It's *one* source, organised with documented choices, public accountability and with no expectation of being the one choice (in fact, if you don't live in the US it's probably a "second read"). It's one tool for the news and meant to be used as such.

It's not meant to be frictionless. It's meant to create affordances in the world, like any good tool would. It's a damn fine tool but there are others — you're not supposed to use it as a dictionary, as a source of cats, or as a treatise on metaphysics.

Anyway, this is eventually a longer write-up, but at the end of the day Search is about as far as you can get from the Unix philosophy. It's disempowering.

(I lied about cats btw. We purvey very fine cats. store.nytimes.com/collections/bo…)