"For all the utopian Silicon Valley rhetoric about changing the world, the technology industry seems to have little appetite for long-term thinking." #readingToday

That is why Paul Otlet still matters. His vision was not just cloud castles and Utopian scheming and positivist cant but in some ways more relevant and realizable now than at any point in history. To be sure, some of his most cherished ideas seem anachronistic by today's standards: his quest for "universal" truth, his faith in international organizations, and his conviction in the inexorable progress of humanity. But as more and more of us rely on the Internet to conduct our everyday lives, we are also beginning to discover the dark side of such extreme decentralization. The hopeful rhetoric of the early years of the Internet revolution has given way to the realization that we may be entering a state of permanent cultural amnesia, in which the sheer fluidity of the Web makes it difficult to keep our bearings. Along the way, many of us have also entrusted our most valued personal data— letters, photographs, films, and all kinds of other intellectual artifacts— to a handful of corporations who are ultimately beholden not to serving humanity but to meeting Wall Street quarterly earnings estimates. For all the utopian Silicon Valley rhetoric about changing the world, the technology industry seems to have little appetite for long-term thinking beyond its immediate parochial interests.

Cataloging the World, Alex Wright