I can’t remember where I came across this, but I feel very happy that I found it.

It sets out to show “how to win the war for the soul of the internet and build the Web We Want”. It draws the foundation of its analysis from the writings of Ivan Illich, and builds from there.

And it finishes with a bevy of action points.

Good Internet magazine has just published what I think constitutes its second issue. It comes as a printed magazine you can subscribe to and a free downloadable greyscale version.

To get that you need to start a free account to the email newsletter, which arrives infrequently and anyway contains things of interest.

Lev Manovich argues that the database is replacing central perspective as the dominant symbolic form by which we make sense of our world. In this he follows the work of Ernst Cassirer, whose Philosophy of Symbolic Forms defines the task of humankind as seeking “the categories of the consciousness of objects in the theoretical, intellectual sphere” and suggests that this “starts from the assumption that such categories must be at work wherever a cosmos, a characteristic and typical world view, takes form out of the chaos of impressions.”.

This essay is simply me thinking aloud about some of the issues and questions that this raises.