Against Nostalgia in Computing
omar.websiteThe opening starts off with back of back winges:
1. Gratuitous overkill about how useless it was to try to make a kid-engaged laptop / OS / learning platform
2. Their first read on Digital Gardens was that it was it "feels too shallow to me, and it feels backward-looking."
Woof. First, yes olpc failed but trying to make a cohesive os that was observable, that could describe itself to kids, was neat, and DBus was a pretty good tool for doing that.
There is a backwards-ism, a literal "back to the land" ism about digital gardens; I'd allow that.
But rarely do I see people with strong sense of owning a property in computing, in information spaces, and I think that's missing. We have very little developed sense of ownership around computing, and that's a notable missing element that Digital Gardens address.
> We copy the idea that "everything is a file", but we apply that to the problems we actually encounter today (tab management, media management).
Sign me up for this 9p utopia that's replicated itself everywhere.