Author:: Simon Pitt Full Title:: Computer Files Are Going Extinct Tags:#media/article Link:: https://onezero.medium.com/the-death-of-the-computer-file-doc-43cb028c0506
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* highlights from 2021-02-08
* One thing I like about files is there’s a consistent way of interacting with them, no matter what’s inside. Those things I mentioned above — copying, sorting, defragging — I can do those to any file. It could be an image, part of a game, or a list of my favorite utensils. Defragmenter doesn’t care. It doesn’t judge the contents.
* But those files are transitory — cached, and may be deleted without warning. These aren’t like the carefully crafted files and folders on my computer.I just want my file browser back.On the Mac, iTunes sorts out your music files for you. They’re handled by the system. The interface displays the music to you and you can sort the files there. But if you look under the hood, at the files themselves, you see a rabbit warren of mess, weird names, and strange folders. “Don’t bother yourself with these,” the computer says, “I’ll handle this for you.” But I do bother myself with them.I like being able to look at and access my files. But now the systems I use try to stop me from doing so. “No,” they say, “access them through these bespoke, proprietary interfaces.” I just want my file browser back, but now I’m not allowed it. It’s a relic of an earlier era.Yet I can’t help missing those files and folders and the control I had with them.
* The unit of creation has moved from the file to the database entry.In some ways, that doesn’t make a huge difference. The data is the same, just stored in a database rather than an HTML document. The URL could even be the same, just behind the scenes it fetches the content from a different type of data store. But the implications are much bigger. The content is dependent on a whole heap of infrastructure, rather than being able to stand on its own.
* The default view in Google Docs is all files sorted by the order you most recently opened them. I can’t sort or organize them. They’re just there, ordered in a way that prioritizes the new over the important.
* It seems so unlikely that something that was just created would happen to be better than everything created throughout all time. What are the odds that every time I arrive at the site, the pinnacle of human achievement has just been breached? But we don’t seem to have a way of sorting by quality. Only by recency.
* At work, I see colleagues creating files, emailing them, and not even bothering to save the attachments to their hard drive. Their inbox is their new file management system. “Have you got that spreadsheet?” they ask. Someone hunts through their inbox and forwards the person back the email they sent. Is this really how we manage data in the 21st century?
* The file has been replaced with the platform, the service, the ecosystem. This is not to say that I’m proposing we lead an uprising against services. You can’t halt progress by clogging the internet pipes. I say this to mourn the loss of the innocence we had before capitalism inevitably invaded the internet. When we create now, our creations are part of an enormous system. Our contributions a tiny speck in an elastic database cluster. Rather than buying and collecting music, videos, or other cultural artifacts, we are exposed to the power hose: all culture, raging over us, for $12.99 a month (or $15.99 for HD) as long as we keep up our payments like good economic entities. When we stop paying, we’re left with nothing. No files. The service is revoked.