Two critiques: First is that we are still in the age of "search" superceding the directories (google over yahoo), that is wrong, Google, Instagram, Facebook et

Two critiques: First is that we are still in the age of "search" superceding the directories (google over yahoo), that is wrong, Google, Instagram, Facebook etc are now curators. Gone are the days where searching for something brought up whatever else people were searching for, now it's curated both for generally good reasons ("Asian" doesn't turn up porn featuring Asian women like it did in 2008) and bad reasons (suggests ads up front and specific services under google. Second their suggested paradigm feels like a hotbed for abuse of users' privacy. Given the author also wrote an article titled "Sorry, Big Brother Is Here to Stay" I'm not sure they are sensitive to that concern perhaps. One of the values of the more ephemeral bits of information is that it's ephemeral, and god we know google et al would kill to have a slice of that data. That said, back in 2009 or w/e I literally had a text file full of shit like copypasta you'd see spammed on 4chan, a meme folder, etc. It's not like people aren't capable of saving the ephemeral bits, it's just a conscious effort (which is what I think it should be) over one that is done automatically. That said in conclusion, this reads a lot like trying to fix something that isn't broken. If anything, that too much is online and hard to actually save to your computer itself is a problem but I don't think the "desktop" metaphor is the problem here... may be they made the connection in the article but I didn't come away convinced their suggestion ameliorates anything.