Originally published in Revista de Occidente, no. 239, March 2001. This is a stub — the full text has not yet been digitised.
The World Wide Web, I argued in this piece, is not merely a library or a communications network. It is something closer to an external hippocampus: a collective, distributed memory organ that humanity has been building, more or less accidentally, since the early 1990s.
The argument drew on connectionist theories of memory, on Vannevar Bush's memex, and on some fairly optimistic readings of what the then-young web was becoming. Re-reading it now, twenty-five years on, the panpsychism holds up better than the optimism. I was writing at the height of the dot-com boom, when it was easy to mistake acceleration for direction.
The piece appeared alongside work by José Antonio Millán, Roberto Blatt, Roger Chartier, and — in a delightful act of editorial catholicity — Vannevar Bush, whose 1945 essay "As We May Think" felt, in 2001, more present than historical. The cover illustration was by my friend Mateo Maté, who I had met while working as an artist's assistant in 1992 and would later invite to present at Dorkbot Madrid.
If you have a copy of Revista de Occidente no. 239 and would like to share a scan, please get in touch.