Kernel Issue 6: FEED is out now, reaching you through one of the myriad feeds coursing through our modern technological society. One of my goals when putting together this issue was to expose the genealogy of those feeds, the history behind what often fades into the infrastructural background. Tomás Guarna is a scholar of digital infrastructure and governance from a social perspective. Here, he traces the history of the now-omnipresent infinite feed, showing the particular decisions and decision-makers that informed its development.

Also, if you’re in New York: we’re throwing a launch party for Kernel 6 at Hex House in Brooklyn on November 8! We’ll be featuring readings from the issue as well as a behind-the-scenes look at the making of the magazine from Kernel Magazine Creative Director Connie Liu! We hope to see you there! Get your tickets now!

—Jacob Sujin Kuppermann

🌽 A Media History of the Infinite Feed 🔩

By Tomás Guarna

Edited by Jacob Sujin Kuppermann

In 2023, a young woman known as “K.G.M.” sued Meta and YouTube for designing features that made her allegedly addicted to the platforms starting when she was just six years old. This addiction, she argued, ultimately left her with anxiety, depression, body dysmorphia, and suicidal thoughts. In March of this year, the tech companies were found guilty by a jury in Los Angeles — with damages at $4.2 million and $1.8 million respectively for Meta and YouTube — after agreeing that they acted with malice and fraud. Many of the culprits of Meta and YouTube’s psychologically destructive strategies are well-known by now: algorithmic recommendations, auto-played videos, constant notifications, and beauty filters. But interestingly, K.G.M.’s lawyers also included among these tools “infinite scroll,” the design feature of Web and mobile apps that presents content seamlessly as users scroll down through content in their feeds.

“Doomscrolling,” “mind-rotting,” “technology addiction” — the endless feed has become the emblematic medium of contemporary digital pathology, the tool of choice for the passive Internet user who scrolls and scrolls in the search of a hit of dopamine. Interestingly, however, this immediacy in receiving consumable Web content was not always demonized — in fact, it was once seen as the harbinger of a celebrated mode of networked politics. Pundits and scholars attributed the rapidness of online activity and the ever-updating feed as a key conduit to progressive political winds, from Obama’s 2008 win to the 2010s Arab Spring. But above all, the story of the infinite feed shows how the design of platforms gradually disconnected the flow of information consumption from conscious choice — a transition that left the dreams of early Web enthusiasts behind, and opened the doors for surveillance capitalism.

Unsurprisingly, the Internet was not always organized around endless feeds. Prior to the rise of dynamic page updates (how clients automatically retrieve new information from the server), to see updated information, users would have to take part in the archaic practice called refreshing, where they would press a button with two arrows forming a circular loop, similar to a recycling symbol. The icon has since been largely refashioned as a single arrow, the concept of a client-server communication now completely abstracted. Refreshing today is almost a misnomer: rather than receiving the freshest version of a website’s content, the refresh button on browsers today is generally used to reattempt a query, retrieving the latest version of a website’s code, or re-launching the website — usually, when we suspect it is malfunctioning. Revisiting the earlier meaning of refreshing brings us back to a Web with a different temporality, one where users would “take turns” with servers, and where online experiences were temporally scattered and broadly slower.

Creating seamless online experiences became a priority for dot-com entrepreneurs of the mid-1990s as they discovered that the gold mine of the Internet was in monetizing interactivity, not access. Selling access to the Internet infrastructure had become a viable business when the U.S. government privatized the Internet in 1995. However, it allowed only a few players and required massive investments. Tech capitalists soon discovered that the prime business opportunity was in profiting people’s online interactions — whether by selling them access to a service, like Match.com; by taking a cut of their sales, like eBay; or delivering them ads, like Google. For this goal they would need to design online experiences that were frictionless.

One foundation for these Web experiences was HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Invented by Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues at CERN in the early 1990s, it defined the syntax and semantics for accessing distributed files on the Web. Thanks to HTTP, you can access a file on a server in China from a computer in Argentina, since both computers communicate following the same rules and language. Particularly, HTTP was envisioned as a “librarian” for digital files on the Web — hypertext documents with graphics, text, videos, and, importantly, links that allowed users to go from one document to another. These documents were coded in HTML, the HyperText Markup Language. Developers could tweak the documents to deliver custom information to users based on their requests — for example, showing a user’s specific dating matches, or their search results based on a query. Another important characteristic of HTTP was that it was “stateless” — the server treated each request from the client as independent, and “forgot” what it had communicated with it before. Other protocols that facilitated real-time Web interaction — like the IRC protocol, used for online chatrooms — had persistent connections. This meant that HTTP could “serve” a higher number of simultaneous users, as the server did not need an ongoing process for each user. Served through HTTP, developers could also flexibly design HTML interfaces that allowed for various purposes, from dating to bidding. In turn, protocols were limited to their envisioned purposes — IRC for chatting, SMTP for emailing etc.

Driven to profit from the Web’s booming popularity, dot-com entrepreneurs enlisted Web developers to create seamless Web experiences they could profit from — ideally, ones that would not require users to refresh. On March 3, 1995, a user with an Italian email address wrote in “www-talk,” the public mailing list and technical discussion forum for the World Wide Web Consortium (“W3C”), which decides the open standards for the Web, “As everybody of us know, html is a ‘monodirectional’ protocol […] I (pronunciation: ‘my boss’) would like to investigate how the thing could be changed, in order to have a real ‘live’ environment.” The user proposed three options: a background process in which the client would poll the server periodically; integrating server functionalities in the browser; or starting a server in the browser that would communicate with the actual server. W3C leadership were not interested. A response from Dan Connolly, a computer scientist who chaired the W3C HTML Working Group, is emblematic of W3C’s refusal to support a “live” web: “Wedging this into HTTP seems like a bad idea. HTTP is an information retrieval protocol. For conferencing, look at protocols like IRC or the MUD [multi-user dungeons] stuff.” HTTP was for information retrieval, not for web interactivity. The open standards community could not be bothered with attempts to fit the Web into the mold of online monetizable interactions.

Outside of W3C’s public standards discussions, Netscape — the Web browser company founded by Jim Clark and former Mosaic developer Marc Andreessen — was independently developing their own solution. As described in an article by ACM columnist Hal Berghel, Netscape had popularized “push technology” in 1995 by developing two methods of “dynamic page updating” — that is, updating content without client refreshing. One was a “server push” method through special software. It did not require client requests, but the server had to hold a persistent, running process for each connected client, which, at its core, clashed with how HTTP was designed. The second method was “client pull,” where an HTML meta tag (code with instructions for the browser, invisible to the user) would instruct the web browser to refresh every X amount of seconds.

Netscape’s client pull, however, had two key problems. For one, it would reload the entire website, which was cumbersome, especially with slow Internet speeds. And second, Web developers could not rely on Netscape’s client pull because it was not a widely-shared standard, but an idiosyncratic feature particular to the Netscape browser, since W3C refused to incorporate it. The client pull method involved an “http-equiv” tag, which was controversial because they simulated a response from the server itself. As Apache Web server early developer Brian Behlendorf termed it, client pull was ultimately a hack (“though Netscape likes to call them ‘cool tricks’”, he noted).

The holy grail of dynamic page updates would also emerge against the open standards’ community resistance, but from Microsoft — a company in a much more advantageous position. In 1999, Microsoft released a version of ActiveX (a software framework that would allow small programs to be run directly inside Internet Explorer) that included a JavaScript object (a reusable block of code) called “XMLHTTP;” the identifiers were ActiveXObject(”Msxml2.XMLHTTP”) and ActiveXObject(”Microsoft.XMLHTTP”). A JavaScript script could use the XMLHTTP obejcts to fetch new data from the server, and then use the response to update just part of the existing page without refreshing the entire site. XMLHTTP powered Microsoft’s Outlook web client, making it work similarly to its desktop version. Microsoft’s success in popularizing XMLHTTP through a browser extension may be puzzling today, but it is worth noting that Internet Explorer’s market dominance was reaching 75.31% in August 1999; and that plug-ins to enable Web functionalities were fairly popular despite the vulnerabilities they provoked. Possibly until Steve Jobs’ declared opposition to Flash in 2010, downloading an extension to enable a feature on the Web was fairly popular, as were spyware infections from a culture that did not mind downloading games, tools, purple gorilla virtual assistants.

As Microsoft’s solution to dynamic page updates grew in popularity, competitor Web browsers adopted it under the non-Microsoft identifier of XMLHttpRequest, which soon became a de facto standard — even if W3C did not begin to adopt it as such until 2006. Gecko, Mozilla’s browser engine — used in Firefox and other Mozilla products, built from the open-sourced Netscape codebase — introduced and coined XMLHttpRequest in 2000. Apple’s Safari browser adopted it in 2004, and Opera in 2005. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer adopted its alternate name in 2006. Popular web applications relying on XMLHttpRequest, or “XHR,” as it came to be termed by Web developers, allowed users to interact with the Web in ways that felt similar to desktop software: accessing information in real time, without clunky reloads. While smooth interactivity has previously been a domain of software that had to be downloaded, developers could now effectively create “Web apps.” XHR’s popularization crystallized the transition of the Web as a “network of documents” to a network of applications that could rely on ever-updating online information. Google’s Web applications, targeted to the mass public, were notable examples of this: Google Maps allowed users to zoom in and zoom out, to move seamlessly through online maps updated with fresh information, much of it crowdsourced from user contribution. Inspired by this new wave of Web apps, a popular 2005 essay by UX designer Jesse James Garrett coined the term “AJAX,” Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, to define a “new approach to Web applications” that finally eliminated ”the start-stop-start-stop nature of interaction”. While still requiring users to click, automatic refreshing had almost arrived.

The rising social networking sites of Web 2.0 embraced AJAX with open arms. In 2008, Twitter introduced an AJAX functionality so that users could access the latest tweets without refreshing the website. A year later, Twitter changed the prompt that users saw as an initiation to share tweets: “what are you doing?” became “what’s happening?” AJAX allowed Twitter to be a site about immediacy — a true Internet of the present. This was the culmination of a process that had begun in 2006, when Twitter launched with a reverse-chronological timeline with tweets from a user’s friends (later changed to followed users). It was envisioned so that users could see what their contacts — especially professional ones, as the site was celebrated for its relevance in conferences like SXSW — were doing at any time, thanks to Twitter’s early adoption of mobile apps and SMS posting. In Twitter: a Biography (NYU Press, 2020), communication scholars Jean Burgess and Nancy K. Baym talk about a tension between two visions: this early idea of Twitter as a social technology for updating your friends, and the one of an informational public communication platform. Twitter’s increase in speed and synchronicity, enabled via AJAX, allowed the site to embrace this second meaning — not just a social media site, but a true information network that could show users “what’s happening,” right now.

This transformation coincided with a moment when those social networking sites’ political potential seemed most promising. Concurrent with Twitter’s AJAX adoption, the first “Twitter revolutions” took place around the world. In 2009, protests in Moldova rose against the governing party, which had allegedly rigged the recent parliamentary election. Pundits named the Moldovan upheavals “Twitter revolutions,” with news media heightening the role of social networking sites as central to organizing civic action. That same year, protests broke out in major cities across Iran, in opposition to the incumbent president declaring victory in the 2009 election — also lauded by Western media as a “Twitter revolution” due to the alleged wide use of social media to organize and document events. The actual role of Twitter in these protests is debatable, in retrospect — notably, in a Dissent magazine piece, critic Evgeny Morozov convincingly argued that Twitter’s role in Iran was overstated, as the protests been largely organized by opposition candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s political organization. There were also few active Twitter accounts in Tehran — although Morozov conceded that Moldova’s protests had been spontaneous, and Twitter may have had a role in encouraging them. In 2010, the Arab Spring broke with protests in Tunisia, followed by Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, among others — Western media, once again, lauded Twitter as the new medium of political change.

The same year the Arab Spring revolts started, the platform introduced a key change in its interface: the “infinite scroll.” Twitter’s first AJAX redesign had allowed users to click a button to load more tweets after they reached the end of their page. This offered more updated content without refreshing, but still required an action from the user. Twitter’s 2010 redesign of the service’s Web version — codenamed Phoenix, internally, and launched as #newTwitter — loaded new tweets automatically when users reached the end of the page. While the original ideation of an infinite-scroll feature was not from Twitter — it can be traced back to engineer Aza Raskin in 2006 — it was Twitter’s implementation which made infinite scroll become a convention across the Internet, since web developers rushed to mimic it across different sites. The infinite scroll invited users to read Twitter as a seamless text of the present. It materialized Twitter’s dream of an information network, where users would continuously access more and more updated information without breaks and disruptions. Users no longer had to request more information, they simply had to desire it. It translated into the platform’s design a vision of a citizenship that naturally strived for openness and the democratic flow of information.

Infinite scroll was a fundamental technical innovation behind today’s “For You pages,” or customized algorithmic feeds. As infinite scroll became implemented across all the major social networks, it allowed platforms to react to the information they gathered from users in real time. Building on its earlier EdgeRank system, in 2013 Facebook transitioned to a machine learning recommendation algorithm that used “over a thousand different factors” to sort posts in the platform’s News Feed, based on users’ predicted engagement. Infinite scroll meant that Facebook could deliver recent posts in small continuous batches — they would appear for users naturally, as long as they had a continuous Internet connection, maximizing engagement and minimizing conscious choice to load more content. But furthermore, delivering content piecemeal meant that Facebook’s recommendation engine could react to rapidly-updated data about posts’ global performance on the social network — the likelihood of all of Facebook’s user’s engagement with the post — but also to rapidly-updated data about the likelihood of the particular user’s engagement, based on real-time “likes”, “comments,” and “shares” of the posts they saw, possibly from the just-delivered batch.

The infinite scroll-powered feed opened the door for the rise of a sharp critique of Big Tech’s capture of people’s emotional states. In 2019, Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff would publish The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (Profile, 2019), which argued that platforms close tracking of people’s activity allowed to extract “behavioral surplus,” data that could be turned into “prediction products” and marketed to advertisers, insurers, and political campaigns interested in shaping people’s future behaviors. The infinite feed was a key medium for this task — it allowed platforms to collect “fresh” data about users, allowing ad systems to react instantaneously. But furthermore, these ads were delivered not just based on users’ demographic characteristics — for example, whether one is a 31 year-old graduate student in the Bay Area — but also on data that purportedly represented their psychological states, their behaviors and attitudes to immediately preceding content — whether they are hopeful, sad, or lonely. The infinite feed enabled surveillance capitalism’s move from demography to behavioral prediction, and it became the center of controversies around emotional influence like the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

Tomás Guarna is a PhD candidate in Communication at Stanford University.

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann is a PhD student in Ecology at UC Davis and the editor-in-chief of Kernel Magazine.

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Nearby, at 1221 Sixth, property of The Rockefeller Group, which owns and manages some six million square feet of office space in Midtown Manhattan, a sunken plaza — also a POPS — has at times been blocked off on weekends. Due to complaints and advocacy by Phillips and his followers, the Department of Buildings has served Rockefeller with a violation on this issue, but they remain determined to skirt the law when they can. A sign barring the public from the lower plaza that is used on weekends sits nearby. And just two days earlier, security on the same property attempted to remove Phillips for filming on the property, though he was not breaking any of the posted rules about the plaza’s use.

In fact, as we walk from one plaza to another, I remark that Phillips seems scrupulous about following the rules of these plazas. “That’s my whole leverage,” he grins.” That’s my whole thing, is [that] I’m going to document that I’m being completely a normal guy.” The message of all his videos and advocacy is one of following the rules, and in the comments, he often pushes back when his followers urge some kind of civil disobedience. The ethos of his Instagram account and all his interactions with building personnel seems to be that the public should be respectful of these public spaces by observing the rules, and that the owners should do the same. “The issue is when they start to put their own rules into effect” and refuse to abide by their own agreements with the public, he says.

Since Phillips began making these videos, security follows him around when he is in these spaces. The evening of my visit, as we sit in the sunken plaza, a security guard watches us carefully and keeps talking into his phone. Just two days earlier, at the same spot, Phillips was removed by security.

Walking north, Phillips shows me another POPS, this one at 31 West Fifty-Second Street where, until he made videos about it, the handicapped access ramp was blocked off. It’s open, for now. Another offending restaurant on the same property has reduced its outdoor table intrusion to just one, which Phillips thinks is acceptable even if it might technically be out of line. “It’s a give-and-take,” he says, “because obviously nothing is ever perfect,” pointing out that it might be hard for an owner to completely forbid a tenant to use outside space that they’d assumed was part of the deal when they rented the space.

Phillips is not someone who has a hard time seeing the viewpoint of others, especially those in the same industry as him. “As a security guy, I work with a lot of these types of guys,” he says. “They kind of get the ego thing when they work in a building like this.” But they are not actually enforcing the law. Rather, they are enforcing the desires of a corporation uninterested in holding up their end of the bargain to the public.

Phillips says building owners are getting more fines and being issued more violations in response to his complaints. Phillips’s advocacy has engaged city officials, including the Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani, who was appointed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani in January and has met with Phillips and toured the offending sites. Phillips calls Tigani “a great, great asset.” Phillips would like to see the city strengthen enforcement and streamline the process for responding to complaints; at present, it’s hampered by the fact that multiple agencies are involved (exactly the kind of problem Mamdani’s Commission on Government Efficiency [COGE] has been trying to fix). He’d also like to see city council legislation to increase the fines on repeat offenders.

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Phillips also holds dance parties, concerts, and most recently, a well-attended Halloween flash dance party and costume contest in the POPS, spreading the word about the violations but also reclaiming these public spaces for public joy. For the Halloween party, Phillips himself showed up in full king regalia, including a crown and scepter — the Lord of Bench, crowned as such.

While the response to his project is satisfying so far, Phillips would like to see the real estate industry comply more fully, and he thinks Mayor Mamdani’s attention on the issue would help significantly. “This is the one issue I cannot believe he has not said a word on since the moment it started,” Phillips says, noting with some annoyance that many content creators “with far less following, with far less reach” have been in conversation with the mayor. “I’m not one of the crazy guys out here!” says Phillips. “We need his voice on this.”

Phillips’s project — fighting for public control of space against real estate oligarchs who want to take it away — seems closely aligned with Mamdani’s own. Both have been fighting for the working class to quite literally have a place in the city: a bench, an apartment, a park, a soccer field, a night at the opera. Both insist that New York is for everybody.

Phillips, for his part, does not frame his crusade in ideological terms. “This is an issue that transcends everything,” he says. “Doesn’t matter if you’re left, right, green. Everybody’s gonna sit on a bench.”

This article originally appeared in Jacobin, a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. Subscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.

What if, rather than being terrifying or utopian, AI is just a waste of time?

Source

There are no generalized solutions to the three-body problem. Say you have three planets orbiting each other: it’s impossible to calculate how they will move using Newton’s laws of motion and gravity.

Unlike the two-body problem, the three-body problem has no general closed-form analytic solution. The differential equations that govern the motions of three gravitating bodies are not integrable and cannot be solved to give explicit formulas for the positions of the bodies as a function of time. For most initial conditions, the dynamical system for three orbiting bodies is chaotic, and the only way to predict their motions is to estimate them using numerical methods.

But thousands of stable three-body orbits have been found — their paths repeat after a given interval. The Three Body Orbits website is an atlas of some of those orbits: you can watch each three-body system play itself out in a wide variety of different shapes and complexities. There’s this simple figure 8, this slightly less simple one, and this one that looks like a spirograph.

The site even enables you to search for new stable solutions to the problem in your browser. This is what one of my unsuccessful tests looked like — two of the planets locked in a gravity death spiral while the other one peaces out in the other direction:

Tags: infoviz · physics · science

Hilbert's hotel is a thought experiment about a fully occupied hotel with infinitely many rooms. It shows why infinite collections do not behave like finite ones.

Between text, images, audio clips and videos, there are so many elements at your fingertips to tell a story in the digital era. A new expressive tool is now available to make it easy to assemble material online and share your creation widely.

Tapestries is a user interface developed by Bob Stein and Dan Visel (who works on the Wayback team) that allows people to make dynamic, multi-linear presentations with various digital objects. The curation tool lets users gather items from all over the web and put them together into a single space to tell a story. Rather than simply listing links at the end of a document, a tapestry can be designed by dragging photos, video clips or other items onto a digital canvas that viewers can click to open.

The finished product can be kept private or posted publicly – with the option of inviting others to collaborate, comment on the project, or make copies of the tapestry to edit and revise.

The Tapestries platform launched as part of the Internet Archive’s Oct. 21 celebration. Stein, Visel, as well as the project’s new director, Ben Vershbow, were on hand to demonstrate the tool during the Funston Avenue party.

“We’ve made Tapestries open source and have a good foundation for people to start building on it,” said Stein, a digital media pioneer who incubated the project with the Internet Archive. “I love that we’re entering [a time] when the author or producer or designer is not stuck with one medium. They can use any combination of media to tell a particular part of a story.”

A New Canvas for Digital Storytelling

Vershbow, who worked with Stein at the Institute for the Future of the Book, and most recently was with the Wikimedia Foundation, is director of the Tapestries project.

“Over time, I got to know the tool, use it and see the potential,” Vershbow said. “It’s about curating different types of media, arranging them however you’d like and fully embedding the media objects. It’s a novel, free way to assemble and make sense of material in the digital world.”

After a limited early release of the tool in 2025, some educators began to experiment with Tapestries in the classroom.

Dene Grigar, professor and director of creative media and digital culture in the Department of Digital Technology & Culture at Washington State University Vancouver, introduced students to Tapestries to learn about digital storytelling. Along with her own majors who specialize in multimedia content design and development, it allowed her to teach non-majors unfamiliar with digital tools and programming how to create born-digital content.

“The students loved it. It’s an easy drag-and-drop system,” Grigar said. “It’s great for my non-majors and my majors because it’s a way for them to get more experimental, do more interesting things, take some risks. I used it last spring in my Internet Revolutions class, and it was so successful that I’m teaching it again this semester in my Digital Storytelling class as a way to produce digital narratives.”

The application allows students to draw images, add commentary and captions – sometimes diving in after just an hour of introduction. Grigar said she likes that Tapestries is open source, rather than a proprietary product with the risk of becoming outdated.

Stein suggested Grigar have her class use papers and videos of computer pioneer Alan Kay to examine his work through an intergenerational lens and use Tapestries to tell his story. That project in the spring will include student interviews with Kay, now 86, that will culminate with an exhibition of Kay’s work in Tapestries.

“Students are learning the cycle of the importance of holding on to things that are dear to them, expressing themselves about why it’s dear, and then making it available for other people to see what it’s like. That’s the value of what we’re doing here,” Grigar said. “We want people not to be just consumers of media, we want them to be producers of their own knowledge.”

Vershbow said Tapestries opens up a new dimension for teachers in protected digital space and offers a low barrier to entry. Because it doesn’t require specialized technical expertise to use, he said, the application levels the playing field yet challenges students to think creatively.

“At this moment in education where AI has flooded the zone, we’re seeing this crisis of students not developing critical research skills,” Vershbow said. “Doing assignments in Tapestries is a compelling alternative to traditional research papers, which are really vulnerable to AI shortcutting. This tool changes the equation. Students draw from a larger range of media material and they have to show their work. The process becomes the product, which we think opens up a lot in terms of learning outcomes.”

Reimagining How We Create and Connect Online

In addition to schools, the creators of Tapestries see potential use for the tool with historical archives to create digital scrapbooks, exhibits, and presentations.

“Tapestries are meant to be archivable,” Vershbow said. “It is deliberately low-tech and minimal. You can export a whole tapestry as a zip file – and it could be deposited in the Internet Archive as its own cultural media object.”

Acknowledging that digital memory on the web is fragile, Vershbow said, Tapestries can be viewed as a personal digital archiving tool complementary to large institutional preservation. “It allows individuals and small communities to make their own choices about what matters and what they want to pass on to the future,” he said.

After years of linear creations in print, film and TV, Stein said, it will take time to throw people into a world to see the potential of thinking in two or three dimensions. Yet, he believes users will design “breathtakingly new” projects in Tapestries.

Stein, co-founder of The Voyager Company and The Criterion Collection, sees potential for crowdsourcing creative works since authors can grant anyone permission to copy a tapestry and change it in ways that are useful. His “dream project” is to send 50 invitations to artists (filmmakers, composers, photographers) to put something on the center of a tapestry. Then they can extend the invitation to anybody else in the world. “We could look back in five or ten years and they will have evolved into an amazing tableau or mosaic of ideas,” Stein said.

Tapestries gives users a way to find agency online at a time when the web has become dominated by large platforms and algorithmic feeds, said Vershbow. Rather than having information summarized and knowledge processed, users are relating directly with sources for raw material.

“It’s a connection to an earlier era of imagining and working with digital information and invention,” he said. “It’s more on your own terms. You have the freedom to associate with these things and pull them all into one universe that you sculpt.”

The post Weaving ‘Tapestries’: Introducing A New Tool for Digital Storytelling and Archiving first appeared on Internet Archive Blogs.